I had almost 18,000 visitors to my website yesterday. Maybe you were one of them. If so, welcome!
I average about 50 visitors per day, so yesterday was quite the spike! Some very nice person posted my article about spending $6 million on Google Ads to Hacker News, and it hit the front page.
It peaked at around #5 on HackerNews and got around 270 comments. Not bad! Thanks, kind stranger.
I’m always interested in what happens when someone’s blog post hits the front page of a popular website. So I’ll show you what happened to mine.
HackerNews Traffic From Google Analytics
Overall I had almost 18,000 visitors to my website yesterday. Here’s where they came from by channel.
And here’s the breakdown of just Social.
So, almost all of the traffic was from HN, not surprising. Let’s look at the device breakdown.
About a 50/50 split between mobile and desktop. The amount of Mobile traffic is interesting to me because everyone should be at home right now. I’d chalk this up to people getting notifications and emails on their phones and just casually browsing the internet as a break from work. I did expect more Desktop traffic though.
Here’s the browser breakdown.
50% of the traffic came from Chrome, not surprising as it’s the most popular web browser out there. Safari as the next highest isn’t surprising either considering the amount of mobile traffic, it makes sense that Safari makes up a high % of that traffic segment. Not pictured here, but 56% of mobile traffic yesterday came from iPhones.
Next, locations!
Shocking, lots of US traffic. But also a fair amount of UK, Canada, and other countries as well. The fact that the US only made up 50% was the most surprising thing to me, I expected that number to be higher.
LinkedIn Profile Views
Her’s the number of views to my LinkedIn profile by week. This week isn’t over yet but I imagine the spike will taper off a bit after today.
The little spike around March 3rd was when I posted my article the first time and shared it on LinkedIn. It spread like wildfire and did around 13k views on Medium during that time.
This spike in profile views was way bigger. I imagine because this time the traffic went to my website, instead of Medium, and I have links to my LinkedIn, newsletter, and other projects easily accessible on my website.
Medium is a great resource, but when a post goes viral you really want that traffic hitting your own landing page instead of someone else’s. The numbers speak for themselves!
Despite having 400 profile views, I’ve only had about 15 connection requests on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to make new connections, and I get that some people just want to look me up to see my work history, but feel free to drop me a connection request too. You never know what opportunities we could have to work together, now or in the future!
Conclusions
18,000 website visitors.
400+ LinkedIn Profile Views
15+ connection requests
Numerous emails from people all around the world. If you sent me an email, thank you! I’ll do my best to get back to everyone but it’s been an overwhelmingly positive response.