

Ask HN: Baseline for web traffic? - rgbrgb

I&#x27;m looking at traffic to my company&#x27;s site and trying to figure out what&#x27;s causing spikes and dips. I&#x27;m sure many of you are doing the same thing.<p>The holiday season is especially noisy. There&#x27;s a huge dip on Christmas day, a huge spike right before, etc. My guess is that the baseline internet traffic for North America is very noisy right now.<p>What seems dumb is that I&#x27;m making guesses about what&#x27;s causing these spikes and dips with little knowledge of the overall traffic environment. For instance, perhaps everyone&#x27;s traffic spiked a bit on Dec 29th and 30th and it had nothing to do with the email blast we sent out.<p>Does anyone know of a good tool or at least a data set I could use to help me tease out the signal in all of this noise?<p>Thanks!
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dangrossman
> perhaps everyone's traffic spiked a bit on Dec 29th and 30th and it had
> nothing to do with the email blast we sent out

You don't need any external knowledge to resolve questions like that. You only
need to tag the links in all your marketing campaigns, including "email
blasts", so that you can identify the traffic from those campaigns in your web
stats reports. To know whether a spike was caused by the e-mails or not, you
just look at how many visits came from that campaign on the 29th/30th.
Whatever analytics platform you choose should make it easy to see how many
visits each traffic source is bringing you each day, so you can answer these
questions you have about the causes of spikes and dips.

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iurisilvio
This way you only understand your spikes. Why I have a dip on Christmas? I did
something wrong or it is just how internet works?

I have the same problem with a website with 98% search traffic. I don't know
if Google changed something or if my traffic will go back to normal in next
few days.

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MichaelCrawford
Have a look at Google Trends:
[http://www.google.com/trends](http://www.google.com/trends)

I wrote an article on legal music downloads a while back. It used to get a
huge spike every Christmas, because so many people get music players then, so
they want some music to download.

There are some search terms that are seasonal, like "turkey stuffing recipes",
or otherwise periodic like "friday".

Analyze your own web server logs to see what search queries your visitors use
to find your site, then put some of those queries into Google trends.

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mateo411
You should look at a RUM(Real User Monitoring) solution. It involves putting a
javascript tag on your web page, and it captures your end users load times,
and usually their location.

