Another month down.
May has been quite the interesting month. Not a whole lot has updated on the face of the website, but I have been messing around with some analytic aspects.
So, let’s go over everything.
May Analytics
Would you look at that, we hit another record! That’s pretty fantastic. I mean, May does have one more day than April, which was the previous record holder, but still. Even if you look at the 30 day span, May still won!
I can’t even describe how exciting it is to see the website still continue to grow. The numbers are right around where I want them, including average session duration being closer to the four minute mark, which is what I kind of aim for.
After some weirdness happening with the search rankings (on one keyword in particular), the site is still holding strong at number one for everything. For about a week or so, it nearly dropped to two for a keyword, but it has since bounced back. I never really quite figured out why that happened. Oh well, no harm.
Event Tracking
The main thing I focused on for this month was better event tracking. I had done it lightly in the past, but I really wanted to get a sense for what users were doing when they visited the site. I now record events for the contribution message, anime list page, and anime page outbound links.
Contribution Message
The ads are gone, for better or worse for my expenses. As I talked about previously, there is a new contribution message that can be accessed at any time. Well, I wanted to see how interactions were going with it.
The events I track with it are: open, close, automatic open, PayPal link click, and Coffee link click.
Anime List Page
The anime list page has been a bit of an unknown for me. For the longest time, I didn’t really see the point based off the site’s purpose. Of course, people who visit the site disagree with me, as it’s one of the top five visited pages.
On this page, I really wanted to figure out what users were filtering by. I set the page up to track whenever the user performs a search, or filters by letter or genre. That way, I can figure out what exactly people are doing when they navigate to this page because, honestly, I’m not really sure.
Anime Page Outbound Links
The links at the bottom of the anime page(s) are meant to be helpful for whenever the user finds the show they want to watch. However, I’ve never really known if people actually used them. I mean, I assumed they did.
I started tracking which links users are clicking, just to see which ones are more popular than others. Of course…it’s a little disappointing to see how popular the “illegal” streaming sites are over the “legal” ones. As a little bonus, though, I also started keeping track whether people are choosing sub or dub. Just for fun.
Looking Forward
As we roll into June, I have a couple of loose plans that might make it to production. We’ll have to wait and see. The first thing on the list for the month is the monthly content check. I’ll have to put more time toward it to get it out of the way earlier than last month.
Custom Named List Pages
This is an idea I’m still throwing around, but think it will be fun. I’m just not sure how I’m going to implement it into the site’s navigation. The idea is to have a “named” or “themed” list; something like “Anime with Epic Fight Scenes”. The page would contain a set list of anime that fit the theme or name.
Backup YouTube Videos
I got a really nice email from a user this past month talking about trailers being blocked. It’s really difficult to find trailers that aren’t blocked anywhere. If I do find them, they usually get taken down due to copyright. I typically lean toward official trailers, but those get region locked.
So, the idea is to come up with some way to have a backup video. Or, even better, have a list of backup videos the user could choose from without leaving the site. This is super early in the process and is more of just a concept at the moment.
I’ll keep you posted.
Thanks for reading.