we had a huge spike in uniques yesterday. an incremental number that in all likelihood gave us our largest number of daily uniques in our history. we’re sitting on 143,000 uniques for the rolling 30 days, and about 15,000 of this total were incremental uniques that just showed up. i reckon we must have been featured, or written about, somewhere on the web. anybody know?
15,000 hits on the Bobby Julich crazy story
Perhaps that’s been linked to lots of other places?
Dan
Was it the RoadBike Rider link on ‘Hank Reardon’ Wheel Change out story ?
Db
That Bobby J story has been linked on lots of sites indeed.
Herbert
In part it may have been caused by a post on the cervelo forum about Demerly’s Brain Bike chronicles?
Peace,
RF
Like a few others said it could have been the road bike rider email that went out. They claim it is sent to “more than 60,000 roadies around the world.”
Well that email went out this morning and Analytics seems to lag about 20 hours or so, so that wouldn’t make sense. Can’t you drill down to see what the referring address is? If it’s that large, it should stand out.
“Did a significant number of the uniques forward from a single address?”
the only thing i can think of that happened yesterday: that ad you see at the top, the 728x90 leaderboard, it’s a third party ad, served elsewhere. they’ve switched from OAS tags to doubleclick, and i had to slap in some doubleclick code, which i did yesterday evening. but i can’t see why that drove traffic to me. it drove an ad to me, but unless that ad arrives under the guise of a unique each time it is served, i don’t see why google analytics would report differently than has typically been the case.
otherwise, it’s the julich story making its way around the web, or something like that. if i see a ridiculous spike today, then i’ll know it’s the doublick ad tags and i’ll have to do something about that.
Yesterday, I noticed that a cycling forum (Daily Peloton) had a post to the CSC training camp article.
http://www.dailypelotonforums.com/main/index.php?showtopic=7075
" Yesterday, I noticed that a cycling forum (Daily Peloton) had a post to the CSC training camp article."
that’s not it, because the article hasn’t been hit on enough to account for this upsurge. my host report looks normal. nothing unusual there, all the usual bots and crawlers (google, alexa, etc.), nothing out of the ordinary.
Doubleclick tags do indeed have a timestamp in them that make them a unique impression each time they’re served… but that shouldnt affect your session info.
“Doubleclick tags do indeed have a timestamp in them that make them a unique impression each time they’re served… but that shouldnt affect your session info.”
yes, of course, the impression is unique. but that’s for statistical purposes, no? is there any mechanism that causes the ad’s “visit” to be counted as a unique visitor?
Prob just all the newbies to the site feel comfortable now and have invited all there tri geek friends.
tfun226~
i’ll lob this out there… You highlighted the Race calender yesterday with a sticky thread… when I go into the race calender it says I’m not logged in - which means it isnt reading my forum cookie or its a different registration altogether. So if I visit the forum, then go see the race calender, do you treat me as one unique or two?
The ToC tire change story has 16,000 views, any other thread has an average of 500 -1M views.
“The ToC tire change story has 16,000 views, any other thread has an average of 500 -1M views.”
Bingo!
“You’re famous now Hank. This is now linked from RoadBikeReview.com!”
Dave
Does Tom Demerly have another crazy trainer sale advertised?
“if I visit the forum, then go see the race calender, do you treat me as one unique or two?”
one unique. this spike happened yesterday, but we’ve been trying to figure out the cookie problem for a week and a half now.
Dan- I’m just doing my part to increase the visibility of ST…
From RoadBikeReviews: “He didn’t know Bobby Julich??” “It is a triathlon forum…I don’t think any of us would know those guys running in their Speedos either.”
The story is getting alot of “play.”
Jeff
Has to be that TOC story. Can’t find anything in the code for DoubleClick that would be doing it.
“Has to be that TOC story. Can’t find anything in the code for DoubleClick that would be doing it.”
i’ve scoured my google analytics report. on the face of it, the metrics suck. we added a whole bunch of uniques, yes, but the bounce rate spiked, the time spent on the site tanked, page views per visit tanked. but when i look to see where people came from, down to the city, everything is normal, that is, we don’t have tens of thousands of visitors coming from wherever the doubleclick ad server is located.
so, it must be the TOC story, and roadies came, saw, otherwise didn’t care for the site, and left 