I thought I would do one followup on yesterdays story about my digg / del.iciou.us experiment. The final visitor count for yesterday was 17,891, up from an average of 3,500/day. The RSS feed subscription is at 1,205, up from 286. Although the frenzy at digg.com has died down, elevated traffic continues to spill over into today.
I’m not mentioning this to toot my own horn… I’m just stunned that one tutorial could have such an impact. I have several long standing pages that get quite a bit of search engine traffic, but the iTunes tutorial has jumped from relative obscurity, to the third most popular page on this site… in just one day. Just incase you’re curious, the top two are Bloodrayne Topless, and the downloads page. I think it’s obvious why those two pages get so many visitors from Google Image searches.
I’d also like to take a moment to talk about stats, in general. Most stats packages give 2 numbers for visitors… Total – the total number of visitors in a given time period, and Unique – visitors that have never been here before. Bloggers, myself included, tend to get hung up on Unique… but is that the number we should care about? Advertisers care about unique visitors, because it means their ad is reaching a wider audience, but shouldn’t bloggers be more concerned with total, or more precisely… the difference between total and unique? The difference between those two numbers represent your regular readers. You may have a lot of unique visitors, but if your unique and total numbers are almost the same, then not very many people are coming back to your site. I don’t want that, would you? I care about my regular readers. Although I keep this blog for my own enjoyment, I would hate to think that no one else sees enough value in it to come back… and it’s just a random Google-stop for a topless image of Bloodrayne, or an Apple desktop picture.
That’s some crazy traffic there. Thanks for the write-ups on this. I’ve been playing around with sites for quite awhile, but I’ve never really looked into the traffic side of things until my first client site, http://industrialcouncil.org. I’m using Mint now, and I’ll keep these thoughts in mind as I go forward with (hopefully) more sites.
That’s a nice looking site Kelly. Well done.