Breakdown of Penny Jam Analytics

Since a friend asked me to summarize how thing’s are going with The Penny Jam (for a pitch he’s giving on spurring interest in local music through video in his own area) I thought I’d take the opportunity to blog about the subject since the numbers are not something that we get a chance to talk about often. As you’ll see as you read on and check out the screenshots from Google Analytics.

My analysis will include data from 2 sources, visits to our website – http://www.thepennyjam.com and total views of our videos as reported by Vimeo, the video service we use to host our videos. The project began with our first filming on March 1st of 2008 – our first video came out a month after that.

Between our 16 videos thus far we’ve totaled 9,385 views, according to Vimeo. Unfortunately Vimeo’s statistics are fairly limited at this point, the visualisations need to come a long way to get up to the graphical standards of Google (and Youtube.)

Much to my delight, Vimeo is about to launch “Vimeo Plus” according to their production roadmap. This is slated to include a revamped analytics package – and as of 3 days ago they claim it is 99.24% complete.

According to Vimeo referral statistics (which I painstakingly ten-keyed together) all of our videos combined have been loaded a total of 211,877 times, a huge number of those from our most viewed episode, The Ascetic Junkies at St. Johns Bridge, weighing in with 68,124. A total of 55,394 from that episode came from City Commissioner and Mayor Elect Sam Adams’ website http://commisionersam.com where the video loads on top right of the main page. It is important to note with this larger number that these are not play counts, simply page loads on pages where Penny Jam videos are embedded using the Vimeo player. These are mostly from artist Myspace profiles, blogs and online publications where there are lots of page loads, but the reader doesn’t necessarily watch and finish the video. Once Vimeo enhances their statistics package it’ll be possible to extrapolate more, but for the time being the options are fairly limited.

Google Analytics provides a more full-featured graphical statistics package, which is helpful – but a sizable portion of plays come from the Vimeo.com internal community or from embedded videos elsewhere on the internet, and those aren’t included here. Unfortunately Analytics doesn’t include play counts at all, just page views, though some valuable information can be deduced by the visitor data.

For example, we can tell that of 11,535 total page views we have had 2,535 Absolute Unique visitors. The average time on the site is 3 minutes and 2 seconds, which is less than any of our videos. But as we’ll see later it is made up for by the fact that some people are watching lots of videos while some visitors might leave the site without watching any. Normally a Bounce Rate (visitors leaving after viewing only one page) of 57.61% would be a little high but considering the newest episode is always on the main page it is possible that regular viewers are just checking in, watching the newest video and leaving. The following graph shows that while we do in fact have a lot of one-time visitors, there is also a contingent of rabid repeat visitors.

The group who have been to the site between 9 and 14 times seem like a mentally balanced group, they return to the site regularly, approximatley once per episode – there are 215 of them. There are also quite a few folks that check back in with the site more often that we put out episodes, with the most extreme group, 107 of them (2.4% of overall visitors) that have been there more than 51 times, which is surprising.

Considering we are based in and promoting the music scene in Portland Oregon, the next few graphics seem pretty much right on. First, of 4,385 visits, 4,192 – or 96% come from within the United States.

2,992 visits are from Oregon and we’ve only had 3 states with no visitors – Wyoming, South Dakota and Mississippi.

According to the graph above 81% of Time on the site comes from within Oregon.

Within Oregon, most views are coming from the Portland Metro Area. The statistics in for cities within Oregon are a little janky, for some reason Portland is on there twice. In counting the Portland Metro Area (Portland + Beaverton) There are 2,705 visits to http://www.thepennyjam.com.

So with all this in mind it is unsure how we’ll fare in the long run, the project is still relatively young and has not exploded, but slowly grown into the local scene. Our project has succeeded in some measure on a local level, finding a passionate Portland audience – though to a lesser degree on the national and international level. We have just scratched the surface of bands to collaborate with so there is plenty of time to expand, and clearly a need to expand into new audiences.