freeg131: Philip Gamble

I was just taking a look at my ProjectWonderful account today which reminded me of my domain GameMaker8.com

The site contains 3 ProjectWonderful ads and the content (first 200 words or so) of the latest 10 posts on GameMaker Blog from its RSS feed. The stats provided by PW show that over the past month the site has been getting an average of about 9 unique visitors a day.

I was quite mystified to discover it was receiving that amount of traffic, and even more so to discover that I appear to have neglected to install Google Analytics on the page so I have next to no information on how people found the site - although my bet is that 90%+ is from Google searches.

I registered the domain in early March this year when HostMySite were offering ridiculously cheap domains for a short period of time (they were $4). I was partly influenced by the fact that GameMaker4 - GameMaker7 were all registered and parked at PPC pages, I assume because of the number of searches made for people looking for various versions of the software. Also I can use the domain to drive traffic to GameMaker blog, and in 2009, when GameMaker 8 is due to be released, I can probably knock up a quick mini-site.

I can’t find a way to see the total amount made from one ad spot with ProjectWonderful, but currently GameMaker8.com is running at about $0.05 a day :P. Pretty pathetic really, but from just 9 visitors very good.

Analytics has now been added.

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AidyBoothroyd.com is currently experiencing its second traffic spike, a month after the Crystal Palace spike came to an end.

The traffic comes from a 5 star rated article on the BBC’s 606 message board entitled Aidy Boothroyd Motivational Website. Apparently I could work in “Spin PR”, or perhaps Jobsite’s admen could since it was they who created the You Are Mighty website.

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I’ve never really compiled a comparative list of all my monthly traffic stats, instead I tend to focus on one site at a time - but I figured it would be nice to see the relationship between the effort I put into maintaining sites and the amount of traffic they receive to see if my time could be better spent.

GameMaker Blog (blog only, NOT gma)
Unique visitors: 2,704
Pageviews: 9,760
Time spent on site: Lots - blogging, checking comments.

Aidy Boothroyd
Unique visitors: 1,737
Pageviews: 2,939
Time spent on site: Half an hour creating a soundboard.
Note: Normally traffic would be at much lower levels than this, however the soundboard was picked up by a couple of football forums resulting in a huge spike in traffic levels.

Stencyl
Unique visitors: 375
Pageviews: 660
Time spent on site: None.

freeg131
Unique Visitors: 202
Pageviews: 426
Time spent on site: Surprisingly little considering the number of blog posts made - a distant second behind GameMaker Blog.
Note: Traffic increased dramatically with the addition of this blog.

GameMaker.tv
Unique visitors: 125
Pageviews: 185
Time spent on site: None.

Cassiobury Park
Unique visitors: 83
Pageviews: 279
Time spent on site: None.

GameMaker Stream
Unique visitors: 56
Pageviews: 79
Time spent on site: None.

The site below was excluded from the above list because of its nature - serving ‘ads’ across many sites - most of them not mine.
Game Maker Affiliation Service
Unique visitors: 10,938
Pageviews: 70,810
Time spent on site: Very little. Fixed a chmod issue, otherwise just checking stats.

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The spike in traffic that AidyBoothroyd.com and its soundboard received in the days around Watford’s game at home to Crystal Palace has now all but gone.

Google Analytics shows that the number of visits to the site was 61 yesterday, which although much larger than the normal average of around 4 or 5 visits a day is, much less than the high of 573 visits on Friday 18th April.

The advice of Jon and common sense led me to place a leaderboard sized AdSense ad on the soundboard page, however I think I may have added it too late to take full advantage of the maximum height of the traffic spike.

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My Game Maker Affiliation Service, a free banner exchange service for Game Maker related websites, has now delivered over 2 million ad impressions in less than a year since its May 2007 launch.

Banners in the system have been clicked almost 13,000 times giving an impressive Click-Through-Ratio of 0.63%. Browser, OS and country stats for surfers seeing ads served through the system can be found in this post at GameMaker Blog.

Until today there had been a recurring problem when members tried to upload banners to the service, however Tim (my host) has set up a cronjob which should rectify this issue.

The service does not show any sponsored ads on members sites, but allocates 0.9 credits to sites each time the show an advert, keeping back 10% of the potential credits. These credits can then be used to further advertise GameMaker Blog. In addition, when there are no available banners to serve, a banner promoting the service is shown.

I created the GMA both to help people who run Game Maker websites exchange relevant traffic and also to help spread awareness of GameMaker Blog. As such the service itself does not generate a profit.

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In the past month or so CassioburyPark.info has had around 230 page views, taken up none of my time, and has earned me £9 (~$17.90).

The site, providing basic information about Cassiobury Park in Watford, has not been promoted anywhere and does not rank highly in Google. In fact for a search of “cassiobury park”, cassioburypark.info is not even on the first page.

Despite poor Google rankings most of the traffic does originate there. However the vast majority is from specific search terms such as “cassiobury fun fair” and “history of cassiobury park” instead of people looking for general information about the park. In total 52 different search terms were used to find the site in this past month.

The money comes from matched (which is not a dating website!), an ad network that pays you £3/month per page (upto a max of pages 5 per site) for including an Google AdSense style text ad on your website.

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I only recently added Google’s excellent Analytics service to AidyBoothroyd.com, as the site was made before I registered for the excellent free service and had not been updated for months. Last week as well as adding Analytics to the site I also created an Aidy Boothroyd soundboard featuring some of his popular or stand-out phrases (love him or hate him).

I only showed the link to a few people, but somehow it was picked up by an Aidy Boothroyd facebook group and later found its way onto several Crystal Palace FC (who we play at the weekend) and general football forums. The huge spike in traffic started on April the 15th, reaching almost 400 visits on the 16th and now looks to be returning to normal. Viral growth most certainly, it was my most visited site on April 16th (excluding the Game Maker Affiliation Service ad network). If only I had a product to promote…

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