Now get this…something REALLY strange happened to my website yesterday. When I first started my site I tried out some paid traffic but I’ve since stopped that. All of my visits come from purely organic searches and referral sites. I’ve even paused my Google CPC account to save some money. When I was using the paid traffic I was getting about 3k visits a day. Once I stopped it, I was getting anywhere from 50-200 visits a day and I’d been averaging about 40-60 daily hits from google organic searches. I got to work this morning and turned on my computer to check me email and noticed that I had over ten new users registered to the forum which is a lot more than my average of a new user every couple of days. So I went to my website and saw that at that moment there were over 250 users (mostly guests on the site) and that at the peak, there were was 458 users on at one time yesterday… So I go to my google analytics to see what’s up and find that I had over 35K visitors yesterday and as of 11:30 this morning had already had over 11k visitors. Yesterday, I had over 28K visits from a social networking site (reddit.com) which is kind of like a digg.com. but all my referring sites were way up…for example, I’d usually get 3-5 referrals from stumble upon, yet I had 1,266 referrals sent yesterday…I usually have between 10-25 referring sites and yesterday I got traffic from 103 sites…I assure you this was for only June 14th not the last 30 days or anything… These are daily figures because there are a few checks to make sure that aren’t google related. For instance, if you click the button near the bottom of the site that says “geo visitors†just a bit under my alexa banner, if shows a global map and where the visits come from…the map was loaded with visits. I’ve even confirmed the increased traffic with alexa (my 7 day average traffic dropped down a few thousand just due to this one day) and I’ve checked with my hosting company Go Daddy…. COMPLETELY BIZZARE….and of course, my google adsense is way up because of the increase in traffic….for the past 3-4 months I had been averaging between $20-$30 per month in adsense income. Yesterday I hit $3.14 which comes to $94 projected for a 30 day period… What in the world would make so much traffic come from so many different sources overnight….?!?!?!?!?
Actually its well known fact that traffic from social networking sites like reddit and digg does not bring a lot of "genuine interested visitors" and provides very little CTR. I personally feel organic traffic from search engine brings more CTR.
It's not that strange. It's forum. The CTR on almost every forum sucks. When was the last time you clicked the banner on the top of this place?
Perhaps people are sticking around to read his content and not interested in clicking an ad? Adsense is all fine and good but you are getting a few pennies to have someone Leave your site. Doesn't make much sense to have someone come and then leave right away. What is your topic? Is it something related to Iran elections or could be mistaken for this? How long are people sticking around? What is your bounce rate via Analytics?