The traffic report for May is big piles of bad news, and that bad news is named Diablo III. The WHH traffic was going good until the May 15th release of Diablo III. The combination of a million WoW annual pass holders getting the game for free and little to do at the end of the expansion means a crazy number of WoW players are clicking away furiously in Diablo rather than studiously researching their hunters and reading the latest hunter news and hot new transmogs.
Traffic Overview
In May WoW Hunters Hall had 50,685 visits and 136,679 pageviews, with a total of 28,081 unique visitors. This is actually only a very small drop from April (which had 53k visits), despite the massive drop in the trend. This is a reflection of how much the WHH traffic increased at the end of April and through the first half of May. Unless hunters get tired of Diablo really fast, however, we’re likely to see another decline in June.
The traffic split between search engines, referring sites, and direct visits is almost identical to April, and for the first time we had a true majority of traffic coming from search engines, which is a good thing. We try to always have more of what hunters are looking for.
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 – 66.09%
- WoW Insider – 6.89%
- Rapid Fire – 3.79%
- Twitter – 1.95%
- YouTube – 1.92%
- OutDPS – 1.18%
- Elitist Jerks – 0.91%
- Facebook – 0.80%
- The Brewhall – 0.63%
This month we saw Elitist Jerks plummet down the referring list and Rapid Fire appear on the list, and up near the top too. Facebook made another appearance and Twitter is holding it’s position as the leading social media driving traffic to the WHH.
Keywords
Transmogrification continues to be a big driver of WHH traffic with Tabana’s giant transmog compilation attracting the fashion-conscious hunter searchers, and YET AGAIN we have lots of people searching for the MoP release date. The top non-branded keyword phrases driving traffic were:
- mists of pandaria release date
- hunter transmog
- hunter 4.3 gear
- hunter transmog ideas
- wow hunter
- kripparian
- hunter gear 4.3
Hottest Hunter Articles
Of the 136,679 pageviews WoW Hunters Hall received in May, 17.06% 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).
The huge winner this month was again Tabana’s collection of hunter transmogrification resources, which captured a massive chunk of the WHH traffic, and coming in second is the list of hunter PvP guides.
- Hunter Transmogrification Resources – 8.63%
- Hunter PvP Guides – 2.26%
- Hunter Soloing from Classic to Cataclysm – 2.13%
- Dragon Soul Boss Strategies and Videos for Hunters – 1.43%
- Hunter Soloing Guides: the Burning Crusade – 1.19%
- Transmog: Dwarven Frost Hunter – 1.04%
- How to Solo Onyxia – 0.98%