30+ conversion on dormant site

[urb100]

Earlier this week, one of my sites that had very little activity both in terms of traffic and conversion, got an amazing result of 30+ conversion with 600+ unique visits.

Analytics showed that 98% of new traffic was from Yahoo for a particular search term.

This happened for a window of 5 hours - from about 5.30PM to 10.30PM.

I am totally baffled. Any theories?

After that 5 hour window, for next couple of days, it went back to normal traffic and convertion of like 1 or 2 a day.

What could have caused such a surge?

BTW, traffic was from almost all 50 states and leads are good. So most likely its not spam.

[fulleffect]

Gotta be a news story somewhere either on TV or newspapers which makes everyone log on a search.... although strange how it's just from yahoo..... Maybe your rank jumped up to a high position then jumped back down again? That often happens for our site at random times.... Good old Google.

[SemAdvance]

Sounds like your site was popular within Yahoo, pehaps a brief search boost in rankings put you at the top of the listings.

Your server should give you clues to keywords used to find your site.

[deepsand]

Without knowing any of the particulars, such as what the search term is, what the landing page is, where the traffic was coming from, both in terms of the referrer and geo-location of the visitors, etc., no answer can be had.

[urb100]

Deepsand:

Here are the details:

Site: StimulusPackageEligibility
SE: Yahoo
Search term: stimulus package eligibility
Normal conversion: 2/3 a day
On the day of question: 31 conversions
There were not any major news event on this as far as I could tell.

[Bernd]

Originally Posted by urb100

There were not any major news event on this as far as I could tell.

Really?
Because of the data from Google Trends I assume the opposite. These peeks are very likely to be caused by TV or Print Publikations.

[notsoold]

I think your serp ranking temporarily got boost by Yahoo during that period of time. If it is caused by TV or other media, you should also have got more traffic from google.