from Hacker News

Running a recipe website, traffic seem promising?

by neostim on 2/21/15, 1:10 AM with 2 comments

Completely subjective I'm sure, but my cousin and I run a healthy recipe website, it started out as a hobby but I feel like we're getting some decent traffic and was curious if others felt the amount of traffic we were getting was above average or worth exploring different ways of monetizing it, we do about $250/month in Google adsense right now with it pretty much just sitting idle.

Some of our stats:

Pinterest: Average Monthly Viewers: 2,250,000 Average Monthly Engaged: 70,000

Intagram: 97,000 followers Facebook: 12,000 likes

Google Analytics:

Past 30 days:

167,000 sessions 317,000 pageviews Bounce Rate: 56% Average Session Duration: 1m23s

Just wanted to get some thoughts from others, as I'm really not sure if this amount of traffic for a recipe site is even that high.

  • by petervandijck on 2/21/15, 12:58 PM

    It's a great start, those are pretty good numbers.

    Your bounce rate seems a little high, maybe try Outbrain or something to show people relevant stuff once they land on your site.

    You should think about starting to collect emails (not sure how relevant to a recipe site).

    The low hanging fruit seems to be (without actually seeing the site): 1. keep people a little longer on the site 2. you didn't mention where people were coming from

    There's no such thing as average traffic. You're doing great, especially on social. Keep it up and double down on the things that work. If you share your site we can give feedback on layout and such that can affect traffic and revenue.