I was curious about how the 100+ comment post affected our readership numbers. Yep, double the number of readers on Friday and over 1,000 unique views. I was surprised, however, that it is not winning on the month. Ravious’s latest Guild Wars 2 post is about 50% higher, despite only having 4 comments; his posts that are actually news consistently get a lot of hits. The winner, though, apart from the front page itself? “A Fable,” a year and a half old, but still periodically rocketing up our stats whenever it has a big day on StumbleUpon. “Game Developers and Porn Stars” also keeps getting hits, largely on the strength of search keywords. Sorry if you were one of the hundreds looking for “game porn,” “game porno,” “porn game,” “games porn,” or “porn games.”
This is also the first time I have not seen Ethic’s Asheron’s Call 2 closing ceremonies in the top 10. People may finally be emotionally moving on from AC2. I never did make that Lugian Tactician.
: Zubon
It’s always interesting to see the referrers on high-traffic posts, isn’t it? Broken Toys is the best referrer I’ve ever had. :-)
My biggest referrer has always been Google. I think right now 90%+ is from Google.
Most of my hits come from other blogs (thanks for sticking me on your blogrolls everyone!). Apart from that it’s people putting in search terms for Snow White.Including this Ñнежанка и Ñедемте джуджета, which I checked in my browser with a certain amout of trepidation. I’ve a picture of Snow White in one of my posts. I wish it would stop.
And, man when the Wusthoff knife people are trying to spam us… you know we got it made. /dap
If you like stats and playing around with Google Analytics, I’d definitely recommend Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik.
One thing I’ve come to realise from reading the book is that the amount of traffic you get doesn’t really mean anything, it’s the affect it has that matters.
For instance, getting linked from Massively and getting 1,000 visits in a day is hugely better than getting 10,000 from StumbleUpon because the ‘quality’ of reader is so much greater. In my case (and I’d guess yours), I find that the referral traffic from StumbleUpon usually has a high bounce rate and a low depth of visit whereas a referral from a related blog is far more likely to convert to a quality comment and longtime reader.
Some great articles recently btw so well deserved traffic!