Traffic Bump, or Traffic Measurement Bump?

Over the last couple of days, KN@PPSTER's traffic has jumped by about 70 visits a day (average as of right now, per Sitemeter, 319 visits and 516 page views; as you can see, 70 visits is a non-trivial percentage of the total).

I'm not sure how much, if any, of that is a real increase in traffic, though. I've made a change in how I measure traffic, and given the now-larger proportion of traffic that lists the referrer as "unknown," I suspect that measurement change is largely responsible for the increase.

The change? I added the Sitemeter button to the site's RSS feeds.

I don't consider that dishonest, or a "trick." The traffic is real; I've just never measured it before. Apart from the Feedburner chiclet that says how many people subscribe via that particular burn, I've never had any idea how many people are reading KN@PPSTER via RSS instead of direct.

It finally occurred to me to fix that measurement gap when I created the KN@PPSTER Android app, which uses RSS as its source. I'm just now getting comfortable with RSS myself, or it would probably have occurred to me to do that before.

Related articles

• The KN@PPSTER Android App is Here! (knappster.blogspot.com)
• Inadvertent Source Deprecation? (knappster.blogspot.com)
• Information overload? - Use of RSS web readers as content filters (marketing.yell.com)
• Metrics that Matter & the Death of the Page View (chartbeat.com)