It's Just Data, Darling! Using data to improve my business

Now that is a start-up-y title! Well, as some of you know, before I started freelancing full-time, I worked for over 4 years as an in-house web and brand designer at three different tech companies. So lets just say - I have picked up a little something along the way :) Most likely in the next two weeks I am going to be re-working my website, blog, and branding. Over these past 4 months that I have had my current design up I have been collecting stats from Squarespace, Google Analytics, and Pinterest - and I plan to use this knowledge to design my new site and help guide me in creating content for this blog.

I absolutely do not intend to let the numbers wholly dictate how I run this blog - I still plan to write about things I am passionate about even if the numbers don't correlate. This is after all, my platform for expressing myself. However this is also my platform for running my business, and so I need to make sure I am setting myself up for success!

I am not a numbers person (without tutors I would have failed out of math), but I am trying my best! In order to track my progress I need to set goals for myself, here is what I have come up with -

Over the next 4 months I want to:

Increase Design Inquiry Submissions by 50%
Double Traffic to my site
Increase my social following by 30%

Here is an overview of how people interact with my site:

Traffic

My numbers have steadily been growing since April when I started posting to this blog daily. Each month I have been increasing audience size by about 20% month over month.
About 70% of my traffic is from people on a desktop, and 30% on mobile.

Audience

30% of my traffic is return, and 70% are new users
56% of my readers are in the United States, the rest are spread between the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Europe.
My average duration on my site is 2:06, with a 67% bounce rate
I don't have stats yet on demographics - but based on my Pinterest stats, I would say an overwhelming number of my visitors are female.

Subscribers

My subscription numbers have increased about 25% month over month

Referrers

43% of my traffic comes from Pinterest!
30% is direct traffic
The remainder comes from social (facebook + dribbble), blog mentions, and subscribers

Search

There is not a significant amount of traffic coming from search

Behavior

My average site load time is 6 seconds (ouch!)
The most common user flow is to move from the blog to my portfolio, but most people never leave the blog

Take-Aways

Now that I have really taken a detailed look at my sites data, I can start to create take-aways and then action steps. Here are some of my take-aways:

My increase in traffic is pretty steady and it is necessary that I continue to increase 20-30% month over month in order to meet my goal
Most of my traffic comes from desktop users - since so many people use mobile now - it seems like there is a missed opportunity for more readers/users.
There seems to be a great opportunity to bring in more readers from the UK, Europe, and Australia
My site duration is pretty standard, but my bounce rate is really high. There is definitely an opportunity to increase engagement, and decrease people from bouncing.
Would love to get my subscription rates up, since they are a great way to bring in return readers.
Pinterest is clearly my best channel for bringing in readers
Lots of opportunity in social channels and especially with blog mentions - I have had some significant spikes in traffic from when other bloggers link to my site.
This blog is clearly the winner, but there is still a significant amount of traffic viewing my portfolio. However, not many people viewing my "say hello" page which has my contact form.
I definitely get upswings of traffic/interaction on my more personal posts and very Pinterest-friendly posts promoting free fonts or helpful instructions.
Wow, so much opportunity for search - I really need to up my SEO game!
The site load time is a problem and could be what increases my bounce rate. Nobody likes a slow-loading website!

Action Steps

Read up on Squarespace forums to help reduce load time for my website
Change the name of "Say Hello", perhaps separating out into about and contact pages
Add a Services page so that people can get a sense of what I can provide
Start a mailing list and send weekly emails to help engage current readers
Think about changing homepage from my blog to a more general landing page
Make my portfolio more digestible, editing down and maybe combining into a one-page style. I think right now it is just too much to go through.
Research more about SEO and start being more mindful of key terms when writing and describing my work
Continue creating personal posts - as well as more Pinterest friendly (but also on-brand) posts that bring in significant traffic
Post more about my work in progress and continue to promote my services (in a non-annoying way!)
Start link round-ups to engage other bloggers and hopefully get mentions from them as well.

Wow, that was a lot of information thrown your way! Maybe too much. But I am hoping my transparency into my process is somewhat of a help to you and others! Look forward to reporting back on my progress, and hopefully meeting my goals :)