Bitcoin Forum

Analyzing website traffic for Bitcointalk can provide valuable insights that can help forum members to understand how big we are and obviously we can inform Crypto businesses to make informed decisions about advertising their projects on the forum.

As an SEO professional, I have all sorts of tools which allow me to see different metrics of a website to analyze and improve.  I always wondered why admins never thought of to have an SEO audit for the entire forum, I understand it's an old forum but having an SEO audit and some simple tweaks can increase our online experience by 100x. That being said let's start with the last last month's stats.


https://i.ibb.co/5RvcSyf/1-bct-overview.png

1.3 Million visits with 552.1k visitors. Although visits gained up to 8.63% compared to January 2023 but 2.97% drop of unique visitors basically makes it even. We had very similar traffic activities comparing to previous month. 56.53% bounce rate on a forum is a lot to be honest. The average visit duration is not bad. It means there are people who spend almost a whole day on the forum.


https://i.ibb.co/L0TVkKH/last-six-month.png

Does anyone have any explanation why on the earth there is a dramatic drop from September last year to October last year? From 3.9M monthly visit to under 1M which is almost 75% drop, not a very normal behavior. Is this because of the Bitcoin price? I can not remember when it started to drop from $50k then below.

Form October to until now, it's moving steady which is a good thing.

81% of the forum visitors are from Desktop which again proves if we had a mobile friendly version then we would have at least 10x visitors on the forum.

https://i.ibb.co/jZw1zZ3/4-traffic-by-source-type.png

It's very simple, most of the visitors who stay longer time are people who know the url and visit the forum by typing the URL directly on their browser. They may have bookmarked the pages too.

https://i.ibb.co/zSky5wy/5trffic-comes-and-goes.png

Even without proper optimization, Google is providing 32.89% traffic. Duckduckgo is also popular around the community. I think these small percent of people are really concerned about their privacy.

https://i.postimg.cc/k4WDsC1R/6-trafic-by-country.png

No office but it seems Colombian nations who are the most numbers as visitors do not like mobile device at all LOL. See 100% are on desktop when they are visiting the forum  ;D

Would you like me to continue it for every coming months?
Opinions please.

Your statistics does provide valuable insights for the forum An average monthly registration of 8.5k, 1.3 million visits for February is a remarkable number.
I am doubtful the admins are interested in boosting traffic or attracting more ads. And they do not plan to make any changes from the current system to make the forum more friendly to other users.

There was no significant price action to result in the dramatic change. Could it be a flaw in the stats? It also shows mobile users to be way higher than desktop users which does not show up in any other month.

- Jay -

I am pretty confident that the stats do not have much flow. I am using one of the best tool that is existed in the industry.

The desktop users are steady, the ups and downs are not much noticable but that huge drop from September to October may caused by the price of Bitcoin. These days new generation always use mobile. When they see much growth, much talk about Bitcoin then they obviously find us from their smart phones.

With a mobile friendly version we could hook them better.

Traffic is not the priority for theymos, quality is. However the forum is missing on some great opportunities, where the source of all things bitcoin related should be this forum, where it should be in the top 5 results on the first pages of search engines. Some of the most prominent crypto related developers lurk these woods regularly and provide the most useful content, yet the search result for some fundamental discussions about bitcoin refer the user to other sources. Bitcointalk should be the go to for the majority of crypto enthusiasts not the go to for the majority of altcoin scammers.

Google does not consider a blog and a discussion board (forum,...) in the same way. This is a well-known fact, but to give an example, Google's bots visit a forum more frequently than a blog (every xx minutes for a forum, once a day for a blog. Considering you haven't written a rule in the robots.txt file of course)

(And there is a good reason to do so, but that's another topic)

The default SMF is enough to optimize SEO, of course they can install a mod but to be honest it's pretty useless. The forum is optimized sufficiently as it is and changing something won't do much.

Not to mention the fact that Bitcointalk has been considered by Google as an "authority site" for years. And when it comes down to it, SEO is pretty useless.

There are so many keywords with which Bitcointalk comes up on the 1st page of the SERP

That's for ON-site SEO, now for the OFF: does Bitcointalk need anything given the mentions it already has? Wikipedia, Forbes, WJS,...


These traffic analysis tools are to be taken with caution. Since you don't have access to the server, such statistics can be considered as not accurate (or not very accurate).

And to stay about forum and SEO. https://youtu.be/WSkETCRe7Ic
https://searchon.withgoogle.com

Since it changed, we can say the SERP do the job now.

You should be aware that the forum no longer sells ads space and those companies running signature campaign here on the forum don't have any special fee that they pay to the forum admin so if Theymos decides to invest in SEO or analytics whatever hell only end up wasting money since there's no more ads to generate money.



I doubt if this would be the actual countries, because alot of users here on bitcointalk are either using Tor or a VPN to hide their locations so I guess that would make your analytics wrong except your tool which you spoke of has a way of knowing the exact location of a person that's using VPN.

What tools did you use to come up for this stats? That's pretty good though that is just an estimate, i said assumed traffic, not unless theymos did linked their analytic code/script inserting to bitcointalk for traffic/analytics purposes/tracking.

If there's a traffic analysis publicly available that can be considered, its only the ad info^[1] of bitcointalk, but its not accurate since ads can be optionally blocked or hidden. But unfortunately since there's no forum ad already which was stoped by theymos  there's no way to track and get more accurate traffic for the site.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Interesting data. I'm a bit surprised that majority of forum visitors are using desktop. Yeah, I know that Bitcointalk isn't mobile friendly, but I didn't expected such big difference between desktop and mobile. Esepcially considering that large part of forum traffic comes from developping countries where people mostly use mobile to access internet.
Also, some number doesn't looks realistic or accurate. For example, it's simply impossible that 100% of  traffic from Colombia access Bitcointalk using desktop. Or such big difference between tow European countries Germany and Italy. 83% of traffic from Germany access Bitcointalk through desktop and just 28% in Italy. I don't think that such huge difference is possible.

I was also curious about that. Because normally, to have this minimally viable data, you have to have some tracking code implemented on the website.

While overall the data makes sense, some are a bit odd as @LTU_btc commented.

Even if you don't say what platform you're using, it would be interesting for the OP to better explain how he got that data.

You really don't need a tracking code or anything installed in a website to pull up such data. The advanced SEO analytical tools can bring all these data from search engine and using crawlers as long as site robots.txt is not blocking the crawlers.

As an SEO professional I have many premium tools which I use for different purposes. This particular analytical data was generate using SEMrush. I am planning to report a full audit of the forum just to give some idea what are the small things can make huge differences.

Forum stopped ads banners months ago but I have some graphs for it till 2020.

2020 year-end report (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5277279.msg56046745#msg56046745)
A summary chart for impression count

I see Colombia in your list that is strange. Could you show us the full list like up to top 20 countries, please.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1194735/bitcoin-online-search-interest-country/
https://bitcoinist.com/top-5-countries-where-google-searches-for-bitcoin-just-tripled/

Yes, of course. That's why a service like similarweb exist. What i'm talking is the accuracy of the data they gathered if there's no tracking code installed in a particular site. Even google analytics is not that accurate because most ad blockers or even latest browsers can block this kind of trackers.

Why use many SEO analyzers though, when one should suffice? I don't get it.

I still have my Ubersuggest account with lifetime membership from 2 years ago, but given that SEO metrics aren't looking too good for my own site at the moment, I'm not using that and I am just monitoring the situation with Google's Site Kit plugin for Wordpress.

I’m always pretty sceptical of statistics where we don’t really know exactly how the information was derived, and would rather prefer to have some official forums statistics to go by along those lines.

Semrush indicates that it estimates monthly traffic (https://www.semrush.com/kb/998-where-does-semrush-data-come-from), but it doesn’t detail how. Ok, it mentions "hundreds of partnerships with clickstream data providers" and "Neural Network algorithm to come up with a realistic estimation", but I’d like to see a contrast of those estimates to the reality before taken the estimates to be any good.

A few of the indicators quickly stand-out as very weird and seemingly not feasible:

- The said drop in visits from September 2022 to October 2022 is not rational from the site’s noticed traffic point of view. The driver behind is the mobile traffic indicator, and there being no logical explanation from the forum’s traffic point of view, unless some very heavy mobile using countries have been blocked from accessing the forum (which I'm not aware of), it might be a change in the estimation algorithm or subjacent data.

- The Spanish Local board has very small activity, and I can’t even think of any active member from Colombia currently posting on that board. It seems unfeasible to have more traffic from Colombia than from the US, all on Desktops, ... and yet having no interaction whatsoever on the Spanish Local board.

I have an agency and we have many clients. Many times clients ask us they require a specific analytical tool and plugins for their projects. For example someone prefer SEMrush then other one prefers ahrefs. We also have clients who wants Moz or Ubersuggest. To fulfill the clients demand we have a few such tools that we use in regular basis. It's costs us a lot but it's reasonable for an agency considering the scope of work and ROI of the business.

For a single project one tool is more than enough, even it's hard to use it's full potential sometimes like I see it in your case.

The entire traffic analysis, SEO industry is based on approximate statistical data. It will never be accurate like 2+2 = 4.

When you search a keyword, certain website will appear at position 1 but after a new search you will see the position dropped to 5th but then again you will discover it's in 2nd position. Google has over 200 ranking factors and it's not humanly possible to work with even 10% of all the factors.

The results are always approximate.

Yes, the data will always be approximate/estimated.
But without a direct API between the website and the SEO platform, the data is estimated even more than usual.

This is because it just works like a search engine. Becoming even more inaccurate, especially desktop or mobile data and even location.

However, the collected data is sufficient for what is intended.

Did you notice that on October 22, there were 3.1 Million Visits from Mobile devices and 805K Visits from Desktops? From the next month, Mobile device visits dropped drastically, and the Desktop remained almost the same as before. So, This is because of the mobile device visits. I do not recall any particular event for mobile device users Or any forum patch that could deny access to the forum for mobile devices.

BTW, I have doubts about the accuracy of his tools. It's showing 3.1 Million Mobile device visits and 805K Desktop Visits on October 22. I used the same tools (but it's a free version), showing me 3.1 Million Mobile device visits and 1.3 Million Desktop Visits. Check the image below. Do you believe there should be any difference in the Accuracy of stats between the Free and paid Versions?

https://i.postimg.cc/g0f35f3C/Stats.png

I do not think there will be discrepancy between the result of the free version and paid version. The worse scenario would be that the free version displays no information at all. But if it is made to display information, the information of the paid version and free version should be consistent hence it's coming from the same tool.

If this is not obtainable, I'll conclude that the tool is not reliable or there wasn't consistency in the input data which determines the output.

The details like website visit is correct and the forum easily ranks on google, depending on the keyword. But, the geography analysis by similarweb is more realistic than what OP provided. The forum have different boards, so having Columbia as the top visitors when they have got no local board in the forum doesn't sound real, though it's possible through search engine traffics, but USA should be first on the table. Looking at activeness of the countries listed below according to boards, I'd choose the below traffic according to geo audience. Since the website is hosted in USA, they should be more traffic from that part of the world. However, OP did a good job, having such monthly analysis would help brands to trust the forum when investing into signature campaign. It'll be great if OP provides more detailed information about the monthly traffic flow in the forum, like all the country's traffic rate.

https://i.gyazo.com/3287ac99197166a1714e0c5c64ced686.png

Yeah, This is what I was talking about. Regarding showing a result, It should show the same result on Paid and Free versions. If they want to restrict something for the free version, They can restrict viewing six months of data for the free version (which they did for other features). Or they can limit it to one week or 15 days as their wish. It's not like we are getting visitors from them. So, they will give me fewer visitors if I use the free version.


You got the point here. I have doubts as well about the accuracy of this tool. But, I won't say the USA should be the first one on the table. I believe a lot of forum users use VPNs for Privacy reasons. This forum is for Crypto and Tech geek people. Most of them care about their privacy. You may know that the USA is the most popular server for VPNs. Even Free VPNs offers USA server. So, it would be tricky finding from where most visitors come from.

The Monthly visitors of Bitcointalk is around 1.2M to 1.5M every month. It never stands still.  some month it is more and some month it is a little less.  In the bottom chart we see three months of traffic.  There are 1.2M, 1.4M & 1.3M.  It is not considered true but very close to the truth.
https://i.ibb.co/kGsPtsK/Screenshot-20230317-220108-Chrome.jpg (https://ibb.co/qD32v3B)

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And we can see that the age of 25-34 has the highest number of users in this forum followed by the 18-24 age.  And users in the age group of 18-44 play the largest role in this forum. So I think more young people are appearing in this forum which means young people are more attracted to Bitcoin.
https://i.ibb.co/LxkywYk/Screenshot-20230317-220235-Chrome.jpg (https://ibb.co/k4HTn5H)

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The forum has 27.59% girls and 72.41% boys.  So it still appears that boys are more interested in cryptocurrency than girls till now
https://i.ibb.co/j8yR1yh/Screenshot-20230317-220341-Chrome.jpg (https://ibb.co/Mgc63cn)
img hosting (https://imgbb.com/)

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I got all the information from www.similarweb.com which is a good quality SEO tools. All information on this site is not guaranteed to be accurate.  But I believe it is much closer to the truth. check the info yourself here - https://www.similarweb.com/website/bitcointalk.org/#overview

Plugins don't help to rank.
Send me your domain name and I can tell you what you need to do.


Is Colombia still leader of the pack?
 

Wow! I didn't know this forum has million visitors each month.

Well, it has more than million visitors per month during sometimes. Surely during the next bull run the number of visitors will increase because new people will join the Bitcoin community during the bull run.