Christmas Traffic

Just noticed that I had 5561 hits on Christmas Eve to my Christmas site.

That’s not bad for one day.

Looking at the analytics, those 5561 visits were from 5261 absolute unique visitors, and they made 10,013 pageviews.

That amount of traffic was a bit of a spike – usually the site was getting around 400-500 visits/day, so something unusual must have happened.

Looking at the top pages report in Google Analytics, the Tracking Santa and the Home page accounted for most of the pageviews. Around 60% were to the page, called (not surprisingly) tracking-santa. So you’d figure it was search engines sending the traffic.

Using Google Analytics to filter the keywords to those containing “santa” and “track”, on that day there were actually 440 combinations of phrases, totalling 4011 visits.
So yes, that one page brought 4011 out of 5561 visits to my site that day. The rest were general Christmas queries.

But on Christmas Eve, everyone wants to track Santa, using Norad’s Santa Tracker. The day before, it had only been 56 search phrases sending 204 visits. Definitely a one day spike.

I hadn’t even edited that page this year – i’d set it up a year or so ago, and left it there. But it was optimised, for content, inlinks, heading etc – all the usual.

I haven’t syncd AdSense and AdWords reports, so I can’t tell exactly how much each keyword earnt, but I can tell that the banner at the top of the page was the top earner that day – even though it was just enough for a cup of coffee each for me and the kids. Shucks – the day before, we could have only had 2 cups of coffee.

But I’m sure we had one.

(And I thought 1500 visits on Halloween Eve had been good)