This morning, as part of my usual daily routine I checked out the Google Analytic stats for the Conduce website and there was a noticeable spike in traffic to the blog yesterday. This was particularly strange.... You normally would see such peaks in visitor numbers on and around days when we have posted a successful blog entry or news item, but never on a day like yesterday. We were busy at the Farnborough airshow and working on a number of external projects - so there was no new content on our website at all this week.
A bit of delving of visitor details, referring sites and content stats soon provided some clues. By far the most popular page yesterday was the
blog item I posted last week about the TV Licensing website. In my inbox I also had a reply back from the TV Licensing website itself from the query I submitted at the time of posting my blog item. I wanted to commend the people behind the TV License website and make them aware of my thoughts.
TV LICENSING
BRISTOL
BS98 1TL
Email: enquiries@TVLicensing.co.uk
Our Ref: TVL19275135
20/07/2010
Dear Mr Saunders
The "web development team" are very pleased with the feedback.
Thank you for taking the time to contact us.
Yours sincerely
TV Licensing
We had a significant amount of traffic from the Newcastle area yesterday and a number of referrals from
Think.eu. So a quick peruse of the
Think.eu website and I had my answer. These guys were indeed behind the TV Licensing site, are based in Newcastle and it seems had my commendation passed on to them. Back when they launched the TV Licensing site in May they wrote a news article themselves here:
http://www.think.eu/latest/posts/redesigned-tv-licensing-website.aspx
So what does this teach us? Well, if you didn't know it already, Google Analytics is a fantastic tool that, if you have the right detective skills, can tell you all kinds of things about who's been looking at your website. Also, if you write something nice about someone or something it's worth making the effort to let them know about it.