So, May of 2017.
What happened, and how can I make it happen again?!?!?
The first thing I did was take a gander at those high peaks (by looking at the single days), to see just how many pageviews I got.
Those numbers are much higher than my usual daily views, so I took a closer look at what happened on those days.
So I set my data range for May 15th.
With this view, I can see when my traffic was coming to my blog. Â But I want more details! Â Where was it all coming from?! What posts where being viewed?! Â With GA, that is easy to figure out.
I’ll start by showing where the traffic came from.
To do that you’ll need to head over to the dashboard on the left, and click
Acquisition–> All Traffic–> Source/Medium
Once you click on source/medium you will see a chart that lists where your traffic from that time period is coming from.
**Just a note.  If you look in the first column, you’ll see the number 277, and think but I thought the number was 316!?  When you view the source/medium they give you the  number of sessions, not pageviews.  This article does a good job of explaining the differences.**
So, as you can see from the list, many of my sessions from that day came direct, followed by Facebook, then from another blog.  On the other days the majority of my traffic either came to my blog from Stumbelupon, from another blog (which means they are most likely coming to my blog from from a link party), or from Pinterest. Which leads me to my first thought that I think helped my blog pageviews  grow.
First thought on helping my pageviews grow : Posting to Stumbleupon, and  joining link parties helped increase my views.
After looking at where my traffic was coming from, I decided to take a look at what pages received the highest amount of traffic.
To do that you need to go back to your handy-dandy… notebook dashboard.  This time you will click:
Behavior–>site content–> All Pages
Now you can see what posts for that day were getting viewed the most.
My guess was that my high pages would be ones that I added to link parties and for the most part I was right (so once again, link parties=good).  There were a few days that had high views on a post that I had not added to link ups.  For example my Blueberry Banana Muffins post is always the top viewed post of the month.  Which leads me to thought two
Second Thought : Be sure to post evergreen content.
Evergreen content?  What is that, you may ask.  Evergreen content is content that isn’t time specific.  A post about using conversation hearts in learning activities is not evergreen material. That is pretty specific to to Valentine’s Day. The Blueberry Muffin recipe posted above is evergreen material. This DIY Coffee Station for Small spaces , another example of evergreen content. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is, you could use this info.
Other things that may have contributed to my crazy high pageview number in May.
-
- Adding more links back to posts- whenever possible I link back to old posts (like I did in this post). Â If you do that, make sure that the links open in a new window.
- Being sure to include pinable images in your posts.
- Whenever I comment on another blog I use the name Danielle @ A Sprinkle of Joy. Â That way people know that I have blog.
- Join Facebook share groups. Â Some of the ones I am in are:
If you do join groups be sure not to just link drop. Be sure to actually interact with others.
So there you have it!  After using Google Analytics to look at the month of May, these are the things that I think contributed.  I’m hoping that this month will be the same, but since it’s June and the start of summer, I have a feeling that my numbers may dip a bit.  I hope that it helps you!
