I’m sharing this so that our ele community readers knows where we’re at. Many folks use compete to find out where sites’ traffic is, and compete is great for comparing sites. But it’s guessing—our compete traffic went down 30% last month, while our actual traffic (Google Analytics is embedded in our site) did no such thing. And we lost an advertiser because our compete traffic appears to be only 60K a month. Still, compete under-estimates everyone somewhat equally—Treehugger, which my friend Graham Hill says is at 2.5 million uniques, is at 1 mill on compete if I remember correctly..

We’re up 30% over the last month, which is pretty average. Our goal is 800,000 readers a month by the end of the year, which will be do-able if our FB and twitter followings continue to increase, and we continue to maintain and magnetize relationships with great community leaders who are willing and inspired to write for and be featured on our forum.

Key:

Visits are unique readers from different computers.

Page views reflect the fact that many readers click onto a second page.

Pages per visit reflects how well we’re doing at getting readers to want to hang out for awhile.

Bounce rate isn’t the rate of folks not reading or anything, it’s the rate of folks who click onto a page, and don’t go on to click onto a second page.

Average time on site is low, considering that some folks click onto an article and then click off in 1 second.

New visits reflects how many of our readers are hardcore, loyal, and how many are, yes, new.