According to my dashboard at CMF Ads, in under 3 days CMF Spike sent it’s 50th visitor to my blog. Below is a chart of the traffic received from Spike. Considering it was Christmas Eve, a time traditionally dead for blogging, I consider these results quite promising. In addition to the 35 Spike visits, there were also 12 visits from the CMF forum. The biggest mystery (until I ask Ben) is why WordPress Stats only recorded 35 visits instead of the true 50. Obviously, the plugin won’t count my own visit, leaving a gap of 14.
| Date | Referrer | Views |
|---|---|---|
| 12-26 | cmfads.com/member/spikes | 4 |
| 12-25 | cmfads.com/member/spikes | 7 |
| 12-24 | cmfads.com/member/spikes | 16 |
| 12-23 | cmfads.com/member/spikes | 8 |
Now let’s take a look at how Google Analytics views CMF Spike traffic.
As you can see, I received exactly 50 visits. If Google doesn’t count my own visit, this still leave 11 Spikes unaccounted for. I am going to attribute this discrepancy to “Drop and Run” traffic or visitors who have an ad blocker installed. Since the Analytics code is in the footer, the entire page has to load before it counts the visit. So what if 11 people chose not to stay and read. 38 visitors from Spike spent an average time on my site of over 2 minutes. Their bounce rate was lower than my other traffic (mostly search engine) by 7%.
Bottom Line: The 50 visitors Spike sent from CMF Ads were mostly high quality. 64% of the traffic was considered “new”. The 12 additional visits from the forum made up for the 12 Spike drop and run visitors. A 12% surge in traffic over the Christmas holiday was well worth the $0.20 it cost me.
I often like to turn things upside down. I enjoy the spike-thingy as a reader. I get to discover active quality blogs!
And if its not new to me I’m sure theres something new to read.
I love the function.
Thanks for this analysis Turnip. I was wondering what the spike traffic would look like. This is very encouraging.
I think the most positive thing there is how long people are staying on the site. I myself am spending quite some time looking through all of these sites. It is driving me to CMF advertisers like never before which is a very big positive PASS in my books.
I’m also looking at a lot of sites I haven’t seen in a while. Sometimes the surprise is pleasant, other times I wonder what happened. I’m sorry, but blogs need content. I prefer seeing a photo of what someone ate for dinner last night in the Philippines (good content) 100x more than a list of last week’s “top droppers” (bad content). Those of you providing real content, keep up the good work! You will be rewarded in the end by quality readers and commenters.
Ahem… yes. I noticed one blogger put their old blog on Spikes which just has a page pointing to their new blog!
Hi Emm, any chance you could send the link to me please? Private message (via the forums) would be fine – thanks
8 spikes remaining…
It didn’t take long to go through 50 clicks – I’m already on round #2. And, best of all, I’ve made new connections.
Great to hear Theresa. We are also making changes on our end, adding a little more eye candy to the Spikes page, as well and discussing in detail exactly how to add advertisers Spikes.
You made a nice POSITIVE ROUND-UP as you are involved in CMF ADS
Can’t expect anything else.
Loosing Drop & Run traffic is bad and you can’t count this as a visit because we PAY for 50 visitors. If it’s not recorded i would say i paid 20 cents for less visitors than mentioned in the Dashboard.
In Adgitize visits are NOT GUARANTEED, so i can’t complain when i got on different days more or less visitors from Adgitize.
Here you are guaranteeing 50 visitors….
In my case 18 visitors haven’t been counted and with my second spikes which i bought just a few hours ago, it seems to get much more worse. From 10 counted clicks in CMF only 3 got recorded with an average time on the blog of 0 SECONDS (First spike – more than 90 seconds).
It seems i’m right in my observation that the clicks will be more for the $$ than for a real visit (there are always exceptions!).
Guess i have to make a third Spikes in one or two weeks, after one day it seems to be not worth.
You bring up some interesting points.
1. Someone who drops and runs is still a visitor. You could put your java analytic script in your header if you want to catch more of them. We really can’t control the length of time on a site without being intrusive. Just like we can’t control the qualtiy of a comment. We only guarantee they click the link directing them to your website. Some blogs have a stupid amount of widgets loading in their sidebar. Exactly how long should we give the page to load before we accuse someone of not waiting long enough?
2. The missing visitors could be because of ad blocking software. There may be a possible trick we can use to prevent them from bypassing your visitor javascript. If we made the outgoing links javascript, they wouldn’t see them if javascript wasn’t enabled.
3. Obviously the same people who liked to click spike links yesterday probably liked it just as much today. Your suggestion of spacing out spikes over a period of time seems a good one if that is your goal. On the other had, if your goal is to increase traffic to earn more from other ad networks, then your goals may be different.
I’ll discuss the drop and run issue with Ben to see what ideas he can come up with. We do have some security features in place already, but the system may need some new ones.
The spikes are great. There are so many blogs out there that no matter how many I want to visit it is impossible to view them all. By using a spike I’ll get new visitors to my site and by clicking on the spikes I’ll find new blogs.
Shiela, Glad you are giving us a try, as we respect your opinion on advertising. As an experiment, we blocked the spike page to those who have javascript disabled to see if that increases the number of sites analytics picks up.
I think initially many people are clicking spikes the same way they click on other ad networks. In other words “drop and run”. We are hoping our members slow down of their own volition. If not, we will continue tweaking the system. On the other hand, if someone buys Spikes daily without updating their post, they have to expect drop and run, as what else is there to do? I click Spikes as well, and if you have an article that caught my interest, I commented.
For those tracking such things, here are todays stats on my 2nd spike purchase. Compare the spike traffic to my normal search engine traffic. (Half this time reflects the new CMF Spike code to prevent javascript disabling). The only stat Spike doesn’t win hands down is new visitors, since it’s my 2nd Spike in 4 days.
23 Visits , % of Site Total: 7.59%
1.43 Pages/Visit vs. Site Avg: 1.25 (14.71%)
00:01:56 Avg. Time on Site vs. Site Avg: 00:00:46 (149.86%)
43.48% % New Visits vs Site Avg: 83.50% (-47.93%)
69.57% Bounce Rate vs. Site Avg: 86.14% (-19.24%)