I’ve not seen any stats on this and I’m a bit curious. But I have something measurable that somewhat relates.
On June 1 of 2012 we posted about this peculiar website, www.tinyurl.com/BuyFacebookShares, that was suddenly showing up as a referrer in Google Analytics in almost all of our clients’ reports JUST for a few days in May.
This is the pattern of visits to that page since that time. Now the only people that would be looking for content on this – and most of these visits were from searches – are people that are looking at their Analytics reports. I didn’t get any links that referred heavy traffic to this page. Just search traffic.
First month it showed up, heavy spike, then a heavy drop, then a couple of months of decent traffic, then a more permanent fall off with a bit of a spike in December.
So here’s what I think – heaviest traffic in June due to those who check out their traffic daily or weekly. June accounted for 1/3 of all the page views of the page. Then in July we see very little, probably for a variety of reasons. I think August and September upticked because either the referrer came back, or people were looking at quarterly numbers. Finally, the December uptick might be related to end of year review.
Clearly, just a musing, not even a theory. Would like to see Google’s data on Analytics usage.