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I track my hits from www.google.com as kind of a measuring stick for all of my google.* traffic. Starting in February the traffic starting coming in waves. What I mean by that is that I graph each month and in February it started having it's peaks on Mondays and it's valleys a little later in the week. For example in February the days that are at the highest are 3rd, 10th, 17th and 24th.
Coincidentally in March the same days are Mondays and also the same days that are at the highest (3, 10, 17, 24).
Now this wasn't always true, if I go back to my stats for January they're flat as a board. They roughly hover at +/- 50 each day. By contrast in March it was more like +/- 300 depending on the day. That's a 600 hit difference on a Monday from say a Thursday.
Anyway, this is just something that's been irking me the last couple months. If it's going to be like this from now on then I'll live with it, but it just seems strange. Is anyone else tracking Google stats and noticing something similar? Worse yet, is it something I'm doing? :)
AL.
Is there a fresh tag for some of your pages in the SERPs on a peak day?
Truth be told I don't think I've ever seen a Fresh Tag for any of my pages. I probably couldn't even spot one ;) GoogleBot's scanning my pages right now though, and if I go search on Google none of my pages are marked Fresh. Including the index page which I'm sure has been spidered by now.
AL.
I get an increase mid-week as well. I think it's just that more people are netty mid-week.
I'm getting a decrease mid-week. It pretty much looks like this:
Monday: High Point
Tuesday: Significantly Down from Monday
Wednesday: Down from Tuesday
Thursday: Down from Wednesday
Friday: Slightly up from Thursday
Saturday: Slightly up from Friday
Sunday: Huge jump from Saturday
Monday: Big jump from Sunday
Or more specifically here's March 10-17:
10th: Starting Point ****
11th: -335
12th: -37
13th: -106
14th: +17
15th: +24
16th: +262
17th: +138 ****
**** represents Monday.
It repeats like this every week give or take a little. The war kind of messed it up a bit (traffic and sales were down the first few days), but for the most part it happens without fail the last 2 months. Any thoughts?
AL.
<edited>Changed Control to Starting Point to avoid confusion</edited>
[edited by: ALbino at 7:35 pm (utc) on April 5, 2003]
Traffic patterns obviously will vary according to the type of site. (If I had a site devoted to college football, I'd probably get a lot more traffic on weekends than I do.)
As europeforvisitors said, this pattern varies for different sites.
My traffic is highest during the week and starts to drop on Friday. Then way down on the weekend - until Sunday night when it starts back up again.
I didn't notice the pattern as much when my site was new.
Beth
[edited by: rfgdxm1 at 1:14 am (utc) on April 6, 2003]
If Wednesday = n
Sunday = n - 20%
Monday = n - 10%
Tuesday = n - 5%
Wednesday = n
Thursday = n - 10%
Friday = n - 25%
Saturday = n - 50%
This has been fairly consistent for a couple of years except during February. I didn't pay that much attention to it back in 1993-2000.
One exception to this is AOL traffic. I have always had more traffic on the weekends from AOL. My evaluation of this glitch in the pattern is that on the Weekends people are surfing from their home computers where AOL is more widely installed than at work.
If you sell wholesale/industrial items or services, you will probably see spikes during the working week as people surf at work. If you are in the porn industry, I'm betting they don't use their work computers :)
The worlds highest traffic adult site (averages over a million uniques a day) is monday as well - his stats are public - as well as many other adult sites if you want to look at them...
quotations: what is the demographics of your site users?
With commercial sites, this may depend a lot on what the demographics of your users are. If you are selling more upscale products, or others that people who work in offices with Internet connected computers tend to buy, this may be true. However, if your product is aimed more at Joe blue collar surfing the Net, I'd expect it to be different.
Monday is the highest for google searches
notice all countries except the US were higher on monday (tuesday is very close)
I suspect monday is higher as well in the US - except that there is thanksgiving in the US and may have screwed things up for holidays and such...
now havent checked traffic stats but going by sales when I say this.
Last spring, my European travel site's busiest traffic days were Monday through Wednesday, but most of my record affiliate-sales days were on weekends. I took this to mean that people were researching their vacations at work but waiting until the weekend to make final decisions and bookings (possibly in consultation with a spouse or partner).
It's been harder to discern a sales pattern this spring because the Iraq war, airline problems, and the SARS scare are new (and unwelcome) variables. But the traffic pattern hasn't changed: I usually get my highest traffic from Monday through Wednesday, which has been the pattern on all my sites for more than seven years.
The big problem with that Google Zeitgeist data is that there is no way of knowing what the people were searching about. For example, while the boss won't mind you searching Google on work related matters, he may not approve of you shopping online for yourself while at work. Thus, those high weekday numbers might reflect largely work-related searching.
That is true of course - but it is better than nothing :)
I suspect some of it also comes from people that don't have the internet at home on the weekend using their work computer.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Sunday
Saturday
It's been pretty consistent that way for over 2 years.
Yesterday hits particularly low.
Day the war began - all time high
but then I have anti-war site!
Grace
