building howbigismypotato

The story of a page and a kitchen tool: howbigismypotato.com

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Famous Potato

Google are trying to sell me AdWords. They sent me an email today offering $100 of free credit. It was enough to make me go and check the analytics page for the site.
40,665 visits came from 160 countries/territories
Wow. This is the total count for the 3 years the site has been live, so it's not a large amount of traffic, but it's more that I would expect for a static page with no promotion or advertising at all. The reason for the high hit rate is search rankings. What on earth are people searching for to find howbigismypotato.com? Turns out they're looking for images of a potato, and Google images has indexed the picture I took of my potato in my London flat as one of the top examples of a potato image. What a beautiful sight:
Famous Potato
The rankings change over time, and I can see that reflected in the varying traffic volumes hitting the site. It also seems that each country-specific instance of Google has its own rankings. Of course most of the hits come from Google in English speaking countries; who is going to ask for a picture of a "potato" if you don't use that word? I happened to notice that in recent months Indonesia is the 3rd most popular country as a traffic source (behind the US and the UK), while early on there was hardly any traffic coming from there. What has changed in Indonesia?

Open question: is there a relationship between a region's potato production or consumption and visits to the site? I'm glad to say that's something I don't have time to investigate.