Missing Website Visitors

The Strange Case of the Missing Visitors (to my website)

I receive detailed monthly statistics from my website provider, Ipage.  In particular I keep track of the number of visitors.  In April I was a member of the Success Panel at the UW-Madison Writer’s Institute and I provided by website to everyone.  With over 300 attendees, I expected a spike in the number of visits to my website.

To my shock and chagrin there were 251 LESS visits in April than in March.  How can that be?  Can I conclude that my participation in the Success Panel was a failure in attracting conference attendees to my website?

I freely admit that I don’t understand where all my visits come from.  Since June 2012 I’ve averaged 1216 visits per month.  In April 2013 I had 489 MORE visits than my monthly average (the initial 4 months of 2012 were bleak).  Taking that view April doesn’t look so bad.

What’s the right perspective?  Can anyone in Social Network Land (SNL) help me out?  Should I be tracking other data such as:  number of pages or number of hits?  And what happened to 251 visitors?  Anyone who can help me out with this will be greatly appreciated.