Why does Feed.Us get so much traffic from schools?

by Rick Stratton, founder

I'm a bit of a traffic-stats addict.  We employ Google Analytics, Chartbeat and GetClicky.com to track and research the visitors to Feed.Us.  

And There's a strange phenomena in our web traffic stats: why does Feed.Us get so much traffic from us public schools? It's been going on for months. 

See the below screencapture from our GetClicky.  These are showing up in our search history for the keyword "feed us" (no period and two words).  On average, 10 people per day visit our site from a school with this keyword.

What the heck?  Initially I was excited that our nation's school kids are getting interested in web technology and site development.  But I finally, recently realized what the heck is happening.

There's an online video game called "Feed Us". I'm not going to link to it so that they can't get the Google juice.  But it's about some fish and eating, etc.  It's a flash game.  

And - all these searches from schools? They are all kids who are using computers on their school networks to play games during the day.  And this is a random, not very popular game.  I can't imagine the traffic that Zynga and big online video game developers get from schools.  

What's the point of this post?

Clicky is freakin' awesome.  It's by far better than any of the other products I've tried... and I've been studying site logs since 1998!  

But even with Clicky... I had to do some leg work.

There's no software service that can make the jump I did above.  All you can do is study your stats and do a lot of the same searches and a lot of clicking.  WIth a lot of manual work, you can learn why (and why not) people visit your site and visit pages.  

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Why does Feed.Us get so much traffic from schools?

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