Monthly Report - May 2013

Serving up 116,786/169,331 Page Views

As I predicted, may wasn't nearly as big as April was.  But if I'm honest, I believe that's my fault for changing up the design for the last third of the month.  With 21 posts I was only two shy of what I made in April and made 16 new caps... one less than April.  I think bot the caps and the non cap posts were better this month, they just didn't bring in the same number of visitors.  And the visitors that did stop by didn't view as many pages.

Anywho... I'll talk more about the design situation at the end of this post.  Let's get onto the numbers:

• Total Page Views: 116,786/169,331
• Total Visits: 34,099 (Averaging 4.97 views per visit)
• 29,247 Visits were from referals
• 5,993 from worldoftg.com
• 2,182  from Smitty's TG Caps
• 1,608  from blogger.com
• 890  from Jennifer's TG caps of Defiance
• 816 from TGComics.com
• 3,301 Visits were direct traffic
• 1,545 found their way here via search

The search terms that brought the most people in include:  variations on caitlyn's masks, tg captions,  and superhero tg.  The vast majority of searches were for the Caitlyn's Masks variations.   I find it funny how people think of the title as variations included (in order of number of attempts):

caitlyn's masks - caitlyns masks - caitlin's mask - caitlyn's mask - caitlin's masks - caitlyn mask - caitlyns mask - caitlin mask - caitlins mask - caitlyn mask - caitlyn masks - caitalyns mask - caitlynsmasks

Just to be clear though, its "Caitlyn" with a 'y'.  It's possessive, so it had an apostrophe and an 's' "Caitlyn's".  And there are several different masks that I wear so that's plural.  "Masks"

"Caitlyn's Masks"

But you know what... I can't complain so long as people make there way here.    

This month's highest viewed caps were:

1. I Hate You I Love You - 4,954
2. Fantasy Camp - 4,694
3. He Didn't Complain - 3,348
4. Submitting to love and submission - 3,078
5. Foretelling dreams - 2,992 

I'm actually surprised that "I Hate You I Love You" edged out "Fantasy Camp".  Don't get me wrong, I love "I Hate You I Love You", but normally a host sticky hardcore cap with a good story beats out a Kinetic Text cap.  They were posted only 3 days apart.  And just to show the differences between blogger stats and Google Analytic stats, blogger has "Fantasy Camp" with 700 more page views than "I Hate You I Love You"... that's almost a 1000 page view swing!

And for those keeping track, I mentioned yesterday that "Submitting to love and submission" had 2,347 page views.  While it did get quite a few more after that post, it didn't get over 700 more in one day.  Yesterday I was using blogger stats, and today I'm using Google Analytics.  According to blogger that cap received 175 page views after I posted that information.  

A few caps that didn't make the top five are still worth mentioning:

• He Thought Of Everything - 2,919
• This JUST missed the cut, but I think it's one of my recent favorites.  Not just because I put a little more effort into lining the photos to center the action around the text box, but I think it's a really fun story that doesn't involve being forced... and it's rare for me to both write AND enjoy a willing story. 
• Staying in Character - 2,686
• This was a really fun smutty cap for me.  It's a really good example of how I enjoy a 'forced' caption.  The hero(ine) wasn't physically forced or changed against his will, but instead is forced into more and more humiliating circumstances by the situation.  He COULD leave the situation but ends up forcing himself to stay.  Very squirmy!
• Break On Through - 2,537
• I put this up here mainly for the work I did on the hair.  It's a technique that I probably won't utilize all that often, but it's a good tool to keep at the ready.
• Antiquities of the Soul - 1,364
• This was my first foray into Jennifer's Living Doll universe and I wrote it out as a stream of consciousness.  As such it's probably not the easiest cap to read, but I think the story telling method helps demonstrate just how far this person's intellect and soul have degraded over decades of forced femininity.  

Conversation wise there was one great post... "Popularity" where I responded to a fairly snide remark left on Simone's blog.   Someone complained about some cappers developing an ego and wondering why it felt like there was a popularity contest going on in the capping community.  After giving my 2 cents, many people chimed in and helped restore my faith in this wonderful community.  Seriously, go read through the comments and I bet you'll come out on the other side feeling all fuzzy and warm just for being part of this group!

I mentioned up top that I am blaming my design change for the less than stellar page views. I talked briefly about this in yesterday's post "Natural Dominance" and I want to reiterate a point I made there... I'm not concerned abut page views in the sense that I want more eyeballs on me.  I feel that my caps generate a good amount of interest and am happy with the level of page views, comments and friends (followers) that my blog gets.  Why I'm fretting over this is that with nothing more than this blog design change, the page views have dropped.  I feel that people that very may well enjoy the caps (the caps have been as good after the design change in my opinion), aren't coming in to view them.  

Consider it like a retail store.  There's a product that is popular among it's customers.  When the retail store places this product in an easy to find place, it's customers flock to it and love the product.  If they instead place it down some dark aisle that no one finds, less people get to the product even though they may well like it and want it.   Of course I'm not selling anything, but if someone wants to see my caps, then I want to make it as easy as possible.  

Dee commented that possibly the black and white images look similar to drive by viewers.  That they aren't realizing that there is a new caption and that the people that follow my work more regularly are still coming by.  While talking to Jennifer she had a different hypothesis;  that people who know my work better are looking at the square black and white preview images and are assuming that they are non cap or question posts.  Before this redesign I always used a spot colored black and white image for those types of posts (like the masked image on top of this post).  

Both scenarios make sense.  So I dug around the numbers a bit as I was writing this post.  I looked at the drop off of page views from various referrals.   If Dee were right, I'd expect to see a larger drop off from World of TG as opposed to other referral sites as they display only a small preview image and have a very wide audience that aren't necessarily fans of my work.  If Jennifer were right, I'd expect the opposite... I'd expect the World of TG page views to drop off less dramatically than other referrals.  This month I had 80% of the page views from World of TG as I did last month.  But I also had 80% of the page views from Smitty's TG caps... and that audience would be more likely to know of and enjoy my work.  

As the drop off was the same, I can't really say that either Dee or Jennifer is right.  But one number did stick out to me... TGComics.com's referrals only dropped off my 10%.   Blogger referrals only dropped off by only 18%.  Both of these referrals don't offer preview images.  So people were coming to visit sight unseen.  With some more thought, I believe it's simply the black and white images that is reducing my page views.  And really, I shouldn't have been surprised by that.    My caps that have been black and white or spot colored have been less popular in general than my full color caps.  While I absolutely adore black and white imagery, I've seen plenty of evidence that it's just not nearly as attractive to most other people.  

So maybe by having a preview image of a color cap in black and white is actually depressing the page views.  

Now of course numbers fluctuate on their own.  I fully accept that I may be wrong... that maybe the posts I've made since the redesign just aren't as popular as I assumed they would be.  But having consistent reductions in referral traffic that offers a preview and having less drop off from sites that don't offer a preview image does offer some solid evidence to support this theory.  

Of course I can't have a theory without having a wrench thrown into it.  The wrench in this case is the number of page views this blog received yesterday... 5,104.  That's a number that I would expect when I post a more smutty cap, but not on a Friday.  I don't know what it is, but I don't receive a lot of page views on Fridays.  It doesn't matter what I post or what time of day I post it, Friday page views are almost always stunted.  So getting this many page views is another anomaly.  

I don't believe I have enough data to really come up with a good solid conclusion.  My best guess is that the black and white preview images are turning casual viewers off and making them less likely to click through and see the color cap.  Jennifer suggested putting up some kind of sign to let people know that black and white previews don't necessarily mean that the cap is in black and white.  I'd be willing to try that, but I believe the lack of page views is from people not even stopping by, so the message would be going out to people that already know what's going on (or at least are quickly finding it out).  

So, my plan is to keep doing what I'm doing.  Maybe it's just a learning curve, and as more and more people realize what the change is that the numbers will return to 'normal'.  If I don't see the page views come back in a week or so, I'll try something different.  I think I'll try the same format (400x400 cropped image from the cap with it's title but no text), but simply make the images full color.  If that doesn't do it, then I'll simply go back to the previous method of posing a true preview image of the cap itself (or one of the panels from a multipanel cap).  I don't like the way that looks, but if it let's more people come in and take a look, then I'll bow down to the audiences desire in this case.  

If anybody has an opinion on what's going on or a different solution, I'd love to hear from you.  As always, thank you for viewing this and for visiting the blog!