Spikes and Dips in Daily Page Views on Associated Content: What Do They Mean?

I've always been an advocate of tracking daily page views (DPVs) on Associated Content. I've recommended using a spreadsheet that is updated daily for this purpose. One of the best reasons to do this is that having a graphical representation of the ups and downs - what I will call the spikes and dips - of DPVs can be extremely useful, and can alert a Content Producer to a number of things. In this article, I intend to describe what a Content Producer can learn from spikes and dips in DPVs.

Before I begin, let me say that a spike or dip in DPVs is relative. For example, the average number of DPVs that I have received in the last week has been 267 views. However, the average for the first six days was about 249 views. On the seventh day, I received 374 views. For me, a difference of 125 views from the average was very large. For a Clout 10 CP that receives an average of 5,000 views per day, a difference of 125 views would be well within normal statistical error. So keep this in mind.

What can you learn from a spike in daily page views? Well, there are a number of things that a spike in daily page views can indicate.

First, you may have stumbled on an effective marketing technique. When I first began to use Twitter to market my Associated Content articles, my number of daily page views quadrupled. This didn't happen when I tried using social bookmarking sites, so I knew what I was going to invest my time in doing.

Second, you might have published an article about a popular topic. One of my biggest spikes in page views came after I wrote a recap of the highly-anticipated season premier of Jon & Kate Plus 8. This was an article that people were searching for, one that served a purpose, and one that was written and published in a timely manner.

Third, you might be seeing the effects of marketing and publishing. If you publish ten or fifteen articles in a day and they all get ten to twenty views, you could get one hundred to three hundred views in a day that you wouldn't have gotten before. If you market these articles, you could get even more views. SEO keywords and useful tags might allow more people to find your articles.

Fourth and finally, you may be advancing the rungs of AC. You might be getting more fans and more name recognition. This is something to be proud of.

But if we consider the spikes in page views, we must also consider dips in page views. Dips are relative in the same manner that spikes are. If I were to get 100 page views in a day, I'd consider that a dip. If the Clout 10 CP with 5,000 average DPVs were to receive 2,500 page views, that would be a dip. Why do dips happen? Let's see.

First, you might have taken the day off from marketing. I know that when I market my content actively, I tend to receive a greater number of page views than I would otherwise. If you market with Twitter and you take a day or two off from advertising your content, you could see a dip in page views.

Second, your content might be out of season. For example, if you have written only about summer topics, you might see a decrease in page views as the fall and winter seasons arrive.

Third, your content might be stale. If you market the same three or four articles every day, the people that receive your advertising will be unlikely to respond after a while. You need to rotate your content and keep it fresh.

Finally, you need to keep in mind that spikes and dips in daily page views can be a result of luck. On a good day, you might get an extra few hundred page views, and on a bad day you might get half of what you normally get. Stick with it, keep your content fresh, and market your content regularly, and you should have success on Associated Content. If you have any other thoughts on spikes and dips in daily page views, feel free to share them in the form of a comment. Thank you for reading!