For my last blog article of 2015, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight our top blogs of the year. Like many firms we use Google Analytics to collect web traffic statistics, so lets see what this data shows.
Website Users
Lets start with a chart of users visiting our website.
Showing:
- Monthly users to www.clarusft.com from 1 Jan 2014 to 29 Dec 2015
- Which peaks in Nov 2015 at 8,490 users
- From a start in Jan 2014 of 3,216
- While Nov 2014 had 4,255 users
- Meaning a 100% increase in users between Nov 2014 to Nov 2015
From May 2015 onwards, our web site averages over 400 unique users each business day.
Our highest single day count is 1,067 users.
Each of these statistics; 100% growth rate, 400 users each day, a high of 1,067 are phenomenal given that we know from Google Analytics that the vast majority of these users come to our site to read our blog articles.
It is immensely gratifying that what we write about is of interest to so many of you.
Discovering a Blog Article
Lets look at what Google Analytics tells us on how users discover a blog article.
The three most common ways are:
- Google Search that leads to our blog (try entering “fed fund swaps” in google)
- Direct, so users coming direct to www.clarusft.com
- Our Weekly newsletter email (>850 subscribers)
Other popular ways are:
- RSS based News readers
- LinkedIn, where the Clarus page has 1150+ followers
- Industry News Sites: theotcspace and tabbforum
- Twitter, where @clarusft has 300+ followers
- FIA Smartbrief
Statistics on Blogs
Lets now turn to some statistics on the blog articles.
In 2015 we published 134 blog articles, compared to 115 in 2014.
Pageview statistics in 2015 for all blogs on www.clarusft.com show:
- 2 blogs with > 5,000 views
- 5 blogs with > 2,000 views
- 19 blogs with > 1,000 views
- 71 blogs with > 500 views
A list which includes blog articles from 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.
Compare this to Dec 2014, when we had only 5 blogs with > 1,000 views.
Top 10 Blogs of 2015
Lets now look at the list of most popular blog articles ranked by page views.
- CME-LCH Basis Spread
- Mechanics and Definitions of Spread and Butterfly Swap Packages (2014)
- The IMM Roll for Swaps
- Fed Fund Swap Nuances (2014)
- LCH-CME Switch Trades and Margin Management (2014)
- MIFID II and Transparency for Swaps: What You Need to Know
- OIS Swap Nuances
- What’s the Deal with Invoice Spreads (2014)
- Implementing Bus252 Daycount Convention (2012)
- SEFs in Japan
Of these five were published in 2015, four in 2014 and one in 2012.
The average time spent by a user reading each of these blog articles is 5 minutes.
All of these continue to get views each month and not just in the week they were published; meaning that they remain relevant and continue to be discovered by new users via google search.
The popularity of some resulted in us publishing a series and creating new categories to group them:
In addition our monthly Swaps Review series tracking Interest Rate Swaps volumes and market share continues to be popular.
Final Thoughts
We are not a news site, but a site that publishes original content and research on the Swaps market.
The data from Google Analytics, helps us understand which topics are popular and that helps in motivating us to write further on these.
We also greatly appreciate the comments and emails we receive from our readers.
Even for data-geeks it can be more satisfying to get an email from a reader saying that they liked a specific article and did we consider such and such a point.
It just remains for me to thank you for taking the time to read our blogs.
I look forward to 2016 and wish our readers a Happy New Year.
At least 2 on the list appear to have been written in 2014…
e.g. https://www.clarusft.com/lch-cme-switch-trades/.
Still interesting nonetheless
Yes thanks David, I have updated the list to clarify which were 2014 or earlier.