In an effort to be more productive a lot of us do our best to avoid checking our web stats too often. Personally I like to have a quick “dashboard” look once a week and then do a deeper analysis about once a month.
Last week I wrote a post on my tech blog about a free iPad scam circulating the web. I wrote it because someone I know fell for the scam and gave the spammers access to their Gmail address book to “invite” friends as well.
A few days later I checked my Google Analytics dashboard and noticed a big traffic jump. I looked a little closer and found that this new blog post was receiving a lot of search engine and Facebook traffic. In fact on the best day it was causing about a 30% increase in daily traffic.
But by the time I had noticed it the best days were past, and traffic was starting to die off a little. The scam site has been shut down so that scam is no longer circulating, or at least not with those specific characteristics and keywords, and the traffic has dropped off to a trivial amount now.
So by not being a “stats addict” I effectively missed out on conversion opportunities for that initial burst of targeted traffic. I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Don’t Miss the Traffic Spikes
The first thing I wanted to do was put an early warning system in place so that I am alerted to these events in the future. I didn’t want to fall into a habit of checking my stats every single day, but I also didn’t want to miss out on future opportunities.
Fortunately Google Analytics has an alert feature that lets you configure email alerts if certain conditions occur. You’ll find them in the Intelligence section of your site’s analytics.
This is not at all complicated to set up. Simply create a new alert, and then configure it with the metric and the threshold that you want to be alerted to.
Now you will receive an email alert in your inbox if you have a big traffic day. What threshold you set this to will depend on what you consider to be a significant spike for your blog. If you aren’t sure just choose a number and you can adjust it over time if you are getting too many or too few alerts.
You may not always catch the biggest day of traffic this way, but most spikes are followed by a few days of smaller but still strong traffic that you can potentially convert.
Conversion Opportunities for Traffic Surges
If you’ve got a hot post getting lots of traffic then you need to take a close look at whether you can optimize the post to take advantage of it. Here are some ideas:
Quick SEO Tweak – if the traffic surge is coming from search engines take a look at the keywords people are using to find the post. Check your rankings for those keywords by doing the searches yourself. Use the Adwords Keyword Tool to look for related keywords. Take a look at your title, description/excerpt, and your post content and see if there are any improvements you can make.
Add Internal Links – one of the ways to keep visitors on your site longer is to interlink your own blog posts. Find some related posts and work those links into your blog post.
Capture Leads – hopefully you’ve already got some calls to action around your blog for your subscription channels, but you can also add a more targeted call to action to the post itself, or use the traffic to test other signup methods. For example if you’ve been resisting testing out a popup newsletter signup, try adding one just to the post that is receiving the traffic spike and measure the results.
Monetize – with so many eyeballs on your post it could be an opportunity to add some post-specific monetization. Look for affiliate products that you can work into the post somehow, or promote your own products if you have them. Target your call to action for the topic of the post itself, for example on the free iPad scam post I might promote a consumer web security product or offer a free multi-part email course that builds up to an affiliate promotion.
As you can see there are lots of ways to take advantage of sudden traffic surges. The important thing is to spot them first by using automated alerts, and then quickly analyse the traffic to work out the best way to convert it.
Image Credit: Flickr
About Paul Cunningham
As always, some great tips in there, Paul. I use Chartbeat for this sort of thing. (Well, to be honest, when I say “this sort of thing”, what I really mean is I sometimes sit and watch it and think how clever I am that these people are on my site and I know about it!) Chartbeat has a traffic alert feature; it sends you an email when you get a spike. It also sends you an email when your site goes down.
I’ve never made use of all this intelligence. Never really thought much about what I could do with it. I’ll be thinking a little more about it from now on, though. So thanks!
I never used google analyics alert. Thanks for letting me know that how to use it and why to use.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for this truly useful tip for creating an alert for traffic spikes. I’m trying to wean myself from obsessive stat checking and I think this might just be the remedy. Thanks!
This is great, Paul! I only use a fraction of the tools available in Google Analytics and had no idea about how to set up an alert and why I would want to. I’m going to set up an alert so that I don’t miss any traffic spikes – if that ever happens :-)
Karen
I personally don’t check my stats enough and probably should more. Every little bit of info on your blog helps out in some way I’m sure.
Paul, I am so glad to have heard about this feature! I will be implementing the alerts. I admit to being a bit obsessive about checking stats, but I’m getting better! This will help ease my mind tremendously, I’m sure.
Thanks!
Paul, I know exactly what a missed traffic jump looks like- came from the last post I would have guessed! Anyway- I will NOW set up my alert so I will not miss it. I know as soon as it e-mails me, I will nervous and afraid if I mess with it, the traffic will fall- does that happen? Prevent it from happening?
Sounds like you’re worried that trying to capitalize on the traffic might somehow drive it away?
Valid concern. It all depends on the nature of the post and the type of traffic. In my case I knew that the post was a little off from my normal topics, so the traffic was already converting badly so there was no harm in trying to improve it :-)
I would say just play it by ear and be a bit cautious. Start with simple things, for example if you’re seeing lots of visitors but no spike in comments, try to tweak your post to draw out more comments.
I want to use google analytics for my site….
can u tell me how to add google analyticsto my site?
Jignesh, check out this post for a step by step guide.
http://www.bloggingteacher.com/how-to-install-google-analytics-on-wordpress-blogs
I guess quick seo tweak wont work coz its momentary spike and the effects of tweak wont be effective untill 2-3 days.
Aery, true you may not be able to move fast enough for the initial spike, but the right tweaks could mean more traffic to the post in the medium to long term.
Thanks can is google analytics free…
Thanks
Quotes on Life
nice way to get alert of the traffic spikes
but i never miss anything, my statcounter and analytics are always logged in and i check traffic after every 1 hour. I get traffic usually from slashdot, reddit and stumbleupon ;)