By any measure . . .

Good morning, and welcome to 2012!

The beginning of January I usually do a look-back over the last year, to assess how things with the BBTI site and the blog have done. That’s a little more complicated because of the massive overhaul of the site on Dec. 1, 2011, but I think we can still draw some conclusions.

A year ago I wrote the following:

My, how things have grown in the last year. Sometimes I feel like we’ve created a monster.

Yeah, same feeling this year. Even though comparing numbers head-to-head between the site before the redesign and after is difficult, let’s see what we can do. January – November of 2010 we had a total of 2,437,348 hits. January – November of 2011 we had a total of 3,493,374 hits. That’s an increase in over one million hits for the two time periods where all the metrics are the same.

Now, because of the way the site loads, trying to compare the hits it receives under the old design versus the new design is very much a case of comparing apples to shoes. So, when I say that in December 2010 we had 457,007 total hits and in December of 2011 we had 387,164, it looks like the redesign didn’t lead to any increase in traffic.

This was something pointed out to me a long time ago, but since I had started keeping track of hits, I was kinda stuck with continuing to do that since the data available only goes back for 18 months. As it turns out, I should have been keeping track of ‘visitors’ all along. If we compare the number of actual visitors for December 2010 (17,643) to visitors for December 2011 (22,498) you can see that there was actually a substantial jump in traffic.

One thing which doesn’t need any explanation is which sites were our biggest referrers in 2011 (excluding search engines and this blog):

1. en.wikipedia.org
2. thefiringline.com
3. www.stumbleupon.com
4. www.mouseguns.com
5. www.thefirearmblog.com
6. www.thehighroad.org
7. www.guns.com
8. www.defensivecarry.com
9. www.ar15.com
10. www.reddit.com

Interesting to see how things have shuffled around a bit from previous years. I am glad to see my new writing gig – Guns.com – make the list.

So, there you have it. By any measure, BBTI continues to be a very big success. Thanks to all of you who have cited us in discussions, or posted data from our site in analysis of different firearms, or just told your friends about us. It has been very much appreciated!

Here’s to a great new year to come for all!

Jim Downey