For The Love Of Ice Cream - With Yahoo!
My passion for ice cream goes way beyond just making ice cream, creating ice cream recipes and updating my ice cream website .... I love to study visitor statistics to the website and understand who is looking for what, where from, how and why. It is an amazing thing to have an insight into the minds of people on a given subject - in this case ICE CREAM.
Having study my Google Analytics reports for several years, I am familiar with quite a depth in level of data - where the visitors come from, in what numbers, which main keywords they use, the most popular content and the most popular sources of traffic (search engines, referring sites etc).
One statistic that has been consistent for a long time now is that Google is the most important search engine to provide traffic to my site; day after day after day, Google outscores all the other search engines by a LONG way. There has not been a single day in the last 4 years where another search engine has outscored Google with traffic to my website .... until recently.
On 28 July I had a 'double take' when I looked at the stats. There was something I had never seen before nor had I expected to see.
Yahoo! sent a whopping 28,000 visitors in 24 hours! That's 4.5 times MORE visitors than Google usually provides daily at this time of year. What's more, it didn't cost me a penny!
How come? Well, because I spotted this massive traffic boost on the actual day whilst it was happening, I was able to do a little 'live' digging and, yes, I found out how and why Yahoo! had done this.
I went to http://www.yahoo.com/ and there staring me in the face was 'Trending Now' .... a small list of keywords that, according to Yahoo!, were the most popular that day. At number 3 was 'ice cream recipes'. So I clicked on the link and it sent me to the Yahoo! results page for that keyword search. At number 1 was my site - bingo! I had found the answer to the puzzle. Quite simply, people using Yahoo! that day were just intrigued as to why ice cream recipes would be popular and, assuming it might be some interesting news item, they click through and visited the first site listed - mine! So there you have it ... simple and honest curiosity was the key - and what's important, it was from people who perhaps never normally think about ice cream recipes.
So if anyone tells you not to take Yahoo! seriously in your Internet marketing strategy, stop and think again. You now know better. Thank you Yahoo!
Having study my Google Analytics reports for several years, I am familiar with quite a depth in level of data - where the visitors come from, in what numbers, which main keywords they use, the most popular content and the most popular sources of traffic (search engines, referring sites etc).
One statistic that has been consistent for a long time now is that Google is the most important search engine to provide traffic to my site; day after day after day, Google outscores all the other search engines by a LONG way. There has not been a single day in the last 4 years where another search engine has outscored Google with traffic to my website .... until recently.
On 28 July I had a 'double take' when I looked at the stats. There was something I had never seen before nor had I expected to see.
Yahoo! sent a whopping 28,000 visitors in 24 hours! That's 4.5 times MORE visitors than Google usually provides daily at this time of year. What's more, it didn't cost me a penny!
How come? Well, because I spotted this massive traffic boost on the actual day whilst it was happening, I was able to do a little 'live' digging and, yes, I found out how and why Yahoo! had done this.
I went to http://www.yahoo.com/ and there staring me in the face was 'Trending Now' .... a small list of keywords that, according to Yahoo!, were the most popular that day. At number 3 was 'ice cream recipes'. So I clicked on the link and it sent me to the Yahoo! results page for that keyword search. At number 1 was my site - bingo! I had found the answer to the puzzle. Quite simply, people using Yahoo! that day were just intrigued as to why ice cream recipes would be popular and, assuming it might be some interesting news item, they click through and visited the first site listed - mine! So there you have it ... simple and honest curiosity was the key - and what's important, it was from people who perhaps never normally think about ice cream recipes.
So if anyone tells you not to take Yahoo! seriously in your Internet marketing strategy, stop and think again. You now know better. Thank you Yahoo!
Labels: analytics, ice cream making, internet marketing, yahoo
posted by Shelagh at
12:19 PM
