Surfski.Info is One Year Old

2006 has been an exciting year for surfskiing and for surfski.info. When we started out last year we had the objective of developing the world's premier Surfski website - we like to think we have achieved that objective.

In our second year we are going to crank it up an notch or two and we have a number of initiatives in the pipeline.  To help fund these initiatives we are now inviting selected advertisers to purchase advertising space on the site.

Thanks to Google Analytics we have some very interesting information about surfski.info.

Click here to read more...

Nearly a half a million visitors, or 443124 to be exact, have stopped by since we launched in November 2005. During this time 367 members have registered on the site (which is pretty good considering all our content is free). During the year we (Ok Rob mostly) published 302 news items, that is almost one per day and our links page has grown to 47 Surfski related sites on the internet.

The following web statistics give detailed analysis of the performance for the four months Aug to Dec 2006.

Visits and Pageviews

Our readership is growing fast, the blue line shows the total number of visits per day. This has increased by 500% in the last four months and the meter is currently clocking around 500 visits per day. The yellow line shows the page views per day which has seen similar growth to almost 2000 page views per day. If you do the maths on average each visitor looks at 4 pages per visit per day.

Let there be no doubt that the surfski.info and the sport of surf skiing is growing fast. 

Where do our readers come from? 

Visitor location

The Geo Location histogram shows the number of visits to Surfski.Info from each country.

The USA makes up our largest readership with almost half of the visits. In second place comes South Africa with 22%. Australia is home to the third most visitors and is increasing its share every time I look at the stats. It took a long time for word to get down under, but thanks to the Perth World Cup and the V10 rip-off controversy the Ozzies are visiting in droves. It looks like Australia's visits will exceed South Africa's soon.

Canada is in a surprise fourth-place for a chilly country, followed by a somewhat dozy New Zealand, who are being chased closely by French Polynesia (that's the place I'd most like to pitch up with my paddle). 

Show it on a map... 

Geographic Map

The Geo Map is awesome, it plots our visitors onto a global map. (Only the main locations are listed.)

If this map is anything to go by then the sport has some huge potential in the Mediterranean. What do the Europeans do? Sit on the beach and look at the sea?

Are we attracting returning visitors? 

New vs Returning Visitors

The New vs Returning pie chart shows that three quarters of our visitors are return visitors with the remaining quarter being new visitors. Both returning and new visitors are encouraging, yes we want new visitors but we strive to constantly provide new content to keep visitors coming back. 
 

How often do our visitors return? 

Visitor loyalty

This Visitor Loyalty graph tracks the number of visits by visitor frequency. The number of visits by visitors who never returned (no loyalty) are indicated on the left of the histogram. The number of visits by visitors who returned over 200 times (very loyal) are indicated on the far right. How awesome is that? Some visitors have returned more that 200 times in four months.

How do our visitors find us?

Sources

The pie chart shows the percentage of visitors from each referral source Nearly half of our readers got here by typing in the URL www.surfski.info or selecting it from their favourite bookmarks. Twenty percent found us using a Google search and the rest came from other search engines or links on websites.

Our free syndicated news feeds to www.surfskischool.com and www.surfski.co.nz have also done a good job of bringing you to our site while at the same time adding top quality content to the referring sites. 

Top Referrers. 

1.		(direct)[(none)]
2.		google[organic]
3.		groups.yahoo.com[referral]
4.		fennkayaks.co.nz[referral]
5.		surfskischool.com[referral]
6.		msn[organic]
7.		surfski.co.nz[referral]
8.		oceanpaddlesports.com[referral]
9.		surfski.info[referral]
10.		yahoo[organic]
11.		race.fit2paddle.com[referral]
12.		kayaks.co.za[referral]
13.		sapaddler.co.za[referral]
14.		nymayorscup.com[referral]
15.		paddling.net[referral]
16.		canoesa.org.za[referral]
17.		us.f370.mail.yahoo.com[referral]
18.		en.wikipedia.org[referral]
19.		fr.f264.mail.yahoo.com[referral]
20.		web.info.com[referral]

What google search words drive traffic to surfski.info? 

This table shows the most popular search phrases that have returned surfski.info through the Google search engine. Most searches are for the site itself which indicates there is a good awareness of surfski.info but that the exact URL escapes some people.

Unsurprisingly the brands of Surfskis are also very popular search words with the Mako6, V10 and Red7 being popular searches. There are also some odd searches such as 'weedless rudder' and 'Paul Mauger - great white' (Paul had his surfski's tail bitten off by a great white in 2002).

Our most popular articles are:

The two most popular articles have a wider interest than just the Surfski community, hence their high popularity. Rob is to be commended for publishing the world's first review of the Garmin 305.

The third-place Surfski-Shootout article drew us some heavy criticism from certain manufacturers but we are encouraged to see it so widely read and highly rated by the readers.

These stats show that what our readers want are surfski reviews and extreme surfski stories. We are mindful of our audience and will continue to deliver top-quality content, free of charge and free of spam.

If you have a surfski related product you would like to market on surfski.info then contact us on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for a quote. 

Warm regards,

Alain.