Since I changed my site template on the 28th of December, the traffic to Ice Cream Ireland has more than tripled. Most of the hits are coming through search engines, so maybe this template is just more search engine friendly? I’m just an ice cream man! I don’t understand these things and would appreciate an explanation if anyone has one (though of course I’m not complaining)…
Just look at all those people who got an ice cream maker for Christmas!
Kieran,
A good complaint to have alright…well mostly. It’s impossible to say for sure without looking through the metrics but here’s a couple of suggestions as to what it might.
– Is it all going to a certain page? Its possible that a certain keyword combination has suddenly become popular which you are getting a lot of traffic for. You didn’t release a “Britney Spears Breakdown” flavour recently did you?!
– To be honest the dramatic jump is a bit unusual especially if it coincided pretty closely with the site update. Are these all genuine visitors or is there a chance that the new template could be counting visitors erroneously? Not knowing any details about this this would be my best guess from afar.
– Another possibility might be that you are getting “screen scraped” by an automated bot which is driving the number of visits up. Are the number of unique visitors also showing the same increase.
General things to look at is where the traffic is coming from (source, keywords and geographic region) and where it is going to (which page or pages). Send me a mail if you want and I’ll have a quick look at it for you no bother.
Love the ice-cream!
Joe
Good God! Well done. I definitely need some tips! I think I need to get baking some tasty treats to encourage my other half to update my blog.
Kieran, everyone’s excited about ice cream at the moment. My boyfriend & I are awaiting your new book in earnest – we’ll be down to Dingle / Killarney when it’s published for some samples & an autograph.
Thanks, all! Joe – that is unique hits, and there is quite a spread – coming from all over. The only thing I can think is that somehow this new template deals with the static pages better (I use them for a list of posts), since there are more people coming into specific posts rather than to the home page.
the same thing has happened to me, in Dec my hits were huge and Jan is doing pretty well too, on Mon my stats tell me I had 423 unique visitors in one day which is great and everything but I’m doubtful about it???
Kieran,
Without seeing the logs it’s impossible to tell.
Unfortunately give the coincidence with your template upgrade I would guess that this is unlikely to be an increase in traffic and is most likely a correction in reporting the figures. (Note a correction in the sense of a change – can’t tell whether you were underreporting before or are over-reporting now!)
Regards,
Joe
Just wondering, did the peak start when you joined the Gastronom.ie network?
Thanks, Joe! Unfortunately I don’t really know how to access logs. I’m just looking at Sitemeter. But that gives unique hits and sees where they come from. Almost all are referrals from other blogs or Google.
Will – Damien put me on Gastronom from the beginning. However, if you want more traffic, join all the aggregators you can!
Today is the first time I’m seeing you and I googled “blogs about ice cream” and you are the first hit. Very cool site!!!
BTW – I do think that Sitemeter was under reporting, because the increased traffic is still using the same bandwidth…
Good point. FYI I’m a big fan of Google Analytics as a metrics tool. It’s simple to setup (via a plugin in WordPress) and use (and extremely powerful if you want or need it to be) and it’s free.