freeg131: Philip Gamble

Topical blog posts quite obviously result in increased traffic, particularly from Google. Take for example my article entitled Lewis Hamilton Robbed of Victory. I had a comment from someone called Dave, I don’t know anyone called Dave, so I googled the article title and found I was the top result. (This is no longer the case as mainstream media and Google News have now taken the top 3 spots). The Lewis post is the second most viewed here this month, behind a topical Olympics post.

Over on GameMaker Blog the discovery of Malware on the official community forum lead to a 50% increase in daily visits, pageviews and uniques to the site.  At one stage I even set up an f1fanatic style live blog - although mostly just to play around with it - this is the first breaking GM news in years.

So, I have decided, at some point I will set up a blog with the sole intention of getting traffic from google on current affairs and topical news stories.

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Every couple of months I make a post outlining monthly traffic levels to my multiple websites so I can see how things have changed - for me this is interesting as I do not often look at the traffic levels of my smaller sites.

There have been a few changes to the sites included - GameMaker.tv has gone, and GameMaker8.com and MyGMGame.com have been added.

Game Maker Affiliation Service
Unique visitors: 9,204
Pageviews: 72,320

GameMaker Blog (blog only, NOT gma)
Unique visitors: 2,809
Pageviews: 7,070
Still quite a bit of month on month variation.

Stencyl
Unique visitors: 404
Pageviews: 765
Remaining fairly constant and I am not surprised given there has been no public progress of Stencyl. Once Stencyl is released I am hoping to get more traffic both from type-ins and searches.

freeg131
Unique Visitors: 297
Pageviews: 460
Up quite a bit which is pretty amazing, have also actually had - heaven forbid - some comments!

Cassiobury Park
Unique visitors: 263
Pageviews: 1,072
Still growing. Has quite a few topical search terms - e.g. for the motor show, funfair etc. Very few links in, but one from an Audi dealer that was at the motor show.

MyGM Game
Unique visitors: 253
Pageviews: 660
Have hardly done any work to this free file hosting website.

GameMaker 8
Unique visitors: 237
Pageviews: 255
What a traffic grab! The domain only cost me $4 thanks to a tip-off from Robin Monks. The site simply features an RSS feed on posts from GMB, and 3 small ProjectWonderful adverts. To be fair I did modify the minimal textual content at the top of the page to try and tap into some more traffic - and it worked!

Aidy Boothroyd
Unique visitors: 67
Pageviews: 184
Down from 2 months ago - traffic obviously peaked long ago, unless of course the site gets picked up at another forum or football website.

GameMaker Stream
Unique visitors: 10
Pageviews: 26
Domain expires soon and I will let it die.

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Does blogging about real-world news and events mean extra traffic? Apparently so.

Looking at my traffic stats for freeg131, the most popular page is the one about the most successful olympic nation per capita - 6 of the top 10 search terms used to find this site where people looking for this information.

Also bringing in traffic are searches regarding Ian Oakley (story summed up here), other Olympic queries and a recent MasterCard advert.

As far as getting web traffic content certainly is king, if you build it they will come (etc etc).  However I don’t think it is worth writing numerous current affairs posts per day in the hope of grabbing more traffic - especially not here on my personal blog.

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After seeing that a couple of sites have received higher than anticipated traffic levels in recent days I decided I should make another monthly stats post (April 2008 stats).

GameMaker Blog (blog only, NOT gma)
Unique visitors: 2,809
Pageviews: 7,070
14 posts in June compared to 27 in April. Pageviews are down quite a bit, but uniques are up slightly.

Stencyl
Unique visitors: 400
Pageviews: 774
Time spent on maintaining site remains as none, but traffic has increased again. When Stencyl is released I expect there will be a big rise in traffic.

Cassiobury Park
Unique visitors: 208
Pageviews: 753
The June redesign has lead to a significant increase in traffic levels and has seen the site move in 2 months from my sixth most popular site to the third most popular. Brings in £9 a month with an occasional 2 minute update about once a month.

Aidy Boothroyd
Unique visitors: 179
Pageviews: 393
Traffic down considerably (as can be expected), but the majority still coming from the BBC

GameMaker.tv
Unique visitors: 124
Pageviews: 202
Expensive domain. No income.

freeg131
Unique Visitors: 112
Pageviews: 263
Traffic down quite a bit

GameMaker Stream
Unique visitors: 31
Pageviews: 48
Can’t make any income from this site because of Creative Commons licences used on the content. Labour intensive to add content so this will just site here. Need to see if it is worth renewing when the time comes.

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: 6,796
Pageviews: 60,219

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I was recently asked by one of my computing teachers if I knew somewhere were you could see how popular a particular website was. I recommended Alexa, easily manipulated, but probably the most widely known about site providing estimates of traffic stats.

Obviously the different traffic estimation sites use different techniques to calculate traffic data for websites, so some variation in their results should be expected.

Here is a quick look at the popularity of what is, under normal circumstances, my most popular site - GameMaker Blog.

Alexa - #438,208, however the week average is higher at 332,014.

Compete.com estimates the number of unique visitors to a domain per month. For April their figure for GameMaker Blog is 658. This figure is far too low. Even if we are just counting visitors to the blog itself, the figure should be closer to 3,000 and that is excluding the much larger number of people who see the site through the GameMaker Affiliation Service.

Quantcast is a site I found relatively recently a couple of months ago. Unlike the other sites Quantcast provides much more detailed information about visitors to particular websites, based on the number of monthly US unique visitors. They give GameMaker Blog, at the time of writing, a rank of 622,506.

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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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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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