Why did I get a massive spike in visitors and views?

  • Unknown's avatar
    astronomywriter · Member ·

    Hello,

    So normally my little astronomy blog (https://theastronomicalyear.wordpress.com/) gets about 100 views daily – maybe 150 ish on a good day. Yesterday, however, was crazy and it all came from Facebook.

    Everything was normal until about 10 pm PDT when I checked my stats and noticed that I’d had something like 2,000 views and they *all* came from Facebook. I have my posts in about four or five astronomy groups there, but it’s never been anything this crazy. I swear it was going up by about 4 or 5 views every second and the majority of the traffic was going to my home page or to the post for March 23rd.

    The final tally for yesterday was 3,562 views from 1,715 visitors. Today, so far, it’s 286 views from 131 visitors so it’s about twice as high as normal.

    First of all, how do I know if these hits are genuine? I have no idea where on Facebook they’re coming from. Secondly, if they’re not genuine, is there any way to determine how many are fake and to deduct these from my stats?

    Thanks,

    Richard

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there. Considering the eclipse last week it’s very possible that one of your posts went viral on Facebook, though as you’re also active there you would probably have noticed that. I assume you didn’t see a relative increase in likes, shares, follows and comments as well? I do notice the Facebook sharing button on the March 23 post shows over 700 shares, though I confess I don’t know why so many people would be sharing that particular post.

    I don’t know if there’s any way to verify if these views and shares did really happen, but I’ll tag this for staff to follow up in case they have a way to verify anomalies like this. Please subscribe to the thread so you are notified when they respond and be patient while waiting.

  • Unknown's avatar
    astronomywriter · Member ·

    Thanks for the response – you’re right, I was expecting a bump with the solar eclipse but that didn’t happen. The post with the massive spike was for March 23rd, some three days later.

    I got a few more follows but nothing spectacular. Also, typically, my book sales go up slightly when I get a good day and with 30x more visitors you’d think I got a few more sales, but no…

    I didn’t think to check the number of shares for that post, but you’re right, there wasn’t anything remarkable that made it worth sharing 700 times. And I don’t know if the visitors were due to the shares or if the shares were as a result of the visitors (I suspect the latter.)

    I don’t know where on Facebook the visitors were coming from either. If I could find that out, I’d make sure to post there more often…

    BTW, the views for the 24th were still very high compared to regular days. I had 348, which would have been a new record on any other day. My post for the 25th has been far more typical – 145 so far.

    So, I still have no idea what really caused it…

  • Unknown's avatar
    lizthefair · Member ·

    I don’t have a specific answer for you except that the internet is a funny place.

    My best guess is someone shared your post on their private Facebook page and it exploded from there.

    I do think it was real traffic, but it’s not the sort of thing you can replicate just by posting in the exact same place again.

  • Unknown's avatar
    astronomywriter · Member ·

    Thanks Liz

    Yeah, I can’t explain it, but it would be nice to replicate it LOL I don’t know who has that many followers that they’d be clicking the link that often, but there you go…

  • Unknown's avatar
    auxclass · Member ·

    I have never got a spike like yours, but one of my articles on visiting Canada with your boat was shared with a boating group and I had about 40 page views to that article in 3 days, normally 3 page views or so per day – – I have also seen someone sharing with their Facebook friends and had spikes of 20 to 50 page views in a few days – – – so the spikes do happen – just a normal internet thing

  • Unknown's avatar
    astronomywriter · Member ·

    Right… but I had about 200 every *minute* (it was literally 4 or 5 every second or so.)

    I’m still not 100% convinced it was all legit. A run-of-the-mill, ordinary page was shared on Facebook 748 times. As a result, I got about 3,500 extra page views – so about 5 views from each share.

    Where was the page shared on Facebook? It can’t have been a single user legitimately sharing the post 748 times on 748 separate pages…

    …and we all know that if we share a post on Facebook with 100 friends, probably only one or two will actually click on the link…

    I know, let it go, but it’s still a mystery to me LOL Like the alien “oh wow” signal of 1977, it was there and then it was gone again, without any explanation LOL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal)

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