Where did the traffic come from in the first couple of years of WhatDoTheyKnow? Let's dig into the site analytics and find out.
TL;DR: We're not entirely sure.
Turns out we weren't using Google Analytics back in 2008 when WDTK was launched and we don't retain log files for that long, so the oldest data we were able to retrieve doesn't really tell us what we wanted to know.
However, just in case it's good for something here's a report drawn from the first 2 years of our Google Analytics data.
The top 10 referrers over this period, representing 11.29% of the overall traffic to the site (in terms of sessions) and 9.75% of our new users over the stated period were:
| Position | Referring domain | Sessions | New Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | t.co | 113,699 | 64,436 |
| 2 | facebook.com | 79,828 | 54,161 |
| 3 | google.co.uk | 42,900 | 31,001 |
| 4 | m.facebook.com | 25,216 | 20,347 |
| 5 | immigrationboards.com | 21,483 | 8,872 |
| 6 | mail.yahoo.net | 18,183 | 4,836 |
| 7 | reddit.com | 17,643 | 17,220 |
| 8 | thestudentroom.co.uk | 15,844 | 8,657 |
| 9 | search.bt.com | 14,692 | 11,832 |
| 10 | data.gov.uk | 9,353 |