We launched on April 19th, 2021, and we are still very new. You can find out what we are building next on our feature roadmap. We are bootstrapped, and if you want to help us please join as a Founding Member (100% of what we raise goes toward new features). 

Traffic stats(last updated Nov 1st, 2024)

For 2023, we had 5+ million visitors!

For 2024:

• January: 442,000+ visitors 
• February: 385,000+ visitors
• March: 375,000+ visitors
• April: 306,000+ visitors
• May: 247,000+ visitors
• June: 241,000+ visitors
• July: 237,000+ visitors
• August: 195,000+ visitors
• September: 177,000+ visitors
• October: 232,000+ visitors
• November: 188,000+ visitors

*Google is struggling with the quality of its search engine, and the last 12 months have been rough as we have lost a lot of the traffic they normally send us. They are no longer showing indie publishers, and they have made a massive shift toward large-scale AI farms like Forbes (and generally bad results). If you are curious about the situation, here is a breakdown of what is happening by other indie publishers (HouseFresh, RetroDodo, Healthy Framework (part 2), RePlay, etc..). This is painful in the short term, but over the coming years, we will regain even more traffic as they fix their search engine. We also have a lot of non-Google traffic, which is growing fast. I wrote up my thoughts here to share with Google as they work to fix the situation. 

For 2023:

• 5 million visitors globally (all English-speaking)
• 2.5 million visitors from the USA

For 2022:

• 1.8 million visitors globally (all English-speaking)
• 900,000 thousand visitors from the USA

For 2021 (launched in April):

• 266,000 thousand visitors globally (all English-speaking)
• 137,000 thousand visitors from the USA

How many clicks to bookstores?

This is the main measurement I use to judge our success.

Did we get a reader interested enough to click on a bookstore?

My goal is to engage readers and get them interested in a book enough they go to the bookstore to buy it or preview it. I do not have sales stats, and you can read why here. 

For 2024:

• January: 29,000+ clicks to all books, and of those, 5,600+ are to a promoted book. 
• February: 26,000+ clicks to all books, and of those, 4,600+ are to a promoted book. 
• March: 25,000+ clicks to all books, and of those, 4,800+ are to a promoted book. 
• April: 22,000+ clicks to all books, and of those, 4,100+ are to a promoted book. 
• May: 19,000+ clicks to all books, and of those, 3,200+ are to a promoted book.
• June: 22,000+ clicks to all books, and of those, 3,500+ are to a promoted book.
• July: 17,000+ clicks to all books, and of those, 3,100+ are to a promoted book.  
• August: 16,000+ clicks to all books, and of those, 2,800+ are to a promoted book. 
• September: 13,500+ clicks to all books, and of those, 2,400+ are to a promoted book. 
• October: 12,800+ clicks to all books, and of those, 2,200+ are to a promoted book. 
• November: 14,800+ clicks to all books, and of those, 2,500+ are to a promoted book. 

How do I track this stat?

I use Plausible.io for analytics and to track clicks to bookstores. There are always caveats when tracking what people do on a website, as a lot of data is hard to capture. Amazon's own system says I've sent ~50,000 clicks just to them in February (almost 2x higher), so it is hard to know who is right. For my sanity, I use Plausible since that is what I use for sitewide metrics. 

Can you give the author's stats for their books/pages?

I would love to! This would be an incredibly hard and expensive feature to build. I don't have the money yet, but I hope to one day have the resources (I have a full breakdown here on the challenges).

How many readers visited my book list?

I've got a breakdown here for an example month and how that looks. I hope to extend this data to authors in a dashboard, but we don't have the resources/money to build it yet. 

Who are Shepherd's visitors?

We are global and aimed at English-speaking readers. 

All our book links are smart and based on a person's location.

So if someone is in the U.S.A., we load bookstores in the U.S.A., in the U.K., we load U.K. bookstores, and so on (for every country worldwide). 

Traffic is spread out, and here is a sketch: 

• 51% U.S.A.
• 11% U.K.
• 6% Canada
• 4% India
• 4% Australia
• 22% from the rest of the world (all English speakers)

Per Google Analytics, what are our reader demographics?

Gender:

• 50% female
• 50% male

Age (Google doesn't collect data for those under 18): 

• Under 18 - Google doesn't collect data for those under 18
• 18-24 - 25%
• 25-34 - 24%
• 35-44 - 20%
• 45-54 - 14%
• 55-64 - 10%
• 65+ - 7%

Feel free to email ben@shepherd.com if you have any questions; I'm an open book and always trying to update this F.A.Q. with more info.