Wikis, Content, Social Media and Cats

I live in Israel. Yesterday was the Super Bowl. I’m not that into football, but my husband and son are, and I’m originally from Dallas, so a Super Bowl Sunday can’t go by without some sort of recognition. We  had the most American food that I could think of for supper (hot dogs and baked beans) and I let my son stay up all night to watch the game with a couple of friends – it started here at 1:30 am.

While that’s all fine and good, why would I bring that up in my blog? Because I was expecting totally different user behavior for The Pet Wiki on Superbowl Sunday than I got. Instead of the number of visitors being down for Sunday, it was up. I had incorrectly assumed that people would be too busy getting their game on to pay any attention to their pets. I guess I was wrong.

What surprises me more than just being high traffic for a Sunday was the fact that I didn’t really do all that much to drive it. I’ve been working at creating internal links on pages to make the pages easier to navigate and to make it more friendly for SEO for the last few days – nothing that would have impacted this past Sunday, and spent very little time on Social Media. I’ve spent more time tweeting other people’s pages than my own. While that may build trust in the long run, which leads to brand loyalty, which leads to traffic, I have no idea what went on this past Sunday.

Even when I look at the pages that got the most traffic, I don’t notice anything strange. If there were a spike in a certain page that could help explain it away, I could understand, but the percentages were still the same for the most popular pages.

Don’t get me wrong, I like traffic, both explained and unexplained. The problem is that the unexplained type is really hard to reproduce. Since I’m kind of new to the pet content field, maybe I just don’t realize that this is the norm instead of the exception. I know that I was also pleasantly surprised on Thanksgiving to see a growth in traffic. Christmas and New Years were down, as expected.

I take the numbers that I see very seriously. I try to correlate what I do with what effect it has on the site, but sometimes I’m just left wondering.

They say that the job of the future will be in statistical analysis. With the ability to collect so much information, the need for people to make sense of it all will be way up there.

Maybe what I need to learn from this is that football really is a very animalistic sport. Maybe because the Colts are a pet, it made more people think about their pets and they went on the site more. (Sarcasm – I don’t really believe this.) I guess that I’ll wait until next year and check out the numbers again before I draw any conclusions.

What kind of numbers did you see on Super Bowl Sunday? Hopefully better than Peyton’s.

Tagged as: statistics, super bowl

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