The January 2015 Blog Report

Each month, I update the Vero team on the blog. In the past, we’ve kept these reports internal but starting today, we’ll publish each report here on the blog.

These reports are pretty simple but it will give you an idea of what’s going on behind the scenes. Hopefully, it will provide some insight into how things work here at Vero and maybe even inspire you to try something new in your own marketing.

Enjoy!

The Numbers (on the blog subdomain)

• Pageviews: 63,871
• Average time on site: 2:59
• Bounce rate: 76.91%
• Organic search visits: 13,634
• New email subscribers: 1,051

A few other fun facts:

• Traffic increased 237.16% since January 2014. That’s more than three times as much traffic.
• We skipped the 50s entirely, jumping from 42k+ pageviews in December to 63k+ in January.

New content:

• The Principal-Agent Problem in Marketing
• The 1-2-3 Method for Lifecycle Email Marketing
• The Ultimate Lifecycle Email Marketing Guide
• How to Send Better Email Receipts
• 4 Data-Driven SaaS Onboarding Emails You Should Be Sending
• The Inverted Pyramid Method: How to Create Focused Emails That Really Convert
• 25 Ways to Get Better at Email Marketing

Top performing content:

1. The Ultimate Lifecycle Email Marketing Guide: 19,615 pageviews
2. 20 Tips for Dramatically Better Emails: 5,512 pageviews
3. How Amazon Dominates E-Commerce With Email Marketing: 2,052 pageviews
4. 21 Welcome Emails to Inspire Your Lifecycle Marketing: 1,860 pageviews
5. 50 Marketing Blogs You Should Read Every Day 1,590 pageviews

We’ve invested a lot of time and energy into improving our SEO. Those efforts started paying off big time in January. 13,634 organic search visits is a 40.96% increase over December and our best month ever. We’ve finally recovered from the hit we took in August. (We changed a few key URLs and lost 30% of our search traffic overnight. Lesson learned.)

Highlights

Without question, the biggest highlight in January was getting featured in the Moz Top 10. Here is a link to the actual newsletter.

That email alone drove 2,663 visits. Thanks Moz! 🙂

Sujan Patel, VP of Marketing at When I Work, included us in one of his Entrepreneur columns.

Here are a few other good links we earned in January:

• How to create a killer value proposition for your next email campaign via Campaign Monitor
• A Guide To Growth Hacking Retention Strategies via Business2Community
• How to Create Focused Emails That Convert Customers via Follow.net
• Five Keys to Crafting Effective Marketing Emails via TechnologyAdvice
• The 5-Step Process For Creating Epic Blog Posts via Buzzsumo
• Why are we thinking like it’s 1999, when we should be partying? via ActionRocket
• Ultimate Digital Marketing Campaign Template For 2015 via Momentology
• How to Segment Email Lists for More Opens, Click-Throughs and Conversions via Zapier
• How To Develop Epic Content For Your Blog [Q&A with Jimmy Daly] via When I Work
• 10 Content Strategies to Rapidly Build a Larger Audience via Zapier
• 5 Clever Email Innovations for 2015 and Beyond via Web Marketing Today

What Worked, What Flopped

Epic content works. In fact, epic content kills it.

In the last five months, our guides are responsible for 85,304 combined pageviews. That’s insane. Expect more guides in the next few months.

Our latest guide was so massive that we actually split it into five chapters. We did this for readability and easier navigation but there was an unintended (and very positive) side effect. Instead of a single page, the guide was six pages. As people clicked through to the chapters, our bounce rate plummeted to 60% and our pageviews skyrocketed. The table of contents page has 12,029 pageviews but as a whole, the guide has 23,791 pageviews. That’s nearly double!

Not all of our posts were popular however. The Principal-Agent Problem in Marketing, for example, netted only 200 pageviews. The post was interesting but not actionable. Our readers let us know that it’s not what they expect from the Vero blog. Lesson learned.

On Tap for Next Month

We’re continuing our SEO push with a tactic called siloing. I can’t reveal exactly how we’re doing it but I’ll report on it in a future post. Trust us, it’s a content strategy you’re going to love.

We’re also working on ensuring the blog is mobile-friendly, adding some additional navigation and redesigning our newsletter. Webinars have also become a key strategy for us and we’ll be talking more about those in the future as well.

Have any questions? Feel free to drop them in the comments.