Its been a struggle to get downloads or page views even when publicizing the games. Game jams were a good start for page views and downloads, but that quickly dries up and its only a small amount to begin with.
By some amazing coincidence I posted a new game yesterday and after months of 1 - 5 page views a day it got almost 500 page views and 100 downloads. It seems like a luck thing. I'm on top of some popular games list here at itch.io when I can't imagine why I'm there considering I just dumped the game with only a tweet for bare minimum publicity.
The down side is the game .exe comes up as a virus. So people can't play it. Oh well. At least I got the 100 downloads.