Marketing Guy
05-12-2005, 03:14 PM
Hey folks :)
Couple of weeks in a row now I've seen some strange spikes in traffic (equal to about 40% increase of daily total). I'm at a loss on where it's coming from though.
My logs (livestats) show the traffic increase - live users online at the time showed a lot more than normal.
The first week it happened, my Adsense earnings relfected the traffic increase, and checking my forum at times showed lots of different IPs so I'm pretty sure it's real people and not bots. Same again today, but no Adsense increase (although stats may be lagging behind).
No increase in SE referals. No new referrers (if it was single online source, I'd see it in my logs).
I've assumed some kind of press coverage, but haven't been contacted by any press (which you would assume they would do if it was a fairly high circulation publication, but perhaps not always).
No particular rise in forum posting or registration, but that's not entirely unusual for my industry.
I've ruled out blogs or newsletters (email) - they would throw up some kind of referral, even if was just a noticable increase in email provider referrals.
Short of posting a huge message on my homepage asking people where the hell they are coming from I'm coming up short on ideas! :)
Any suggestions on how to trace offline sources of referrals?
ADDED: Further investigation shows the entry point to be a generic forum/viewtopic.php which doesn't help much really! :confused: It would seem strange that an offline publication would reference a forum topic URL? Seems unlikely that people would type in anything with queries.
Cheers
MG
Couple of weeks in a row now I've seen some strange spikes in traffic (equal to about 40% increase of daily total). I'm at a loss on where it's coming from though.
My logs (livestats) show the traffic increase - live users online at the time showed a lot more than normal.
The first week it happened, my Adsense earnings relfected the traffic increase, and checking my forum at times showed lots of different IPs so I'm pretty sure it's real people and not bots. Same again today, but no Adsense increase (although stats may be lagging behind).
No increase in SE referals. No new referrers (if it was single online source, I'd see it in my logs).
I've assumed some kind of press coverage, but haven't been contacted by any press (which you would assume they would do if it was a fairly high circulation publication, but perhaps not always).
No particular rise in forum posting or registration, but that's not entirely unusual for my industry.
I've ruled out blogs or newsletters (email) - they would throw up some kind of referral, even if was just a noticable increase in email provider referrals.
Short of posting a huge message on my homepage asking people where the hell they are coming from I'm coming up short on ideas! :)
Any suggestions on how to trace offline sources of referrals?
ADDED: Further investigation shows the entry point to be a generic forum/viewtopic.php which doesn't help much really! :confused: It would seem strange that an offline publication would reference a forum topic URL? Seems unlikely that people would type in anything with queries.
Cheers
MG