I am studiously gettin’ stuff done this weekend, including the WHH traffic report before half the month is done — it’s almost on time! It was a good month for the WHH, with a crazy high traffic spike in mid-April (the 18th) and generally higher traffic thereafter. I dug down and it looks like that spike is due entirely to the Hunter Transmog Resources page. Hunters clearly love their transmogrification, and I have to admit that Tabana put together an impressively complete compilation of transmogrification resources.
Traffic Overview
In April WoW Hunters Hall had 53,962 visits and 144,705 pageviews, with a total of 30,136 unique visitors. This is a big increase over March, gaining thousands of unique visitors and nearly 50% more pageviews. So more hunters reading the WHH, and reading more of it.
The traffic split between search engines, referring sites, and direct visits is almost identical to March, with again a majority (or plurality technically) 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 – 69.48%
- WoW Insider – 4.27%
- Elitist Jerks – 4.03%
- OutDPS – 1.81%
- YouTube – 1.71%
- Twitter – 1.14%
- MMO-Champion – 1.09%
- Rapid Fire – 0.96%
The big change in referrers in April was the rise of Elitist Jerks up to 4% of referral traffic. YouTube dropped again, and this may be due in part to YouTube failing to properly grab article descriptions in their “As Seen on WoW Hunters Hall” section. We’ve tried making various changes, and either one of them worked, or YouTube figured itself out and it’s now properly pulling in descriptions.
Maybe what we should really do is create a WHH YouTube channel ourselves and create topical playlists — such as a playlist of raiding strat guides, one for extreme soloing, one for transmog, etc. What do you guys think?
Keywords
The variations of WoW Hunters Hall that usually account for all the top keywords were mostly pushed down the list in April as other keywords started bringing in higher traffic. I’ve changed the way I’m reporting these slightly — I’m now weeding out suspicious phrases that brought in no new visitors, but instead were the same people searching and clicking repeatedly (often bots). The top non-branded keyword phrases driving traffic were:
- mists of pandaria release date (seriously guys? Again? Still?)
- hunter transmog
- wow hunter
- hunter gear 4.3
- best hunter spec
- elitist jerks
Hottest Hunter Articles
Of the 144,705 pageviews WoW Hunters Hall received in April, 18.29% 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 Tabana’s collection of hunter transmogrification resources, which captured a massive chunk of the WHH traffic!
- Hunter Transmogrification Resources – 8.33% (that’s huge)
- Hunter Soloing from Classic to Cataclysm – 5.27%
- Dragon Soul Boss Strategies and Videos for Hunters – 1.93% (4th month in a row on top)
- Bows: the Definitive Review – 1.18%
- Solo Farming for Thoridal the Stars Fury – 1.06%
- Mists of Pandaria Release Date Estimate – 0.1.06%
- Optimizing for Heroic Spine of Deathwing – 1.05%
- MoP Hunter Glyphs and Items – 1.01%
- My Dark Ranger Transmog – 0.95%
Regional Stats
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There are several things about the traffic report that are interesting. The big bump of course corresponds to Frost mentioning the transmog comp on WHU and WoW Insider. Oddly enough, as was mentioned last month, the bots were apparently doing searches for Shannox heroic hunter, no idea why.
Solo farming for Thori’dal has been on top for quite a few months now, suggesting that hunters are still seeking the legendary bow. The Soloing Guide comp, which indexes the cumulative hard work of many dedicated and generous solo hunters, is in 2nd place, indicating that we hunters are game for the challenge of soloing old bosses for mounts, transmog gear, gold, rep, etc.
It’s also interesting that Keelhaul’s review of bows made a reappearance after all these months, undoubtedly due to the graphic in the transmog comp, and it is indeed a very thorough and professionally illustrated review of bows.
What’s most interesting to me though is the reappearance of the heroic Spine of Deathwing article at this time; although I haven’t seen any data to indicate it, its popularity suggests that many of us have now reached heroic Spine progression-wise and are making use of the tips to aid in defeating the encounter.
I’d also note that Sesamee’s Dark Ranger transmog article has been on top for two months now. Hopefully someone at Blizzard takes note of the large interest in transmogging the dark ranger model and designs more hunter gear in line with the concept.