Saturday probably isn't the best day to be selected for cool site of the day, so my experience will probably be a little bit on the low side. I use urchin stats. My end of day is different than CSOTD's, so there is a little bit of an off shift. My site is pretty low traffic at this point, so I think my numbers are relatively accurate. Today, I saw about 600 more sessions than normal. Strangely, I saw 1400 higher page views than normal as well - meaning that people were actually clicking through the site. Under referrals, I see 580 referrals from CSOTD, but 94 Non-referrals, and that number is usually really low - so I think 600+ visitors is probably pretty accurate. Adsense shows me with about 2300 more impressions than normal. I'm not sure why there's such a large discrepancy between adsense and urchin and frankly I'm not sure which one to trust. I would think adsense is more accurate since they have more to lose if the stats are wrong, but still it's a pretty significant difference. CTR was cut by a third, but my ad placement changed a little for the worse yesterday. Today, I have a PR6 link with only 9 other offsite links on the page. A link will be added each day of the month, and from there, it looks like the page will be PR0 until a PR update and then it will be a PR4 link. Overall, I think the $27 was worth it just for the link. My site earned a score of 6.080, which will put it probably in the top 10 for the month of October - so residual traffic will exist although I have no idea what that will be. If you calculate in the extra adsense revenue I picked up, it was definitely worth it. Thanks to yfs1 for the idea, and thanks to all you guys for helping out with my ranking. It took them a little over 10 days to review my site - but there were weekends and holidays in there as well. Once selected, it was about 4 weeks before my site was the Cool Site of the Day - which gave me good lead time to prepare for it. It looks like they make the shift to the new site at 10:00 Pacific, but I could be wrong. Looking through the archive, it seems that non-profit sites perform better. Next time I think I'll direct it at a specific page with a free utility or something like that rather than at the home page.
I'm not bragging. I thought I'd share my experience with others here so that they can decide whether or not to submit their sites in the future. Most of my posts were about this yesterday, but mainly because it was the thing on my mind, and trolling for a little bit of support from members here kept my ranking above the 6 mark, which I think will have it in the top 10 for the month. I don't think that coolsiteoftheday is any sort of holy grail, but IMO it's worth submitting your site for review.
I submitted www.coolest-gadgets.com shortly after seeing your original thread (thanks for that). I got the email yesterday to say I've been accepted and will be the CSOD on November 3rd, so I''l be starting a voting campaign too around that time
Forget IamNed - He has mental issues Thanks for the report. You will actually see residual visits for about 30 days. The thing with us was our site was picked up by probably the biggest computer related radio show in the US. They found us through the Cool Site link. Although our added traffic was good from Cool Site, the radio show brought us something like 500,000 uniques over a few weeks. As far as the $27, if you think your site is cool, it is definately worth it Nice Jobs Steven!
I am sure IamNed is going to have a fit with another post but I just looked at my stats. My cool site feature was in April and in the last month I have gotten 52 uniques from their archive link. The month before I had 40 uniques This tells me it has settled at that monthly rate
lol at Iamned! He is obviously now just trying to get a rise out of people. Ah well, there are irritating things in this World all around us. Really interesting stats nevets. I'm sure many more DP users will be trying the cool site of the day out and many more DP users will be trying to affect each others rating
I am hoping Roman1 gives a full report along with DCT They both have very different sites so it will be interesting to see how it plays out
I agree that the link in itself is worth the $27. If you combine that with the adsense income for the day, plus the traffic the link gives after that then I'd say it's a bargain.