February 21st 2008 will be the second anniversary of It’s Time To Play B-Sides. As we start the calendar for 2008, I took a look at the website statistics for 2007.

According to Google Analytics, I had a total of 9,469 visits for calendar 2007. Of those visits there were 13,694 pageviews accounting for 1.45 pageviews per visit. I guess that is heartening! For those 1.45 views, folks spent an average of 45 seconds. Judging from how wordy I tend to be, I guess that means that people aren’t really reading the articles most of the time. Interestingly 86.71% of the visits were new visitors.

I realize, however that some percentage of the page views are coming from other websites caching my content like elbo.ws and others. 66.82% of my traffic is referred from Google. 20.39% comes from other sites referring me. 12% is Direct Traffic. A special “Boy Howdy!” to those 1,211 people!

Those visits came from 89 countries or territories. 5,976 not surprisingly came from the U.S. with the UK at a distant second with 619 visitors. Canada, who at least on the same continent with me came in 3rd at 501. Maybe I don’t have enough articles about Loverboy, Bryan Adams or Barenaked Ladies to keep the average Canadian coming back?

My top keywords, for what it’s worth were “play b” which accounted for 2.18%. I wonder how many of those folks were happy with the resulting page? #2 with 48 visits was “fender baritone” which is certainly reflected in the top content. Tied with “fender baritone” is “mike roeder” which also got 48 visits. If you do a Google search for “mike roeder” you’ll notice that my website is at the top of the page– TAKE THAT ALL YOU OTHER MIKE ROEDERS!!! There were 43 visits from “the ‘b’ side music blog” I’m at #47 on today’s results page from Google, and that is actually a reference from elbo.ws so, I can’t account for that traffic unless I used to be higher in the rankings for those keywords.
The most popular articles were:

The homepage got 4,330 hits with 3,639 unique views. Peeps spent 1:34 hanging there.

Fender Baritone Jaguars and the Bass VI got 1,754 pageviews with 1,495 uniques. Fans of the “Fat Cat” spent 3:16 reading that one. I guess that is one of the better articles I have written, and this article is always at the top of the list of popular articles every month.

2005 Fender American Stratocaster Hard Tail (review) got 1,024 pageviews with 916 uniques. Another discontinued instrument from Fender. Based on my statistics, maybe Fender should have kept this one around.

Beyond those articles, things drop off pretty substantially, and is really dependent on the age of the article from what I can tell, and possibly how much buzz surrounds the topic or act. My article that captures all of the rare Calexico tracks on iTunes got 420 hits last year, which is pretty impressive, really considering that folks would probably need to purchase the songs to really take advantage of it. I’m planning a refresh of that article to include the other collaborations and soundtracks that showed up last year.

The popularity of the guitar articles is enough to push me to spend more time writing about my guitars and related items. It’s really a pretty big part of my spare time so I should write up my research.

Last year was the year that I think playbsides really gelled for me personally as well as establishing a level of credibility. I got serious about taking pictures at shows to enhance the reviews which I think makes a big difference. I really enjoy working on this site and it gives me something to focus on that isn’t my day job. It is a really good diversion that is frankly much needed!

If you’re reading this and aren’t a Bot or Search Engine Spider or some other manifest of the interwebs, thanks for stopping by and making this hobby of mine worthwhile.

Here’s to ’08!