As a platform for users interested in data, we want to share some data-driven stories about our successes (and challenges) in spreading the word about Impactstory throughout September and October.

Here are our numbers for September and October 2014.

Organic site traffic

We saw a spike in traffic for August & September that’s unusual. It’s due to announcements we made about Impactstory’s changing business model, which became subscription based on September 15. October’s traffic is a return to pre-announcement levels.

• Unique Visitors: 12,303 total
  • 4263 visitors in September
  • 3249 visitors in October
• New Users: 748
• Conversion rate: ~9.9% (% of visitors who signed up for a new user account)

Blog stats

• Unique visitors: 13,077
  • 5866 visitors in September – up 33.9% from August
  • 7211 visitors in October – up 22.9% from September
• Clickthrough rate: 2.01% total (% of people who visited Impactstory.org from the blog)
  • 2.4% in September
  • 1.6% in October
• Conversion rate: 20.3% (9.8% for August) (% of visitors to impactstory.org from blog who signed up for an Impactstory.org account)
• Percent of new user signups: 6.9% (1.8% for August)

Twitter stats

• New followers 482 (215 for August)
• Increase in followers from August 11.19%
  • 4.29% growth in Sept
  • 5.38% growth in Oct
• Mentions 688 (346 for August) (We’re tracking this to answer the question, “How engaged are our followers?”)
• Tweet reach 8,703,155 (3,543,827 for August) (We’re tracking this–the number of people who potentially saw a tweet mentioning Impactstory or our blog–to understand our brand awareness)
• Referrals to Impactstory.org: 618 (271 for August)
• Signups: 43 (32 for August)

What does it all mean?

Not all of these numbers are directly comparable, as they track growth over a 60 day period rather than a 30 day period, which is what our August numbers are based on.

• Impactstory.org: Our conversion rates on Impactstory.org went down from August, meaning that the site design changes we enacted in September had a different effect than we anticipated. We’re continuing to roll out changes that will improve conversion rates in the coming months.

• Blog: We’re continuing to write blogs that our users find worthy of sharing and reading, as evidenced by our double-digit readership growth throughout September and October. (Looks like we really nailed the content marketing goals we set for ourselves in the last post.) Our conversion rates went down from September to October, however, perhaps due to the fact that we didn’t blog about Impactstory much during October–meaning that new readers had little reason to click through and sign up for an Impactstory account. In addition to our November Impact Challenge, we’ll probably do more blogging in November about Impactstory itself.

• Twitter: Our Twitter followers and mentions continue to grow at the same pace as in August, while our tweet reach grew slightly. That indicates that we’re doing about the same amount of engagement, while also writing tweets that our followers find more worthy of mentioning to others via retweets. We have yet to crack the 5,000 follower mark, meaning we missed our goal that we set for ourselves in August. We’re aiming meet that goal by the end of November, instead.

We’re going to continue to blog our progress over the next few months, while also keeping our eyes peeled for ways to share this data in a more automated fashion. If you have questions or comments, we welcome them in the comments below.

Updated 12/15/2014 and 12/31/2014 to fix a data reporting error in impactstory.org visits (previously reported values reflected total visitors, not unique visitors) and conversion rates for visitors to impactstory.org from blog.