Something else kind of stuck in my brain from Stephen Hume’s column. His claim that the Vancouver Sun had received 10 million page views in February, 2009 seemed unusually high.
Warning: This post gets pretty web-analytics-geeky very quickly, so bail out now if that doesn’t interest.
I checked out the Sun’sonline advertising site. According to their downloadable PDF, these were the traffic numbers for May, 2008:
vancouversun.com
7.2 million monthly page views to vancouversun.com
522,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on vancouversun.com
theprovince.com
3.7 million monthly page views to theprovince.com
391,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on theprovince.com
There’s some fine print at the bottom of the page which indicates that the page view numbers come from (the links are mine) “Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, Avg. May 2008″ and the visitor numbers come from “Source: comScore Media Metrix, Total Canada, Home & Work, May 2008″.
Analytics and Panels
I take an interest in those sources because Omniture SiteCatalyst provides a more accurate visitor total than comScore. SiteCatalyst is an analytics-based tool like Google Analytics, and if it’s counting page views, then it’s counting visitors, too. Like any such ‘web-bug’ system, VancouverSun.com has code on every page that enables them to capture and report on behaviour for each of their site visitors. I grabbed a screenshot of that code from a page on the Sun’s website.
As regular readers know, we’re writing this book about social media marketing. I’m currently working on the chapter on social news and bookmarking. As part of my research, I’m gathering some real-world numbers about Digg, and just how big the Digg Effect actually is.
To that end, I’m running a survey. Has your site ever been ‘Dugg’? That is, has it ever been featured on the front page of Digg, and suffered a torrent of visitors as a result?
It requires you to look in your stats program (Google Analytics or whatever), and determine just how many visitors arrived from Digg on the day you were Dugg. I’m also asking for the URL of the page on your site that was Dugg, to confirm each entry. If you don’t know how to do this, send me an email and I’ll explain.
As an example, Get a First Life was Dugg on January 21, 2007 and received 10,829 visitors from Digg.
I plan to publish the results (though not your name or email address, obviously) on this site and possibly in the book. So you’re disclosing this data point for the world to see.
It’s okay if your site crashed–I’m interested in how many visitors you actually captured and reported in Google Analytics or your stats program of choice.
UPDATE: I’m only going to accept five submissions per website, to ensure one particular topic or site doesn’t bias the results too much.
And There’s a Prize
As an enticement, one lucky submitter will receive one of the brand-new iPod Shuffles I’ve got kicking around the house. They’ve become a common speaker gift, so I’ve got two or three of them at the moment. I probably won’t get more than 20 or 30 submissions, so your odds of winning are excellent.
If you don’t want the Shuffle, I’ll give $50 to the charity of your choice.
Mimi emailed to let me know that my peculiar fandom project DearRockers.org was featured on the CBC’s culture show Q yesterday. I had pitched the Q’s webby correspondent Mio Adilman on the story, as it seemed like the right thing for his Download Down-Lo segment. And apparently it was.
If you’re interested in listening, here’s the four-minute piece (in which Mio needlessly mocks Vancouverites):
One aspect of DearRockers.org that I was interested in was what the ratio of visitors to letters would be. I thought it would be low, but it’s shockingly minute. Since it launched in early November, the site’s had about 55,000 visitors, and has about 20 letters that I didn’t directly solicit.
That’s one letter for nearly 3000 visitors. Of course, the ‘friction’ to create a letter is quite high–it’s not like leaving a comment on a blog or something. Still, an interesting result. I wonder what the visitor-to-creator ratio is on YouTube or Flickr?
Every time I get on TechMeme I get 500 to 3,000 visits. That matches what the Guardian and what Nick Carr are seeing.
But, truth is not many sites out there do any better. Yeah, when I get on Digg I get 20,000. When I got on the front page of the BBC a couple times in the past month I got 5,000 each time. But Valleywag? I get 100 to 1,000 visits…
Dave Winer? A few thousand per link, but sometimes only a few hundred. Wired? A few thousand. Stumbleupon? I got tens of thousands once, but not lately. Twitter? A few hundred, even when dozens of people put my link up.
Those numbers sound about right to me. Robert’s cult of personality probably amplifies things a bit–I’ve never seen more than 15,000 visitors from a single Digg post on this or any of my clients’ sites.
My best example of disappointing referral numbers is the recent link to this site in the New York Times. The New York Times! The Grey Lady! They get 450,000 visitors a day. Surely that would result in a windfall of referral traffic, right?
Not so much:
The Times was the #8 referrer to this site for July, 2007. I mean, I love each and every one of you 760 Times readers, but you didn’t bring enough friends.
Now obviously, context matters. The Times link was just in the sidebar of an article, among sundry other links. Plus it helps if there’s something really enticing at the other of the link.
Which brings me to a related truth: offline media hits rarely result in radically increased online visitors. We emphasize this to our clients over and over. There’s plenty of value in doing traditional, offline media relations, but in my experience, an immediate influx of visitors isn’t one of them.
