Well a few days pass without me updating. Partly because I didn't have anything to talk about, partly because grad school is kicking my ass, but either way there was no new content here. Well after my post last night, I decided to swing by Google Analytics to check out my page views for the month. I expected them to be low, seeing as how I haven't been updating here, commenting on other blogs, or shamelessly promoting my blog via Facebook or Entrecard. Imagine my surprise when I saw that I was already just shy of 1,000 unique visits for the month.
"1,000 visits? Already? Well that doesn't make sense. I was only a little over 1,500 for the month last month. I wonder where all this new traffic came from?"So I dig a little deeper into the results from Google Analytics. Come to find out, the days with the largest hit counts were 9/9 and 9/10.
"Well, that's all fine and dandy, but why would my hit count be so high? I didn't post anything on either of those days. Who found my stuff to be that interesting?"
At this point I started to wonder what audience was reading my blog. Not that I care, but I just like knowing who I'm talking to. Was it people routed from The Greenville News? Could it be the slew of new people I met tailgating last week who are now stalking me on facebook? Did I manage to land on top of something Google found attractive and now I'm reaping the page views from it?
None of the above. Come to find out, most of my page views were coming from West Bloomfield, Michigan.
"Odd. 300 page views from one place in two days? A place where I know not a soul. Weird, I wonder how they got here?"
Well one quick look through the referring sites showed that the top two referrers were fcn.ford.com and clipsheet.ford.com. I'm not sure what clipsheet.ford.com is but I know that fcn.ford.com is Ford's corporate intranet. Apparently someone at Ford corporate came across my blog and either a) liked my stuff -- a lot or b) has a sense of humor and forwarded my page across the entire company. I'm guessing the latter...
"Hmm, well I'll be. That's kinda funny. Too bad I own a Camry."
3 comments:
I think I know how this happened :)
Google Alerts
If I had to take a guess, someone (or quite a few people) at Ford had set a Google Alert for "2009 Lincoln MKS" So when your post with that phrase appeared on the internet, and was crawled by the Google bot, an e-mail was sent to this person. Who knows, maybe my comment will give you another spike :)
Anyone from Ford care to tell me if I'm right?
~Emily
Bots, definitely. I noticed a tremendous traffic increase after the crawlers found my page. The counter that I use on my site will record the OS and the web browser used to view my page. I forget the name of all the crawlers, but one of them will show up as "voyager." And, of course, with all the extra traffic, I got all the extra spam posts.... gay.
-gancos
Em
Possibly. With all the hits originating in one place and a couple referral links, I could see someone at Ford setting up a Google Alert. But damn, I'd HATE to have that job. Think how much crap you would have to wade through just to find something of substance.
Gancos
My first thought were bots, but in looking at the OS & Browsers nothing showed up out of the ordinary. Plus (thankfully) I haven't been getting any spam comments.
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