Hawk's By Design
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This is a new series that I’m wanting to start every month. I think it will have a positive impact to look back at the past month and see what all went on with Random Anime.

With that said, let’s look at what all went down with the website in October of 2018.

Updates

Example of new watch links on the site

Watch Links

The watch links got a huge update this past month, adding in an additional five websites. This project was extremely time consuming, racking up over 26 hours of time (and that’s just the time I remembered to record).

The goal of adding these additional websites is to improve the overall user experience. Once a user finds an anime they want to watch, I want to be able to give them as many options as possible.

There was another, smaller reason as well…KissAnime. I completely removed all links to KissAnime after the admins decided to go on a banning spree, punishing users for having an ad blocker installed. So, KissAnime is out, and 9Anime, AnimeHeaven, AnimeXD, MasterAnime, and WatchCartoonOnline are in.

Page Transitions

The only other noticeable change to the site would be the page transitions. Making the website a “one page app” was a bit of a challenge for me, since I’d never done it before. As a result, I’m still trying to get the whole page transition thing down.

I’ve adjusted the transition to be slightly faster, and adjusted the timing with the “scroll back to top” function.

I like it so far. I think it makes changing pages more smooth and less disrupting.

Other Minor Updates

Here are some other minor updates that happened throughout the month.

  • Fixed Google Analytics not recording accurately on some site visits
  • Added in Google Analytics Events to improve feedback from list page
  • Updated personal site link in the footer

Traffic

October Analytics Overview

Analytics

The site’s traffic stayed fairly consistent compared to last month. There is a lot of red, showing some numbers down, but nothing significant enough to worry about.

On the bright side, there was a really good jump in average session duration, which is a good stat to boost. This stat jumped to 3:05 from 2:53 last month.

Bounce rate also saw a significant drop off (which is good!). Last month, 42.53% of users left the site without interacting with anything. This month, that number decreased to 37.87%. This is a number that I’d love to see under 30%.

October Search Console Overview

Search Console

I always keep an eye on the search console, though there, generally, isn’t much change.

There were consistent numbers in October comparatively. Overall, we saw 14.3K clicks on 96.1K impressions, which calculates out to a 14.9% CTR. Average position was 8.5, but for the top three keywords, the website remains number one.

Looking Forward

Looking toward November, there aren’t a lot of huge plans going on. The most notable task open right now is to get up to 1200 anime on the site. Currently, on the live site there are 1084 anime shows. In development, I have added up to show 1130.

I’ve started the process of brainstorming ideas for updating the genre form. There is a need to add/edit the filters. The Show/Movie filter really should be an episode filter, and I need to add TV Rating and Star Rating filters. I’m still very early in this process, so, we’ll see how it goes.

One small task that I may start soon is adding a “re-generate” button on the single anime pages when you choose to “generate a single, random anime”. This was a feature request from a user of the site.

We’ll see how far I get. November is going to be a busy month. My fiance and I are going to Wisconsin for Daisho Con, there’s Thanksgiving, and we are house hunting / wedding planning!

That’s About It

Welp, that just about sums up the last month, as well as my plans for November.

Let’s have a good November!!!

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