By Michael Dorausch, D.C.
When you measure performance, performance tends to improve. When you measure performance and you share those measurements publicly, performance tends to improve even more. A quick review of statistics on this chiropractic website shows a surge in traffic the day after Super Bowl Sunday. In this article we will be looking at a few measurement components that display the growth in traffic to its peak, and then it’s drop off throughout the week.
I love viewing statistics and I’ve poured over many pages of all kinds of web analytics during the past decade. In August of 2007, I wrote about the top five yellowpages directories and shared various stats for each of those online destinations. In September of 2007 I reviewed some statistical analysis of presidential campaign websites, and it was determined the Barack Obama campaign site measured up best. I noticed both these reviews were done on a Saturday so maybe there’s a small trend beginning here. Lets look at some chiropractic data for the past week.
(photo: an awstats screenshot displaying traffic statistics for first week of February 2008)
I took this number of visits screenshot on Friday night so data for the week was not complete yet. Data from February 1 through February 7 (Friday to Thursday) is what we’re looking at. February 01 shows traffic to the web site at 2507 unique visitors, and you can see the numbers climbed from there, peaking on the day after Super Bowl Sunday, and dropping back down throughout the remainder of the week.
Why would I share this? Simply to show that if you have a niche focused website, you don’t have to live inside a bubble. Normally, it would be common to expect that web site traffic would decrease significantly on a weekend like Super Bowl Sunday, since most of America is in front of a television set. There’s three pieces of content that are primarily responsible for the increase in traffic we are reviewing here.
Visits to the chiropractic website on Friday were logged at 2507 Uniques. Midday Saturday Eastern time we published our chiropractic guide to the 2008 Super Bowl. The article was well received (several nice an e-mail comments regarding Joe Montana and Michael Strahan) and internet visits for Saturday and Sunday were nearly double the average. Saturday shows visits at 3954 and Sunday shows visits at 5734.
On Sunday, our new biweekly advertisement round up added to the traffic that was coming in that day (about 2600 visitors browsed through ad listings like job wanted posts). Had it not been for the guide that was posted on Saturday, Sunday traffic would have likely been lighter, as the Super Bowl guide was still being accessed as a resource.
It was Monday, with a post that almost didn’t go live, that brought in the mother lode of traffic for the day. Our chiropractic round up on 2008 Best Super Bowl Commercials was primarily responsible for the 15,768 unique visitors making their presence known. With all the traffic that came in, the funny thing was that Daria wrote the article in less than 20 minutes. She e-mailed chiropractors late Friday night to get input on their favorite ads. Early Monday morning she had eight replies, which was enough to put something together for enjoyment. We were not planning any regular chiropractic news that morning since we figured most people would be focused on the upcoming election and news of super Tuesday.
The lesson here is sometimes you never know what’s going to go popular and be best received by a particular audience. The top Super Bowl commercials post was a creative way to engage a group of chiropractors to participate on a topic that was viewed by thousands. Maybe it’s time to start preparing something for March madness?
planetc1.com-news @ 11:44 am | Article ID: 1202586287
Comments are closed for this article!