Exciting Visitor Spike … But I Can’t Tell What …

Over the last two days I have had a little bit of a visitor spike to my site. My unique visitor count has doubled for the last two days.

This is pretty exciting for an unknown relatively boring site like mine that doesn’t feature pictures of dogs chasing their tails in circles, extreme bike riders jumping out of planes without a parachute, cats playing the piano, or one year old babies laughing at the family parrot sneezing—if you get my drift.

But it is truly frustrating that I cannot tell what it is that my new—very welcome—visitors are clicking to.

As you can see from the viewing stats above from SquareSpace, for the last two days it unhelpfully tells me that the popular content clicked on was “Other”, with the second most popular content being “Journal”—which just means the front page. It is sort of interesting that my two posts on single-shot HDR made it into the 4th and 5th slots in the last two days, but combined they only count for 8.3 percent of the clicks. The biggee (sic) is Other with 56.2 percent but I have no idea what “Other” is.

From the referrer statistics for the last two days, shown at left, I can tell that it is likely that many of the new visitors have come from a linking reference because 48.5 percent of the hits were “direct”; meaning someone clicked on a referring link. This could be in an e-mail someone is sharing, or from someone’s Facebook page, or from another blog or Web site.

Assuming the visitor rush is not over and that more new visitors are yet to come then you could ease my frustration by just posting a really quick comment telling me what it is that you’all are visiting, and maybe where you got referred from.

Obviously this plea is not going to even be seen by these new visitors if they are just clicking through to the linked posting (buried down in the bowels of my highly educational and interesting collection of 350 postings), checking that out, and then leaving—because they won’t lay eyes on this request. But it is worth a try.

Thanks.