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Ask HN: Baseline for web traffic?
I'm looking at traffic to my company's site and trying to figure out what's causing spikes and dips. I'm sure many of you are doing the same thing.
The holiday season is especially noisy. There's a huge dip on Christmas day, a huge spike right before, etc. My guess is that the baseline internet traffic for North America is very noisy right now.
What seems dumb is that I'm making guesses about what's causing these spikes and dips with little knowledge of the overall traffic environment. For instance, perhaps everyone's traffic spiked a bit on Dec 29th and 30th and it had nothing to do with the email blast we sent out.
Does anyone know of a good tool or at least a data set I could use to help me tease out the signal in all of this noise?
Thanks!
- dangrossman 12y ago> perhaps everyone's traffic spiked a bit on Dec 29th and 30th and it had nothing to do with the email blast we sent out You don't need any external knowledge to resolve questions like that. You only need to tag the links in all your marketing campaigns, including "email blasts", so that you can identify the traffic from those campaigns in your web stats reports. To know whether a spike was caused by the e-mails or not, you just look at how many visits came from that campaign on the 29th/30th. Whatever analytics platform you choose should make it easy to see how many visits each traffic source is bringing you each day, so you can answer these questions you have about the causes of spikes and dips.
- iurisilvio 12y agoThis way you only understand your spikes. Why I have a dip on Christmas? I did something wrong or it is just how internet works? I have the same problem with a website with 98% search traffic. I don't know if Google changed something or if my traffic will go back to normal in next few days.
- mateo411 12y agoYou should look at a RUM(Real User Monitoring) solution. It involves putting a javascript tag on your web page, and it captures your end users load times, and usually their location.
- MichaelCrawford 12y agoHave a look at Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends http://www.google.com/trends I wrote an article on legal music downloads a while back. It used to get a huge spike every Christmas, because so many people get music players then, so they want some music to download. There are some search terms that are seasonal, like "turkey stuffing recipes", or otherwise periodic like "friday". Analyze your own web server logs to see what search queries your visitors use to find your site, then put some of those queries into Google trends.