June proved to be a very exciting month for me and Ask Will Online. It is the month I decided that ALL of Ask Will Online’s earnings will now towards charity. These charities at the moment are Dementia Research and SOS Children. However, you are more than welcome to add to that list by telling me the charity to donate too. Saying all this, its unfortunately been an average month (maybe a bit under average).
Ask Will Online’s Stats (from Google Analytics) June 1st – July 1st
Visits – 9,331
This is a decrease of around 3,000 from last month which is pretty disappointing. I think this is because the closer we get to the official school summer holidays and the further we get away from exams, the less traffic AskWillOnline will get. However, there will still be a consistent amount of traffic which has happened since starting Ask Will Online.
One positive is that the bounce rate has decreased from 83.90% to 82.86%. It’s a decrease of 1% which is good but as I have said in the past, this is only a minor fluctuation and doesn’t really count for anything. 5%+ is where I will need to start considering the bounce rate seriously.
Pageviews 13,301 therefore average pages per visit is 1.43
A decrease of 4,000 pageviews, this is mainly due to the decreased visits seeing that the pages per visit has not changed near at all. This is good seeing that last month had a decrease in pages per visit of 0.11. Therefore, at least the pages per visit is staying consistently higher than normal.
There has been one positive from this month being the Business Studies BUSS 4 exam. I made an article providing 18 business example students can use in the exam. This article became extremely popular over Twitter and managed to gain over 1,000 views in little over a few hours!
As you can see, the middle of the month was where the BUSS4 exam article was popular. If it wasn’t for that article, Ask Will Online would have suffered a lot more by the drop in traffic.
Traffic Sources
The traffic sources have been very different this month mainly due to the popular article gaining traffic through social media. Referral traffic from Twitter has caused it to increase by 5% this month. However, direct traffic has increased by 6% this month. My only explanation for this is that people bookmarked the Business article because it was so helpful. This is supported by a tweet @COLFESeconomics did:
People would bookmark the page and read it later like @COLFESeconomics did by reading it during breakfast the next morning. This explains why there was an increase of direct traffic: people bookmarked my pages more.
Making Money Online…Not Any More!
June has been an exciting because I decided to donate all my earnings to charity. I have stayed completely away from Adsense this month because I managed to sell an advertising zone on BuySellAds. With the ad zone worth $35, after a 25% deduction from BuySellAds, it means that around £22 can be donated to charity this month! However, as it is the first month, I feel kind and want to get things rolling. Therefore, I am going to donate £20 each to Dementia Research and SOS Children. Once the money has been transferred to my bank account, I will do it. You can keep up to date with this by following me (@willGreeny) or Ask Will Online (@AskWillOnline).
From the making money online perspective, the advert in its current position is doing extremely well gaining an average CTR at the moment of 0.8%. Considering the Adsense unit before that was 336×280 (and this advert is only 300×250) and only got a CTR of 0.6%, this advert is proving to be quite successful.
Unfortunately for you, I will be going on holiday a lot in July and August. Therefore, I might not be able to post as often as I have been doing. From this, I am not going to set myself any aims: maybe just to keep this charity making website going!
