Since the release of our Weather by W.a.R Google gadget a few weeks ago, we are spending a lot of time in Google Analytics learning as much as we can about...
- ...who's using it.
- ...how they are finding it.
- ...what they are doing with it.
- ...how we could draw even bigger crowds!
On any given day it's fun to dig around in Google Analytics for useful information about your web site traffic but when you throw a viral component into the mix (such as a Google gadget or Facebook plug-in) things can get exciting very quickly.
Based on past experience with Google gadgets we predicted that after a few days we would start to notice a slow but steady increase in traffic resulting from people adding our gadget to their iGoogle home pages. To determine the accuracy of our prediction we started looking for trends. If the number of unique visitors coming from a specific referer (in this case google.com) steadily increases over a period of time then the prediction holds true.
In this particular case, our prediction was wrong... very wrong. We didn't see much activity the first couple of days and then suddenly there was a traffic spike, not from google.com as we had predicted but from blogspot.com. It wasn't just one blogspot.com referral either. There were blogs popping up in our referer list left and right. In that first week alone our traffic jumped up 6,000% and we had roughly 70-80 blogs sending referals to our site on a daily basis.
Through a little research we found that our gadget had become popular very quickly when Google indexed our gadget on the first page (#4 of 123) for the search phrase "weather" in the Blogger gadgets archive.
So far Weather by W.a.R has been on a lucky streak, full of "right place, right time" coincidences. It's been quite a roller-coaster for us and we're grateful to have had such a positive response from the Google community.
To thank our users, we've already made several improvments to the gadget and have defined a timeline to add many more cool new features in the coming weeks and months.
More information, coming soon. Stay tuned!