[thelist] Effect of downtime and refreshed content on visitornumbers

[Bart Posselt]

No, we don't do cross-session tracking. So I don't really know how repeat customers affect total visitor numbers. 

Our site's traffic is cyclical. It usually goes up in the months before our trade show and crashes pretty dramatically in the summer months after the convention. However, this year, with the redesigned site, we're not seeing the same kind of volatility. Not including the four months before our trade show, which saw monthly double-digit growth in both sessions and page views, user sessions are up 4% while the number of page views has increased 9%. Meanwhile, visitors are spending slightly less time on the site (down 4%) and looking at slightly fewer pages (down 2%) per session. Combined with anecdotal evidence, I think we have a fairly sizable repeat audience. 

Bart


<snip author="bposselt at dineout.org">
>The only numbers I know of are for our own site.
>Since redesigning (which included regularly updating content in several
>places), the number of blind (no referrer) >sessions per month has gone
>from 34% to 75% while the number of referred sessions has gone
>from 58% to 19%. Search engine referrals have stayed relatively
>the same.
</snip>

**************
Bart Posselt
Web Site Manager
National Restaurant Association
www.restaurant.org

>>> martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com 07/05/01 10:02AM >>>
So has this affected your total visitor numbers? If so, how?
Do you do cross-session tracking (even if it's anonymous users) to see
repeat visitor numbers?