The boring risk training course traffic update

It has been an uphill and downhill ride for the last two years. We have had many moments to celebrate as well as a handful of frustrating close calls. But this morning as I looked at the analytics I realized that we had crossed two important milestones on our second anniversary of launch as a formal business.

Let’s start first with the good news. This January two of our primary channels, our Risk and Investment online training site and our Finance Training Videos YouTube channel crossed an all time high in terms of monthly page views. FinanceTrainingCourse.com, the online risk training site crossed 40,000 page views a month, while our YouTube channel that showcases risk and investment management training videos crossed 5,000 monthly views. More importantly we have seen a consistent rise in pages per visits, average duration per visit and conversion rates over the last quarter.

Risk Training – Top Content

What are the visitors spending time on. Here is a list of our top ranked content over the last few months.

Forward rate calculation cheat sheet

Derivative Crash Course for dummies

Black Scholes probabilities – Understanding the difference between Nd1 and Nd2

Basel II, Basel III, Training Guide and Learning Roadmap

The Advance Risk Management Training Workshop – Resource page

Interest Rate Swaps – MTM and Valuation Guide

Monte Carlo Simulation – How to Reference

Black Scholes Equation – Intuitive Reference

PSR Limits – Counterparty Credit Risk

Option Greeks & Delta hedging series

Risk Training – Top Countries & Visitors

And where do these visitors come from. Last quarter’s review of traffic shows that the largest contributors of traffic remain the US and UK, followed by India, Pakistan and Canada.

Within the top 25 countries, US and UK contributed over 59% of total traffic (the actual number across the entire universe of visitors is lower).

Organic search remained the largest source, followed by direct visitors, followed by referrals.

Challenges and let downs

The biggest challenge this year has been malware attacks on the site and the resulting downtime. We have luckily been able to move completely to AWS this January after another spate of attacks on our related sites in December 2012.

AWS has also fixed once and for all our scalability and traffic spike problems. With hindsight, the next time I would do this, I won’t waste my time on any other provider of hosting services and just go directly to AWS.