How do you judge when Internet traffic in general is down?

What methods do you use?

[dataguy]

The past 2 days has caused a nearly 30% decrease in traffic to my web sites. I figure this weekend is a double-whammy with Easter and Tax day occurring at the same time in the U.S., so I was expecting traffic to be down.

Still, I've read that Google adjusted their search algo on April 11th and the decrease in traffic makes me a bit nervous. My sites are too large to do any kind of keyword analysis to see when they are improving or declining in the search engine ranks. I have a few 'hints' that I look at to see when Internet traffic is down as a whole in the U.S. but I'm sure there are more ways to figure this out than what I'm aware of.

What do you use to determine when Internet traffic is down as a whole?

[longen]

The [internettrafficreport.com ] Internet Traffic Report might point to problems in your area.

[dataguy]

I've played around with the Internet Traffic Report, but the numbers that it gives have never corresponded to any real traffic counts that I've seen. For instance, in their 24 hour North America graph there is virtually no difference in Internet traffic no matter what time of the day it is. Every web site I've ever monitored has a sizable difference between traffic during the day and traffic during the early morning hours.

I guess I don't understand what the traffic report represents, I just don't see any real correlation with my numbers. Maybe someone can explain why this is.

[fiu88]

We use our own data..logs, ppc impressions, referrals from steady known sources...and we talk to other peers to compare...
We have also noticed a slowdown the last week or so..

[dataguy]

We have a few custom reports that we run, but without being able to compare to anyone else, there's only so much we can no for sure.

We do notice that when traffic is down everywhere, eCPM on AdSense increases, but that is not a very reliable gauge.

[Broadway]

March was gang busters for me. Now here in April traffic has dropped off, so I've been concerned.

Like you I don't track keyword rankings. I know how some of my keywords rank but in general I too have too many keywords to keep track of.

I participate in Adsense. I have set each of my site's different topics up as individual Adsense channels. Each topic/channel corresponds to a group pages sharaing related keywords.

I ran my Adsense data for each topic, taking note of the number of Adsense page views that had taken place here in April as compared to the same time frame in March. Sure enough all of my individual channels showed a drop in traffic. Some 7%, others as much as 20%.

If just one channel had dropped in page views I would have assumed that my SERP rank had changed for a keyword. But since the decrease is across the board, and since I know at least some of my more dominant keywords have not changed position, I feel satisfied that my loss of traffic is just a seasonal thing all sites like mine must be experiencing.