A statistical panic attack.

(WORLD) April played a nasty trick on my brain. The stats show a massive dip in traffic, enough to scare me and starting hacking through calendars, code and past conversations to figure what on earth could have happened to effect the site statistics so dramatically. What had I done or not done? Was the site broke? Did I place some code online that made the site inaccessible? Had the world discovered something crazy about MediaSnackers, that meant we were not flavour of the month?

Something happened. I just needed to figure it out.

Tracking through the stats, I’m looking for patterns. April looks OK, just like March, nothing changed, if anything it went better than normal—with the DeviantArt podcast racking up a bunch of hits, Sir Ken Robinsons Podcast was still driving traffic our way, and the click throughs from Twitter were still happening like viral clockwork. However everything had taken a dive. It’s as if, everyone, everywhere changed.

Then it clicked.

The Easter holidays happened.

I’m not a newbie at this web development lark, so I shouldn’t have been caught out like this but I guess, when you’re continually looking at something, you can easily miss the obvious. One of the biggest shifts in user activity on any website, in any industry, that no tracking software can pinpoint, is a change in offline activity, in other words: human behaviour. I’m talking holidays. When the sun comes out and when the kids break up from school—these are almost impossible to trace statistically. Unlike when a popular media figure dies, where you can follow the links back to news sites, when the sun shines, there’s no linkback to traffic. People suddenly stop using their computers and, well, go outside.

So if you like me are scratching your head and wondering what ‘went wrong’, forget it… think about what went right, we all stopped staring at our screens for a week or so. We went outside.

Its that simple. *phew

Related post : Real Life Has More Bandwidth

Author: mark - 07/05/09