In what is turning into an every other month feature (and sorry about that) here are the traffic stats for WoW Hunters Hall in December. Traditionally across every non-retail site in the internet, this is a month for traffic slow-downs during the holidays, and indeed the WHH saw a decline during the season, as you can see from the graph above. But despite that, the site is showing some very nice growth over October’s numbers.
Along with our holiday traffic slowdown, we also had a bit of a posting slowdown as several of the people who keep with posts and curate them were off for the holidays and we had a chunk of time during which we failed to keep up with the hunter community news. I think we’ve pretty much caught up now, but as always if you write a for a hunter site — or even if you don’t — and you’d like to take over making sure it’s up to date at the WHH, please hop over and drop us a line. We always need more people to maintain this community resource.
Traffic Overview
In December WoW Hunters Hall had 48050 visits and 107,162 page views, with a total of 29,285 unique visitors. This is significantly more visitors, visits, and pageviews than October, despite the holidays — great to see that word is spreading and people are (presumably) finding the site useful.
In a substantial changeup, the majority of traffic to the WHH is no longer coming from referring sites, but instead is coming from the search engines. Search engines were responsible for 45.99% of December traffic, with other sites bringing in 39.41% and direct traffic straight to the WHH accounting for 14.6%. I’m very excited to see the huge growth in search traffic for the WHH, even though a large chunk of that is just people searching for “WoW Hunters Hall.”
Referring Sites
The top referring sites (sites with a link to WoW Hunters Hall that people clicked on to get here) breaks down as follows:
- Warcraft Hunters Union – 86.2%
- OutDPS – 1.47%
- WoW Insider – 1.43%
- Elitist Jerks – 0.69%
- Facebook – 0.58%
- Marks-365 – 0.53%
Keywords
Google was responsible for 94.3% of the search engine traffic to WoW Hunters Hall. The top several keyword phrases were variations of WoW Hunters Hall, accounting for about 5.3% of all search traffic. The top non-branded keyword phrases driving traffic were:
- hunter transmogrification
- survival hunter 4.3
- hunter gear 4.3
- warlord zon’ozz strategy
- shannox heroic hunters guide
- survival rotation 4.3
- best hunter spec
Hottest Hunter Articles
Of the 107,162 page views WoW Hunters Hall received in December, 20.75% were the home page. After that the top viewed pages were as follows. Note that while this is interesting data, articles posted early in the month have an advantage, and those posted at the very end have a severe disadvantage (given the amount of time they have to collect views for the month).
- Dragon Soul Boss Strategies and Videos for Hunters – 2.68%
- Ultraxion Strategy for Hunters – 2.4%
- Survival Rotation Changes in 4.3 – 2.05%
- Elitist Jerks Weekly Recap 12/9/11 – 1.81%
- Elitist Jerks Weekly Recap 12/16/11 – 1.57%
- Marksmanship Hunter category – 1.54%
Regional Stats
For whatever reason, WHU removed a direct link to your site from the “Other Hunter Sites” sidebar on the homepage. I used to click that to get here. I’d suggest you ask WHU to include you there again… I’m not sure why you were removed.
Hmm… I removed that link when I put up the widget that lists the most recent 5 WHU articles onto the sidebar at the WHU.
Consider adding it back there? I know you have links to recent articles, but I liked having the full list of major hunter sites on the WHU sidebar. Not having wowhuntershall there seems strange, given what a great site this is.