Monthly Boosts Behavior (Or Losses) and User Metric Signal

[frankleeceo]

After having a couple of sites, I have noticed that my new sites usually receive monthly traffic boosts around the beginning of the month.

What usually happens is that the site would receive steady set amount of daily traffic for about a month, then receive a 10%~20% boost at the turn of the new month.

The time of boost is usually between the 25th to the 4th.

Please note that the only "manual" link building that I do is from my existing related sites for content discovery purposes only. So the sites receives no manual link work from me after that first month.

Could this be an effect or related to Google using user metrics to give sites additional traffic and exposure? This is given the assumption that I did very little link building. Or could it be that the "link" is "gradually" flowing the trust to the new site? Instead of google ranking it higher based on user signals.

Have others noticed similar effects with their new launches? Where the traffic is more or less intentionally throttled at a level and then receive boosts later after a given amount of real visitors reflected their usage on the content.

Note: This can also have reverse effects on "existing" site complain of gradually losing traffic. As new sites gain traffic, existing sites must lose traffic at around that same time. Around what time of the month do people generally experience jump in lost traffic?

I guess what I am really trying to get is...Is our time better spent to work on building more manual links? Or to create better content which generates better usage signal..? What are your experiences?

[aakk9999]

What usually happens is that the site would receive steady set amount of daily traffic for about a month, then receive a 10%~20% boost at the turn of the new month.

Are you saying this is one-off (the first month after a new site is live) or this traffic boost happens with a new site subsequent months too?

What amount of traffic are we talking about? Smaller numbers can be misleading and easily skewed.

[mihomes]

I have noticed this as well. Some of my older sites of 5+ years or more which have been hit hard by the new algo changes suddenly get sales right at the end of the month and a few days into the new one. I assumed this had something to do with the algo and updates being applied. For example, for a few days the site is listed high where it 'should' be then the algo kicks in and it is dropped due to something being triggered. Just a guess of course.

I spent some time trying to find out if this was due to something else (a social network post I made, someone linking me in an article, etc.), but could not correlate anything to it.

This has happened to me the last two months. It will be interesting to see if it happens here in another week or so.

[muzza64]

Sounds like natural human behaviour around pay day and something that has become more exaggerated on my ecommerce site since the recession began.

[mihomes]

frankleeceo... I am starting to see the same trend starting again over the last few days. It is too early to tell if it will continue on through the end and into November, but it does look like its happening again. How about you?

[frankleeceo]

@ak

It happens subsequent months for about 3~4 times. The number is something like 800 average daily visit, jump to 1000, then to 1300, then to 1500, then 2000. The "jump" always happens in a span of 2~5 days. For example...800 -> 900 -> 1000 then stay there for the rest of the month. Something in those range, and all in a nice even monthly intervals. Significant enough not to be daily variation. All the jumps all happen during the time frame that I described. Are these numbers significant enough?

Note: One of the site that showed this trend took a dive after the 5th month which is 2000. Got hit back to 1000. Will wait another month to see if it recovers. My guess is that some other sites took my position on the SERP. So will see what happens during the 6th month.

@muzza:

It could be human behavior or not. My sites are purely informational and have no ecommerce component. If really want to argue, people work harder during the begin of month, and work less to be on computer more towards the end when they are about to receive the paycheck. But that's a hard stretch. It's not a sin wave, it's a step graph trending up.

But the trend that I am describing is that the sites receive a lasting daily average boost continuously after a certain period of "test" on Google's part. Not about money value, but more towards the line of raw traffic and visits allowed by Google SERP exposure.

@mihomes:
I think what you are describing more or less matches the normal visitor's buying intent timing. But what I observe is raw traffic counts. But it could also be that Google does assign you different kinds of traffic during the time you experience better sales.

It's not starting yet for the majority of my sites. I do know that one site that I described took a 60% traffic visit hit around oct 21st, while the rest are holding the traffic steady.

Btw: I don't observe what I describe across all my sites, but rather only the sites that have "potential" and feels like to be intentionally capped. (intentionally capped by Algorithm). Some sites that have reached the potential value do not really grow like this step up graph.

But I think it's worth mentioning after I observed it happening 2~3 times with different launches. Some launches show a nice diagonal trending up traffic graph, but it's weird that some would show the "step up" that I describe.

Again, after thinking about it...It could always be that all of my visitors continue to visit my site after finding it on Google's SERP. But the timing of the "jump" is too coincidental.

[mihomes]

There is no way this is normal buying behavior from visitors. In 13 years I have never seen this behavior on these sites or any of mine for that matter. Certain times of the year, holidays, 9/11, etc yes behavior changed, but nothing like this and not during the same time window.