Welcome to Part 2 of our Inbound Marketing Circle series! If you missed it, last week I wrote about the importance of integrating analyitcs into your inbound marketing stragtegy. I wanted to share a very interesting story that illustrates the points made in part one.
A few weeks ago, I was in the CommonPlaces office monitoring our analytics. As you can see, for the most part, our site traffic is very consistent. However, as you can see in the timeline, the big pop on November 5 stuck out like a sore thumb. For some reason, we saw a 400% increase in traffic in just 24 hours.
Our analytical software not only allowed us to see this pop in traffic, but it also allowed us to determine the exact source of most of the traffic. As you can see below, social media proved to be the biggest source for the day. Further investigation unconvered that a blog article that Ben wrote a few months ago, which was referenced in a major web development conference, was generating quite a buzz on Twitter. From there, we were able to engage our social media followers who had shared our article and interact with them. We also took advantage of the pop in traffic to generate more content that people could see while checking out the other trending article.
If nothing else, this story proves that blogging, analytics, and social media truly are interconnected. Occurrences like this happen every day on the Web. When you see trends like this, you can leverage the spike in traffic by creating more content and further engaging the visitors. Tell us how you leverage analytics in the comments below! Check back next week for Part 3 in our Inbound Marketing Circle series.