When Robots Attack We See Big Funky Spikes!
In November we served 6,176 Pages to 1,534 Visitors
This is a really big increase from October, and it marks the largest number of visitors we’ve served in a month so far. I thought we might see a decrease this month due to American Turkey Day (Nov. 2) and American Thanksgiving (November 25)—but the visitors and views just kept coming!
But before you get all giddy and plan a geeky party, you have to know a couple of things. There were three events in November that affect these numbers. First, on November 11, a robot decided to try to post comments on our page. It didn’t work of course, but over the course of an hour he/she/it viewed 700 pages. A few days later, Squarespace, (our provider) was attacked by a nasty thingie and our site was inaccessible for about 5 hours. Third, on American Thanksgiving another robot impersonated about 400 Visitors in an attempt to post spam in our comments. Again, it didn’t work, but these three events skew our stats a little bit.
Having said all that, I’m still thrilled to see that no matter how you slice it, well over a thousand visitors came to our little corner of cyberspace. This means our efforts are working!
Facebook Continues to Dominate our ReferralsSocial, Social, Social
Facebook accounted for around 16% of our referrals this month. I can’t emphasize how important it is to publicize your outreaches and MA News stories on your social networks. This helps all of us—and since our traffic is up this month, I’m guessing that you’re doing it—so keep up the good social networking!
Way to Go, Salem!Popularity
YWAM Salem is still the most visited base page, accounting for nearly 3% of traffic. El Paso/Juarez and Idaho have also proved to be popular. But the real story here is that our visitors are hitting every page on the site pretty evenly. This is good news for you—most pages are getting hit at least once a day. So make sure your content is fresh, accurate, and that you’ve got links to your base’s web site on your pages.
MA News
We made an emphasis on putting up fresh Mission Adventures News stories over the last 8 weeks. It looks like this is really paying off in page views. The MA News main page was viewed 218 times. News stories in that section were viewed another 269 times. This is a lot of exposure, so keep those stories coming! Visitors are coming for the news, and then they hit a few more pages after that. So please consider the following:
More News Please
Before you go off for your Christmas holidays, please write an MA News story. If you can’t write one up, get someone on your base to do it. If you can’t do that, get a Youth Worker who came through your program to write something up. Let’s keep the news going!
So there you have it, November was great, even with a couple of giant American Holidays.
Peace,
Craig