Watch how I build an internet empire from scratch!

I thought I would share some traffic stats for Countdown To Win to show you a little of what I am learning and how it is effecting my internet ventures. These traffic statistics are all from google analytics (which is amazing by the way). I still have not officially launched Countdown To Win because there ended up being some problems with the script that automatically draws the winner. I ended up getting all the problems fixed but then I decided to move the site over to Joomla platform.

I started telling people about Countdown To Win and letting them actually sign up around the beginning of January 2010 about January 5th or so. The first giveaway was on the 7th and I ran it as a one day giveaway. That means I started it and ended it in one day. This definitely didn't give me a lot of time to promote the site as the giveaway was ending in just a few hours after I started it. So I hit facebook hard and also pushed all my friends and family to promote this giveaway. Below you can see the stats from January 5th to the 8th just so you can see the effect and what happened.

After seeing these stats I was pretty happy with what happened after only 3 days. Ok I was really excited! I like the fact that the average time on the site was 12 minutes also. This is really my first site that I have made that is seeing any kind of traffic so I really have nothing to compare these numbers to so at this point they are really exciting to me. I made sure that I set up a custom filter in google analytics to block my IP address so it doesn't show me in these stats. The next giveaway was on the 15th. More people signed up to the site and by that time I think there were almost 50 members (from word of mouth). I don't think I promoted this one as hard as the first giveaway because I figured that everyone that was a member would just come back and participate in this giveaway. I was completely wrong! It turns out people actually have lives and some of these members were busy doing something else and couldn't log on. Or maybe they just forgot about it. I learned a lot from that 2nd giveaway because there was less traffic than the first but I had more members. Here is the graph from Jan 5th to Jan 15th. I always like to show a day after the givaway to show how traffic drops off the next day.

So instead of 77 visitors like the first giveaway there were only 35 on the second giveaway day. This showed me that I can't just stop promoting (not yet anyway, maybe never). You can see the good and bad changes in these statistics and make your own assumptions as to why it happened. I am still learning all of this but I think it is pretty clear what happened and why. The next graph shows the third giveaway traffic levels and I really like what I'm seeing here. After looking at these stats I couldn't help but be really excited about the future of Countdown To Win.

You can see what is happening in this graph. There was a lot of promotion going on here and the big spike in traffic is actually the day before the giveaway. There were 246 visitors that day. The next dot is the actual day of the giveaway. There were quite a few people that signed up on the day before the giveaway but most of them didn't even log on the day of the giveaway. That was really interesting to me. Why would you go through the trouble to sign up to a website and not log on the day that a prize is being given away? I don't even know what to think about that. Maybe I didn't remind them on the day of the giveaway that it was ending that day. Maybe people really need to be reminded by email a lot. Aweber is great for this, however I don't want to spam people with too many emails. So I continue to think about these stats and exactly what they mean. As you can see traffic drops off significantly after a giveaway. My answer to that: run a giveaway everyday!

There were a few problems with the last (the third) giveaway. There were bugs in the script that sent winning emails to a few people and there were actually a few complaints about this (most from close friends which I couldn't believe lol). So I had to stop running the giveaways and work on the site. I have since fixed the bugs and everything is working fine, however I decided to switch platforms and start runnning the site on Joomla so I have not had another giveaway since the third. The new site is not quite ready. Here you can see what has happened (not surprised at all though).

As I have said there is no surprise here. I have been focusing on building the new site and have not been promoting whatsoever. The new site is almost done and there are so many features. There will also be a giveaway a day. I expect to see big things when the new site launches and I will definitely post new traffic stats. I can see from just running these three giveaways that things will be huge and I am really excited to show you. If you want to get on board and sponsor a giveaway find out here. If you want to be updated when I write new posts just sign up on the left there. I won't send you an email for every post I write but definitely for the ones that I think you will enjoy. What do you think of these stats? Please tell me by commenting below.