I check my blog traffic stats almost daily. This a good way to keep up to date with my blogs but it is also an excellent way to catch any problems before they become problems. In order to analyze abnormal traffic it is important for you to know your normal traffic patterns and average daily traffic. For example I know that Thursdays are typically lower traffic days. I've had 3 abnormal traffic spikes in 2 of my blogs over the last couple of months. Here's how they played out:
- cooking blog spike 1 - My normal daily traffic for my cooking blog averages about 330. One day it reached 720! So I checked it out and apparently my blog was featured on a site that sent a lot of traffic my way so that was a very pleasant surprise.
- homemaking blog spike - My normal daily traffic for my homemaking blog is about 50 visits per day. One day I noticed it was up to 130 mid afternoon so decided to check out why. Apparently another blogger decided to lift one of my images quite contrary to my copyright notice but in return they did give me a link. I did request the blogger to remove my image despite the nice traffic increase. This brings up the issue that if you are going to fight copyright infringement you have to fight it consistently even if there is a small benefit to you as a result of the copyright infringement.
- cooking blog spike 2 - A couple of days ago I checked my cooking blog stats at 9:30 AM. I just about fell off my chair when it said 220 visits! As I said my cooking blog averages about 330 visits per day. I immediately started checking through the logs. There was absolutely no reason for such a jump in traffic - no abnormal referring urls, no anything to indicate why my traffic jumped. The only thing I noticed was a bit more search engine traffic but even that wasn't abnormally high. I watched as the number of visits climbed to 418 by 7:00 PM with still no indication as to why the traffic jumped.
Garden Gnome
©2009-2010
2 comments:
My politics blog usually only gets about 20 visits a day but I wrote two posts about the South African political situation recently and received about 500 visits in a week. It is really nice sometimes (but getting attacked by readers wasn't so nice) but it can be pretty scary. The most amazing 24 hours of my blogging experience was when i got Blogger "Blog of Note". I had my usual 10 visits by the time I left work and by the time I got home an hour or so later, I had almost 900! It rose to 4,000 the next day!!! It was brilliant (but a relief when things went back to normal).
Hi Emm, I think you are right that a spike that high would be bit overwhelming! Definitely being attacked by readers would not be very pleasant. I can't imagine getting 4,000 visitors in one day. It would be awesome yet a bit too much. That is a nice spike though.
Post a Comment
Thank-you for your comment. It will appear once approved.