BlogRush Week One - 14 Clicks from 5,800 Impressions

BlogRush has now been live for just over a week and the statistics became available a few days ago. In this post I delve in and have a look at the stats and contemplate what they mean. Were my reservations about BlogRush justified?

I Have Referrals Whoo!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I have 15 direct referrals and an additional 8 referrals under those 15. This breakdown is very clear:

Over time I expect that as more and bloggers come on board (assuming the ‘rush’ continues), that I’ll see some referrals popping up in the bottom 8 tiers. It’s nice to see 3 tiers in there already though, and I’m sure my numbers are way smaller than some of the established folk out there.

One interesting thing that I noticed was that there was very little activity from the referrals in the 2nd and 3rd tier - most of it is in the first tier. I have no idea why that might be.

My Referrals Aren’t Generating as Much Traffic as I Expected

This rather sexy graph shows a nice clear visual of the syndication credits earned by myself and by my referral network, though at the moment it only shows the last 7 days and I can’t see a way to configure that:

Considering I have 23 bloggers in my network I would have expected my referral traffic to be much, much higher than the traffic that I have generated myself but that’s not really the case. I can only assume that those people that signed up underneath me have very low traffic levels or perhaps they have already stopped using the widget.

My Clickthrough Ratio Sucks!

Interestingly, the most important graph is right at the bottom of the stats page:

This result is pretty much what I predicted… My links have been shown 5800 times and only 14 people have clicked through. That’s a ratio is around 0.2%, which is pretty dire. And don’t forget that’s while BlogRush is so new. I imagine that over time people will become accustomed to the look of the widget and their eyes will faze it out. I could be wrong on that point too of course.

To be fair to the guys behind BlogRush they have been sending out update emails every couple of days and have openly admitted that they have problems with some people cheating (using automated script to gain free credits that nobody will ever actually see) which is accounting for the low click through rates. I have no idea what the extent of the cheating is though.

Word Around the Blogosphere

There is no shortage of BlogRush posts around at the moment. I’ve read with interest the results that other bloggers are getting. Now here is one thing that confused me: Yaro Starak has revealed his first week of stats in this post, and he has over 700 bloggers in his downline, wow! Yet he’s had only 11,466 impressions. Why has he had only double mine when he has orders of magnitude more traffic than I do? His clickthroughs sucked as well, only getting 27 out of that lot, ouch! Here is what he had to say:

Personally I have great faith in John and I know BlogRush will succeed. I don’t expect BlogRush will ever do amazing things for my traffic, but given my position in the pyramid I’m sure I’ll be getting as much traffic as I can from it for a long time coming, whether I use the widget or not.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame has had even worse results:

On the negative side - while my headlines have been shown around 70,000 times I’ve only had 35 clicks on them. That is an extremely low Click Through Rate of 0.05%! I didn’t expect it to be high but thought it might have got somewhere in the 1% range (which would have brought in 700 clicks from the 70,000 - but this is pretty disappointing.

In my original post I said that John Chow would be on every blog within a week - I was suggesting that his referrals would be huge. I didn’t quite hit the spot there as he has less than Darren or Yaro but he’s still doing ok with 445 subscribers. John always likes to give us the marketing angle, here’s his tip for getting more referrals:

The key to doing well with BlogRush will be to use really enticing headlines and build up a lot of syndication credits. Just running the Widget should get you some referrals, but you will get much better results by blogging about it.

Conclusion

For me personally, I’m not exactly thrilled with 14 clicks but I do understand that it’s early days and I said that I would leave it up for a month. As I keep it low in the sidebar it doesn’t really detract from the other content on the blog so it’s not a problem to keep it there for the time being.

If you have a blog and haven’t tried it out yet, sign up under me using this link :-)

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