Gary Lewis Posted October 31, 2017 Share Posted October 31, 2017 Today we've had four new members join, and that got me to thinking about the stat's for the forum as well as the website itself. So I'm going to post a few here now, and will hope to remember to do this again at the end of November. First, my goal for the website has been to help us Ford nuts by providing documentation that in some cases cannot be found elsewhere, or is so tedious to find (think "master parts catalog") that few have the time or willingness to ferret out. So the website itself has been a labor of love for almost two years. But the forum only started at the beginning of August this year, and as of today we have 70 actual users. (I'm in there twice as I have a Test User account so I can see what y'all see, so the count shows 71.) As you can see below, the advent of the forum has had a significant impact on the number of daily pages viewed on the website. This is important for at least two reasons. First, the more people that see the site the more people will follow links to other pages beyond the forum. Second, the more people that follow links the more the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo realize there is important info on those pages, so they bring the Garagemahal up higher in the search results. And that is important because the site is here to help others, but if they can't find it then it doesn't serve the purpose. Given that, I track the search results on Google and Bing/Yahoo. Here are the results from Google searches since the forum was started, with the blue line showing how many people clicked on the link to a Garagemahal page from a search, and the green line showing where the Garagemahal's page scored on that search. Obviously a score of greater than 10 puts the results on the second page, and is much less likely to be seen. Anyway, I fine tune the wording on the pages that are being searched for in order to get our pages high in the search results, and you can see that the trend for both the number of clicks as well as the page position has been improving since Aug 4th when the forum started. That begs the question of what the searches are for, and this table attempts to answer that. Who would have thought that 350 people in a month's time would be looking for towing capacity on these trucks? Or 142 looking for lubricant specifications? (Which tells me that I really, REALLY need to finish that spreadsheet on lube spec's!) Also, that table shows that over 1,000 people have found the site in the last month due to searches using Google in its various forms, including US, CA, AU, MX, DE, FR, PL, BR, AR, ZA, & IN? Or that FTE would have sent 367 people? Anyway, all of that to say that we are growing! But, the goal is to be "the" resource for Ford truck nuts, so if you know of things that people would be looking for please let me know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ford F834 Posted November 1, 2017 Share Posted November 1, 2017 That is an impressive change in just 3 month's time! Let's hope this continues to grow and push the Garagemahal onto page 1 of the google search. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Lewis Posted November 1, 2017 Author Share Posted November 1, 2017 That is an impressive change in just 3 month's time! Let's hope this continues to grow and push the Garagemahal onto page 1 of the google search. Thanks! Let's hope it continues to grow, but I doubt it'll grow quite that rapidly from now on. I say that because I've already changed the easy things on the site to get the search engines to find the pages. Having said that, what page the links are on is somewhat determined by the number of people that click on the link, so it can be kind of a vicious circle. If someone clicks on it that raises the results on the page, but raising it on the page causes more people to click on it, which...... So, we shall see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gsmblue Posted November 1, 2017 Share Posted November 1, 2017 Thanks! Let's hope it continues to grow, but I doubt it'll grow quite that rapidly from now on. I say that because I've already changed the easy things on the site to get the search engines to find the pages. Having said that, what page the links are on is somewhat determined by the number of people that click on the link, so it can be kind of a vicious circle. If someone clicks on it that raises the results on the page, but raising it on the page causes more people to click on it, which...... So, we shall see. This is a great resource, thank you for all the work that has been put in. You need a “donate” button! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Lewis Posted November 1, 2017 Author Share Posted November 1, 2017 This is a great resource, thank you for all the work that has been put in. You need a “donate” button! Thanks. But I'm staying away from donations or advertising as I don't want there to be any question of this being a for-pay site. That could call into question use of copyrighted material, such as the parts catalog snippets or the brochures. Really, all that I'm out is the cost of the website, and it is something like $65/year. The rest is my time, and I work cheaply. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pebcak Posted November 1, 2017 Share Posted November 1, 2017 Holy cow! Congratulations!The main reason I frequent here is for the quality of posts and answers instead of quantity. On Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 16:24 Gary Lewis [via Bullnose Enthusiasts] <redacted_email_address> wrote: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Lewis Posted November 1, 2017 Author Share Posted November 1, 2017 Thanks. But are you telling me to keep my responses short? 🤢 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pebcak Posted November 1, 2017 Share Posted November 1, 2017 Thanks. But are you telling me to keep my responses short? 🤢 Good one! And.... No. Don't keep them short..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Lewis Posted November 1, 2017 Author Share Posted November 1, 2017 Good one! And.... No. Don't keep them short..... Oh, bummer! Apple gave me a bunch of new emoticons during the night, and I used the one with the swollen green face that looks like it is about to explode because the lips are sealed. Unfortunately that doesn't come across on this Windows machine - but it looks good on a device running iOS 11.1. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Lewis Posted February 18, 2018 Author Share Posted February 18, 2018 Oh, bummer! Apple gave me a bunch of new emoticons during the night, and I used the one with the swollen green face that looks like it is about to explode because the lips are sealed. Unfortunately that doesn't come across on this Windows machine - but it looks good on a device running iOS 11.1. First, I know what some of you will be thinking: You're so vain, you probably think these statistics are about you. (Sorry, Carly.) No, I don't think the statistics are about me. I think they are about the resource we are building for all Ford truck nuts out there, and one measure of how well we are doing is statistics. So, let's do the forum first as it is easy: we currently have 102 members. That's up from 70 reported at the end of October. And, according to Google, there are 285 pages on the forum, although I didn't capture that figure the last time I reported. Now for the website, which includes the forum but also the pages of documentation shown in the menu in the header at the top of the page. One view of how effective we are is how many other forums have links to the Garagemahal. Here are some of those having links to us. I didn't capture this info last time, but plan to next time for comparison purposes: FTE: 699 links as of today, but that will go down as some are being removed Full Size Bronco: 92 links Bronozone: 53 links Fordification: 40 links Ford-Ford: 21 links Anyone know 'bout these guys? Hadn't seen them before. F150 Forum: 12 links The Ranger Station: 11 links Oilburners: 5 links Another way to look at things is how many people are viewing the site, which includes the forum. The best info for that comes from Weebly where the site is hosted, and they only provide info for the last month. But here are the number of people accessing the site on a daily basis for the last month. (Disregard the very last data point as that is today and today isn't over by a long shot.) A you can see, the visitor count has basically doubled in the last month, from ~130/day to ~260/day. Then there's the question of how many pages those visitors viewed. As you can see below, page views are up and down significantly, but a month ago they were around 500/day and now they are pushing 1000/day - with yesterday hitting 1498 for an all-time high. (Again, disregard the last data point - today.) Another measure is how many people are coming to us via a search. The info below is from Google, but you can add another 10% for Bing and Yahoo. In other words, 3 months ago there were ~26 clicks that brought people to us on a daily basis, and now we get 63 clicks/day. Meanwhile we've brought the average page position up slightly from 16.2 to 15.3. (Why is "page position" important? Because few people will go to the 2nd page to find something.) Last, what are people looking for when they search and find us? The info for the last month is shown below on the left, but let me translate as it might be difficult to read. The "/ 3641" is how many people went to the forum. Then 297 people went to the page on towing - who would have known that would be so popular? Then 173 people went to the page on DSO codes, apparently trying to decode their certification label. And 157 used the VIN decoder. Another 155 looked at the Motorcraft 2150 documentation; 129 looked at the axle ratio page; 113 the page on frames; 102 used Bill's 1986 EVTM; 101 were interested in engine perches; and 91 went to the 351M/400 page. And the list goes on for another ~400 entries. In other words, essentially every page on the website was viewed at least once in the last month. Is that enough? Is that more than you ever wanted to know? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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