I love watching the trends of the traffic on my blog; even if said traffic is not that high. In fact, I think it is much easier to monitor my site’s traffic trends then it is for us at Viddler because I’m able to keep a much closer eye on even the smallest of trends.
Monday’s stats
Take for example this passed Monday night, when the Green Bay Packer game went into overtime. Though short lived due to a long pass by Brett Favre, during the time this game went into overtime my site received hundreds of referral hits from the major search engines. Why? Because I show up on the first page on Google when you search for NFL overtime rules. These types of things happen all the time – and to nearly ever blogger.
Sometimes these trends can be predicted (which is why blogging about niches is so popular). Other times though, trends just appear out of no where.
Take for instance the most popular post on my site; Tolype Velleda. I know what you’re thinking: “How the heck is that the most popular post on your site?” Because the number of visits to this page is skewed by the fact that my photo of this moth comes up on the first page (and sometimes in the first row) for a Google Images search for the word moth. Combine that with the fact that, when clicked, the photo of the moth is only contained in a small frame above my site loaded in a lower frame. This happens, a lot.
It is funny to see where you get traffic from. Some of the searches I end up seeing a lot of referrals from are funny to me because – once and a while – I know people are looking for something completely different then the content on my site. For instance, doing an image search for ‘pot’ on Google will refer you to my post about a gift Eliza gave me. I’ve gotten emails asking: “Did you know your site comes up when I search for pot? Do you have any weed?”. No joke. And to answer those wondering, no I don’t have any weed. Ask Josue, he has some.
I could go on forever about all of the odd ways people end up seeing my site. What are some of the weird ways you’ve seen on your site?
5 Comments
yea, send them potheads my way bro
Josue: Haha! I know that’d draw you out of your cave!!
I have a blatant addiction to checking stats on my site. I find myself checking things out at multiple times throughout the day. One keyphrase I find myself receiving referrals from is “self improvement” because I once wrote an article outlining a number of ways to improve yourself… as a Web designer/developer. I can’t help but feel bad for the people looking to better themselves and they’re faced with an article about writing code.
Jonathan: Time for some affiliate links to self help books? Cha-ching!
For sure. Watching the stats can be addictive. I just launched my personal blog about 3 weeks ago. Already getting search results for all kinds of interesting keyword combinations.
btw, have you checked out the MyBlogLog plugin for WordPress comments?