Thank God for the booming Bulgarian job market
When we first launched the Smells Like Yukon website, the SLY IT department decided to implement a cost-effective Google Analytics solution in order to track the thousands–no, make that millions–of visitors who would flock to the site. We actually had a whopping budget for this project, no thanks to Yukon government Strategic Industires funding but rather due to Jesse’s tireless part-time work as a charwoman. Nevertheless, we decided to go with the totally free solution (aside from the whole “selling your soul to Google” hidden cost), and reallocate the analytics budget to the purchase of the highest quality free stock photos the Internet has to offer.
Well, our investment has paid off. After some rigorous analysis, we have some interesting insight into who visits this site and why. We won’t get into all the details right now, but we would like to share one intriguing trend.
Between September 1 and today, almost 6% of visits to the Smells Like Yukon site came from Bulgaria. And the bounce rate (i.e. the number of visitors who left the site immediately) was far less than 100%. All of our Bulgarian “fans” were being directed to the site from www.yukonadvertising.com, another URL in the SLY stable, and every one of them arrived at www.yukonadvertising.com through a keyword search for “yukon advertising” on Google’s Bulgarian portal.
Naturally, we were a bit confused. The first thing we thought was that Tourism Yukon might have decided that Bulgaria would be the next hot market for dog mushing adventures or shagging under the northern lights, and had bombarded the poor Bulgarian population with Larger than Lifish promotional materialism, as if those poor people hadn’t suffered enough during 50 years of Communist rule. This was not the case.
We kept digging and, after a crash course in the Bulgarian language, finally discovered that there’s a company in Sofia, Bulgaria called “Yukon Advertising” which has been routinely advertising job openings through Bulgaria’s primary online job search site. Naturally, some job seekers search for the company online using its name, which brings up our www.yukonadvertising.com listing at the very top of the search listings (an optimization achieved entirely without the high-priced help of a certain local SEO “expert”.) Unfortunately for most Bulgarians, their minimal grasp of English means that they have to click and wail their way around the Smells Like Yukon site for quite a while before they finally figure out that the site isn’t much use to them, if anyone.
It was a little deflating to the ego, but at least the mystery is finally solved.