Quick one today.

I started tracking the traffic data for 16,573 websites at the start of Google’s March Core update, which finished rolling out on April 19th.

The websites I tracked were all monetized with Mediavine or Raptive ads.

The data is enlightening.

73% of the sites had traffic declines, which leaves 27% with increases.

Unsurprinsingly, the smaller the site, the worse it was hit (on average).

Sites with less than 10,000 monthly visitors saw an average traffic decrease of 64%. Sites with more than 1,000,000 monthly visitors only saw a decrease of 9% on average.

I shared lots more interesting data here:

Data from Google’s March Core Update

You’ll find it fascinating if you enjoy diving into data!

By the way, the raw data is available to all members of Website Growth Mastermind. If you aren’t a member, you can join the group to access it. You can find it in the Research section.

With the raw data, you can run your own analysis - and see the actual URLs for all the tracked sites. This is useful for finding sites that had huge traffic gains, so you can reverse engineer their strategies. You can also see exactly which sites were badly hit. Analying those sites will help you understand what to avoid.

Things you might be interested in…