Thank you to Ed Stetzer and to Jeopardy
Something strange happened on my blog a couple of days ago.
First, Monday morning, Ed Stetzer linked to an old post that I wrote called “Luther and the non-Christian ‘worship service’.” I wrote that post four years ago, and I don’t think I’ve linked to it in the last few weeks (but I could have on Twitter or Facebook).
I usually don’t get links from big time bloggers like Stetzer, so I really appreciate it.
That night, I decided to check my site’s stats to see how many hits I got from Ed Stetzer’s post. I got a few, but what really surprised me was a big spike around 7:00 p.m. Now, this spike wasn’t huge, and it didn’t swamp my other posts or anything like that. But, it was a spike that I noticed.
After doing some investigation, I realized that the hits were all going to a post that I wrote last year called “The Day of Pentecost in the Upper Room.” Strange… Pentecost was a couple of weeks ago. Plus, these hits did not come from a link on someone else’s site. The hits came from search engines, searching from different locations (48 different states/countries) and different search strings all related to Pentecost.
I did not know why so many people around the world were searching for information about Pentecost a few weeks after the fact. So, I began asking around. And, Jeff had the answer. This is what he said on Facebook:
It was a question on Final Jeopardy…
It occurred last night and depending on what time zone you are on would determine when you were searching. There is controversy on the question and answer; so it sent people searching.
It turns out that the Final Jeopardy question for the episode that aired Monday, June 11, 2012 was this (the category was “Events in the Bible”):
Acts 1:13 says this event occurred in “an upper room.”
The answer that was ruled correct was “The Last Supper”… which is not correct. But, that’s beside the point. (In Acts 1:13, the only event to happen in “an upper room” is some people “stayed.”)
Apparently, the controversy concerning that “correct answer” sent many people scurrying to Google and other search engines in order to determine the correct “correct answer.” And, several of them landed on the post that I wrote last year.
So, I wanted to publicly thank Ed Stetzer and Jeopardy for the intentional and unintentional (respectively) increase in traffic to my blog on Monday.
That’s just too cool! I’m glad you found the reason and shared it with us. Keep up the good work on your blog!
Blessings!
Aren’t analytics exciting! Over a decade ago my first web pages (done with Front Page) had a single hit counter and I was able to determine that after 6 months when the site finally showed up on search engines it rose to a hundred or two hits a MONTH (how many of those hits were search engines I’ll never know).
Today I can find out where the hits come from, whether they are search-engine direct or from another link. etc. etc. Does it tell me anything that matters about revising things to be more attractive? Not so I can tell. I now know that the ‘bounce rate’ is the percentage of the hits where the person goes to no other pages before leaving my domain and that ‘only’ 60% leaving right away is considered good. It suggests that at least 6 out of 10 people (6.8 in my case) decide my stuff is not what they wanted and they’re ‘outta here’. How humbling!
It reminds me of the parable of the sower (not that I compare my site to the seed of the Word), and even Jesus suggested that only 1 out of 4 types of hearers would produce fruit…or should that be interpreted that only 25% of web sites are of any lasting value? Now THAT is humbling!
Stan,
I’m glad you enjoyed this little story. It was quite interesting for me. 🙂
Tom,
There have been times in the past when I tracked Analytics closely. Not so much anymore. Now, I primarily use Analytics to find old post to link to on Facebook and Twitter. It is a great tool though!
-Alan