Unexpected spike of visits! Where did they come from?
One day you look at Google Analytics and see this. Your product was mentioned somewhere! Earlier this week I had a huge spike in visits for my SaaS https://mygoodweek.com.
How did I find the source of visits? Join me in my investigation in this post, Hopefully, you will learn something new, or at least enjoy the story.
Looking for hints
Of course, the first idea I had is to check out the "Traffic acquisition" page of Google Analytics. By default, it only shows the big categories though: Social, Direct, Search, Referral, etc.
Not specific enough, but gives us a hint already.
Social traffic, as the name suggests comes from social networks, like Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Direct traffic means someone typed the website address directly in their browser, or read a QR code.
Search traffic comes from search engines, such as Google or Bing.
Referral traffic comes from other websites, that do not categorize as any of the above. It is the simplest one to identify because Google Analytics records the actual Referrer values for us.
From the screenshot, you can see, that most of the traffic of the spike for http://mygoodweek.com came from Direct and Social.
I cannot figure out the source of the "direct" traffic, but since it happened at the same time as "social", the source is most likely the same.
Let's check out the Social traffic in more detail. You can choose another grouping on the "Traffic acquisition" page. Select "Session source", as shown on the screenshot.
Now I can clearly see, that people who came from Social networks actually came from Instagram. The other half is still unknown though, because of direct traffic.
Now I just need to go to Instagram and find that post or story 😀
Sounds easy, but it turned out to be almost impossible. I spent an hour trying various search queries, but could not find a clue...
But luckily I got a hint from another place!
Like many other SaaS, I use a messaging system. In my case it is Crisp.
One can just quickly ask a question or report a bug. Of hundreds of users, one got confused about one of the features and decided to ask me a question ♥️
After resolving his problem, I decided to ask, where did he come from? And his reply was the solution to my search!
Turned out an influencer from Peru, Daniel Bonifazz posted a TikTok and Instagram story about http://mygoodweek.com and generated traffic.
Here is the TikTok itself: https://www.tiktok.com/@danielbonifazz/video/7083868811027401990?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1
Lesson learned
I learned several things from this experience:
- One influencer can bring a lot of traffic with just one post.
- Google Analytics is a great tool but does not give full information
- Crisp and other contact systems can be very useful in surprising ways!
Hope you enjoyed it!
Please check out https://mygoodweek.com and check out my Twitter where I build in public: https://twitter.com/slava_minamoto
