The lifeblood of a website is it’s traffic. If no one is using your site, it’s basically dead. One of the things that interested me most when I was considering purchasing ZoomIn, was it’s traffic stats. On a typical Monday, ZoomIn has around 10,000 visitors, 85% of which are from New Zealand.
Traffic of Zoomin from Jan 1st 2007 to today
This doesn’t make ZoomIn a top 100 website in New Zealand in terms of rank, in fact it comes it at number 660 according to the Alexa ranking. That’s even further down the list than Zenbu, a similair site that has been around for about as long.
However, those visitors every day are interested in New Zealand, and are interested in maps, so they’re a really great sounding board to try new ideas and try and find one that sticks. Something that I noticed early on (back in 2006) in ZoomIn, was that every time we made a release, we would get a slight bump in traffic. I guess this is because we had interested users, and that whenever they noticed a change to the site, they’d dig around and see what had changed.
I sort of foolishly assumed that I’d get the same little traffic bump every time I do a release to ZoomIn now. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’ve done about 50 releases to ZoomIn in the past 6 months, many small changes, and a few large ones (redesigning to use twitter bootstrap for example), and none of these releases have made a significant difference to visitors, page views, or pages per visit.
I’m working my way down my list of things to do to ZoomIn, hopefully I can report back in 6 months and show a slow growth in the traffic stats above.