This is what Digg Traffic Looks Like

egon — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 19:51:32 +0000

One of my sites got on the front page of Digg a couple weeks ago, and I was interested to see the final results on this. Finally everything seems to have evened out again, and with some decent (and interesting) results. There were actually a few surprising results according to my analytics software. I might go over some more details in a different post, but here’s a brief run-down of some of the results that had an impact:

RSS readers increased from 650-ish to around 830 on average
Within a few hours of hitting the front page, Digg users consumed almost 24 GB of bandwidth
The story hit front page around 7PM, and traffic was higher the next day. I attribute this to the links back and distribution of the link throughout Digg
AdSense earnings increased 250% for about 3 days and have slowly dwindled back to normal, or slightly higher
Total Digg visitors for those few days: 34,186
Alexa rank didn’t increase very much, possibly due to the fact that not many Digg users actually use the Alexa toolbar.
The rumor about Digg users having a short attention span is mostly true:
- Digg user’s Average Time on site: 35 seconds – Normal users: 51 seconds (31.16% difference)
- Digg user’s pages per visit: 1.26 pages – Normal users: 1.57 pages (19.57% difference)
- Digg user’s Bounce Rate: 87.28% – Normal users: 78.28% (11.5% difference) – Bounces are when the visitor leaves from the same page they entered (only viewed the one page)

Traffic Graph:

The initial traffic spike on the above graph was when the article made the home page, in the evening around 7PM. This graph is for total traffic. The next day, the traffic increased, but the amount of Digg traffic was actually equal to the day before. The increase was from links back from other sites. The traffic in total quickly dwindled, but has settled at a point higher than it was before, which is very good.

So what are the long-lasting benefits? Well, I got almost 200 more RSS readers (no email subscription offered, regrettably,) and I’ve noticed traffic is still higher than it was before. The links back from other reputable sources is great, but the effect that has on PageRank is questionable since Google’s last PR update. Revenue spiked during the few days it was popular (not proportionally though,) and has settled to a point slightly higher than it was before.

If you have a server that can handle it, it’s a great thing to happen. I use MediaTemple Grid-Service hosting, and the page didn’t even slow down during the Digg frenzy. That’s impressive. As great as that is, MediaTemple has been down and slow a lot recently, so I can’t fully recommend their service, but it seems to have handled a Digg better than other shared hosting would have.

Has anybody else been Dugg and had similar or different results? Please share.

Egonitron » Social Networking

This is what Digg Traffic Looks Like