Weird HUGE spike in traffic for one day, how can i find out where it came from?

[MPinelli]

So my site www.projektgotham.com just recently had 4 sales in one day after being pretty dormant for 2 years. we get occasional sales but never more than 5-15 uniques a day.

well this is our starts for these three days

4/27- 47 uniques
4/28 - 1109 uniques
4/29 - 76 uniques

how can i find out what happned? all 4 sales came on the 28th plus 4-5 inquiries since our credit card system isnt working.

thanks guys

[insomnia]

Referrer stats?

[MPinelli]

nothing higher than 18 visits.

[Luc]

raw server stats is your best bet, ie access_log. they are usually located in the same path as your domain on the server, but root access is usually required to view them in ssh or to copy via ftp.

[GoPC]

happened to me too at gopc.com... and judging from your post, around the same time. I wonder if there was an update to some group of search engines or something like that. I say a huge spike from like my average of 3K-4K visits to over 20K on a single day (in my case May 6th) then back to normal again the next day.

I posed a similar question in Domain Discussion and people said it was a Search update or spider sofware or something like that... but... like you, I can't see anything specific in my tracking for those explanations. Looks like just a ton of people came and visited.

I did note ONE thing though... alot of hits came through random.Yahoo.com I don't know if that's random "feel lucky" search like on Google but maybe gopc.com found its way onto that "featured" sort for a day.

I didn't notice the increase of hits from THAT site until a week later and it was wrapped up into the rest of the basic stats at that point, so I can't be sure that is the source.

You might take a look through your stats results and identify the odd patterns. Personally, I'm fascinated by them.

GoPC