It’s time for the July report — which is exciting since Tabana reminded me that I completely missed June’s report. Let’s just say that June was something in between May and July. And July was a good month for the WHH, fully recovered from the horrible traffic dip brought on by the Diablo III. And best of all traffic is trending slowly but steadily upward and MoP approaches.
Traffic Overview
In July WoW Hunters Hall had 56,717 visits and 145,965 pageviews, with a total of 33,645 unique visitors. This is a nice bump up from May in all categories. Looking at the trend and knowing the Mists is imminent, it’s probably safe to say that we’ll be moving substantially higher for the next couple of months. Traffic will likely peak in September, drop a bit in October, and then decline a bit for November and more in December. We’ll see how right my predictions are!
The traffic split between search engines, referring sites, and direct visits is shifting further and further toward search engine traffic — disproportionately so. Referral visits fell from May, though that’s mostly likely due to whether or not I make a big reference to the WHH on WoW Insider.
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 – 57.71%
- Rapid Fire – 4.66%
- WoW Insider – 3.62%
- YouTube – 2.93%
- Twitter – 2.46%
- Elitist Jerks – 1.90%
- Quels Hunting Corner – 0.79%
- OutDPS – 0.74%
Not a lot of big movement in the referring sites in July, except that WoW Insider plummeted down compared to May (when I linked to the WHH in an article). Note that the big spike in traffic the WHH got on July 31 was from the WHU when I linked to Tabana’s write-up on the new rare pets found in the beta.
Keywords
Transmogrification continues to be a big driver of WHH traffic with tons of transmog related searches, and we still have people hunting for the MoP release date — though we finally have an actual answer for them. The top non-branded keyword phrases driving traffic were:
- hunter transmog
- hunter transmog sets
- wow hunter
- wow hunter transmog
- mop release date speculation
- hunter tier 14
- hunter transmog ideas
- season 12 pvp gear
Hottest Hunter Articles
Of the 145,965 pageviews WoW Hunters Hall received in July, 14.68% 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 – 11.94%
- Hunter PvP Guides – 2.19%
- Hunter Soloing from Classic to Cataclysm – 1.71%
- Dragon Soul Boss Strategies and Videos for Hunters – 1.38%
- Hunter Transmog: Three Dark Rangers and a Paladin – 1.38%
- Hunter Season 12 PvP Gear – 1.31%
- Hunter Soloing Guides: the Burning Crusade – 1.27%
Oh Noes! Profit!
I also realized that for the first time the WHH has actually made a profit from the Google ads, to the tune of about $15 bucks a month for the past couple of months (over and above the $7/month hosting fees). Since we don’t actually want to make money here I’ve made a $30 donation to the International Wolf Center.
If anyone has a better idea of what to do with any wee profits in the future, let me know, but I feel like donating to the Wolf Center is a pretty hunter-worthy cause in the mean time.
Regional Stats
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Throwing money to the wolves? Howl could you do such a thing?
(For the record, my vote is to keep doing that.)
I think throwing money to the wolves is a fantastic idea, Frost, and am so happy to hear that we finally generated a profit that could be used for a worthy cause. Maybe in the future we could spread the wealth a bit and donate a little something for other animal causes such as the big cats?
If you had asked earlier, I would have recommended the Save the Tiger Fund. The tiger is the largest cat species, and its habitat in South and Southeast Asia are diminishing from deforestation. Compared to lions, tiger habitats are more vulnerable now.