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First Impressions

We have had Hitslink on over the weekend so it is much too early to draw any firm conclusions but here are some initial observations and reactions.

There is a frighteningly high proportion of very short - one page visits so we need to look at the first impressions we are making.

The proportion of robot to human traffic has also been quite a shock. In particular it appears that much of the page view volume of activity on this blog is robotic although there have already been a couple of visitors who followed up some links including streamed samples. I shall have to test whether secondary publishers get picked up by the Hitslink system.

The biggest category of visits are people looking for a specific piece and they are listening to the sample - apparently entirely successfully. So I think some work on the sample pages may be in order.

The next most frequent visitors are of the composer + mp3 kind which is what most of our pages are optimized on but these are the visitors who are least likely to stay and we need to think about what if any thing we can do about that. It looks like some experiments are called for.

It looks as if the visitor who came and spent 20 minute on the site yesterday had been before because they were not referred from another site - unlike everyone else.

As usual Google is far and away the dominant source of visitors so our dependence on their continued good offices is as heavy as ever.

The specific, albeit anonymous, customer by customer detail has a much bigger impact than the inferences made from log summary stats so I think we will be continuing with Hitslink after the free trial period.

This week we are going to feature the Rags that we published last week. Here is a lofi streaming sample from our lovely percussion arrangement of 12th Street Rag from our new Ragtime page.

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