Whenever I log onto my website to edit a page or add a blog post I always take a look at the analytics on how many people have visited my site and what pages they are looking at. (I just use the Weebly provided interface, not Google analytics, though I have heard good things about it if you want a more in-depth understanding of how traffic comes to and moves around your site.) Well, normally I average somewhere between 100-200 total page visits a day for artandrhinos.com.
However, when I logged on yesterday I saw a huge spike in pageviews on May 21st, and by huge I mean 2212! (that was over 900 "unique users"!). This is a very rare occurrence and to make it even weirder in the section where it shows what sites people used to "click though" to mine, there was no matching bump in numbers from any one site. Here's the screen cap for my analytics:
However, when I logged on yesterday I saw a huge spike in pageviews on May 21st, and by huge I mean 2212! (that was over 900 "unique users"!). This is a very rare occurrence and to make it even weirder in the section where it shows what sites people used to "click though" to mine, there was no matching bump in numbers from any one site. Here's the screen cap for my analytics:
So you can see:- "Pageviews" graphed out along the top
- "Top Pages" what's been the most popular pages on my site
- "Search terms" people used and then selected to view my site from the options listed under that search
- "Referring Sites" - what site led people to click on a link to my site.
Here's where it gets weird. Normally, when I've seen abnormally high traffic to my site I also see a matching increase from a "referring site" so I know where online I was mentioned and so how people heard about my site or something on it. But, aside from a slightly higher google.com viewer number, it does not appear that my site was mentioned on another website with a clickable link, so my current best guess is maybe I was mentioned on a podcast, where people would have heard the name, but have to type the web-address in themselves?
The plot thickens as I can deduce that the main focus of the traffic was, most likely, my Star Wars Dress blog post from 2012, since it is listed as the top page visited, with 300 more visits than to my actual home page. From previous months numbers I can fairly comfortably say that my Star Wars Dress Blog post does not get more than 75-100 hits per month. (My Loki Staff Walking Stick blog post gets by far the most hits --> Loki's Army is alive and strong, Long Live the God of Mischief!)
One of the things I have to account for is that the numbers listed in the three columns are for the month, not just that day, so there is a certain %-error in my speculation here and I did not take a screen shot the day before to know what traffic was from specifically that day.
But it would appear that most of the people typed in my address artandrhinos.com and then clicked on the Star Wars Dress picture on my home page that takes you directly to the blog post on how I made it. That is the easiest way to get to the blog post, because on its own, the blog post webaddress is this - http://www.artandrhinos.com/2/post/2012/08/star-wars-dress.html - which is not at all intuitive.
Now, another odd thing, 300 MORE people visited the blog post than went through my home page, so, how did they get there? They didn't search for "Star Wars Dress" or anything like that to have google bring up a direct link to the page or else I'd see it in the "Search Terms". Maybe a few visitors clicked around on the website and went back to the page a couple of times? The only times I've seen any other page on my website have more hits than the home page is when something is mentioned in an article with a clickable link. I'm not saying this aspect is a grand mystery, just an oddity, an outlier from what I normally see represented in the analytics.
So, if you've seen me mentioned somewhere, most likely related to Star Wars or the Star Wars dress, please let me know! If I've come to erroneous conclusions based off what I see in the numbers, let me know! I'm always open to a better understanding of how this all works. Thank you for reading along on this little mystery.
- "Top Pages" what's been the most popular pages on my site
- "Search terms" people used and then selected to view my site from the options listed under that search
- "Referring Sites" - what site led people to click on a link to my site.
Here's where it gets weird. Normally, when I've seen abnormally high traffic to my site I also see a matching increase from a "referring site" so I know where online I was mentioned and so how people heard about my site or something on it. But, aside from a slightly higher google.com viewer number, it does not appear that my site was mentioned on another website with a clickable link, so my current best guess is maybe I was mentioned on a podcast, where people would have heard the name, but have to type the web-address in themselves?
The plot thickens as I can deduce that the main focus of the traffic was, most likely, my Star Wars Dress blog post from 2012, since it is listed as the top page visited, with 300 more visits than to my actual home page. From previous months numbers I can fairly comfortably say that my Star Wars Dress Blog post does not get more than 75-100 hits per month. (My Loki Staff Walking Stick blog post gets by far the most hits --> Loki's Army is alive and strong, Long Live the God of Mischief!)
One of the things I have to account for is that the numbers listed in the three columns are for the month, not just that day, so there is a certain %-error in my speculation here and I did not take a screen shot the day before to know what traffic was from specifically that day.
But it would appear that most of the people typed in my address artandrhinos.com and then clicked on the Star Wars Dress picture on my home page that takes you directly to the blog post on how I made it. That is the easiest way to get to the blog post, because on its own, the blog post webaddress is this - http://www.artandrhinos.com/2/post/2012/08/star-wars-dress.html - which is not at all intuitive.
Now, another odd thing, 300 MORE people visited the blog post than went through my home page, so, how did they get there? They didn't search for "Star Wars Dress" or anything like that to have google bring up a direct link to the page or else I'd see it in the "Search Terms". Maybe a few visitors clicked around on the website and went back to the page a couple of times? The only times I've seen any other page on my website have more hits than the home page is when something is mentioned in an article with a clickable link. I'm not saying this aspect is a grand mystery, just an oddity, an outlier from what I normally see represented in the analytics.
So, if you've seen me mentioned somewhere, most likely related to Star Wars or the Star Wars dress, please let me know! If I've come to erroneous conclusions based off what I see in the numbers, let me know! I'm always open to a better understanding of how this all works. Thank you for reading along on this little mystery.
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Here's another way to look at just how odd May 21 2014 was for my site. The image on the left is the last 3 months. The image on the right is the last 2 years.
What happened on May 21st?
WHERE was I mentioned?
WHO mentioned me?
....THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE!!!!
What happened on May 21st?
WHERE was I mentioned?
WHO mentioned me?
....THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE!!!!
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