Small Business Forum Referrer Stats

As the responsible SEO that I am, I periodically check stats for several sites under my control. On the small business forum I’ve notice that this blog seems to send a fair amount of visitors each month. It’s usually the #1 or #2 referrer to the forum.

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At first glance I should be happy. This blog sends some pretty good traffic to the forum. There’s a very low bounce rate and visitors are spending a lot of time at the forum and viewing a lot of pages. Looking a little deeper though you notice something strange.

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You can see in the image above that of the 136 visitors this blog sent to the forum over the month, 134 of them visited from the main page of the blog and only 2 visited from specific posts.

That’s certainly possible as the main blog page gets the most traffic for the entire blog, but still it seems a little odd that 98.5% of the clicks originated there. The home page of this blog does not get 98.5% of the traffic to the entire blog.

Digging a little further you can see in the image below that 133 out of those 136 visitors are using a Mac. Hmm? The market share for Macs is growing and this site has always had a few more Mac users than usual, but really 133 out of 136? Interestingly enough I happen to use a Mac.

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Let’s change the dimension from operating system to city and see what’s there

The plot thickens. 133 of those 136 visitors apparently live in Denver. What are the odds? Wait a minute. I don’t live in Denver but my IP goes out through my ISP in Denver. Seems like all those visitors just might be me.

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I can dig into some of the other dimensions, but it’s pretty clear that most (probably 133) visitors from this blog to the forum are me.

Now you might be thinking what’s so unusual about that. I naturally spend time here and also at the forum. The unusual part is I don’t ever click a link to get there. I type the forum address directly. Generally I just type the letter ’s’ and my browser shows the forum right away. Other than when I tested to make sure I correctly added the links, I’ve never clicked from here to there. And that testing all took place several months before the stats you see above.

Are Referrer Stats Bogus?

At first I thought maybe it was because I would usually load up my browser with this blog in one tab and then open a new tab to visit the forum. I thought perhaps having this site open in one tab caused Google to think the traffic was originating there. Not a pleasant thought if you think about it.

However I’ve made sure the last few months never to have this site open in a tab when visiting the forum. And again I never click any link from here to the forum. Maybe I’m missing something, but doesn’t a referrer visit mean a visit through a clicked link?

So why does Google consistently show what would indicate me clicking links here and visiting my forum when I never click the links here to the forum?

I won’t post more images, but I will tell you that most of the top referrer sites month over month are sites of forum members. Checking some of the dimensions shows the same pattern you see above. It’s pretty clear the overwhelming majority of the visits are by the same person.

While it’s possible some forum members do visit through links on their site, I tend to doubt it. I suspect the situation is similar to what’s happening with my own visits to the forum.

What Do These Bogus Stats Imply?

Am I missing something here? Or is Google recording referrers where none truly exists. A couple questions come to mind right away.

• If these stats aren’t real what other stats that Google is showing also aren’t real?
• How exactly is Google tracking visits if it isn’t through clicks on a link and what does that imply about what they track in general?

Again I’ll ask if I’m missing something here? Could I be doing something with Analytics causing referrers to show like this? I haven’t noticed this on any of the other sites I track. Have you ever seen something like this on any of the sites you track?

Most Popular Blog Posts

1. 2 Column CSS Layout – 9039
2. Interview With Guest Blogger Yuri Filimonov – 6977
3. Simple Navigation Bar With CSS And (x)HTML – 6031
4. How to Design your Posts to Guarantee they get Read – 5934
5. How Important Is Proper Grammar And Word Usage To Effective Communication? – 4775
6. 3 Column CSS Layout – 4479
7. Simple Menus With (x)HTML Lists And CSS – 3818
8. Problems With WordPress Posts Going Supplemental In Google’s Index – 3432
9. Answers To 10 SEO Questions – 3328
10. Is AdSense A Scam? – 2769
11. SEO Basics Tutorial – 2680
12. Practicing Good Customer Service Is The Best Way To Market It – 2617
13. This Week In SEO – 11/9/07 – 2573
14. Centering With CSS: Web Pages And Block Level Elements – 2546
15. Choosing Fonts In Web Design – 2438

Once again I won’t make claims that these are the best posts here, but they are the ones that received the most views. Most of the posts on the list were written last year and typically have more links than many newer posts. The additional links are leading to more search traffic. Five of the above posts also have permanent links in the blog sidebar under the ‘Popular Posts’ heading, which would naturally lead to more views on those posts.

Two of the posts above are more recent. In fact #4, How to Design your Posts to Guarantee they get Read, was only written in mid-November. Both did very well with social media, in particular StumbleUpon.

The best news for me is that the last post above received nearly as many page views as the top post did a year ago.

Unique Visitors/Visits

1. Jan 2007 – 6448/14751
2. Feb 2007 – 6041/13687
3. Mar 2007 – 6817/16389
4. Apr 2007 – 7453/17096
5. May 2007 – 8544/18889
6. Jun 2007 – 8242/19043
7. Jul 2007 – 7877/18676
8. Aug 2007 – 7878/20215
9. Sep 2007 – 9688/23644
10. Oct 2007 – 11994/27760
11. Nov 2007 – 12732/28566
12. Dec 2007 – 9226/23556*

*Numbers for December are extrapolated to the end of the month

Totals for the year are 102,940 unique visitors and 242,272 visits, which in both cases is about 430% growth over 2006. Not quite the dramatic growth I’d hoped for last year, but pretty good nonetheless. For the most part month over month traffic has improved with a few hiccups this summer.

December has been lower than expected after the previous couple of months, but I suspect some of that is due to the holidays. Most, though is due to less social media traffic than I had been picking up this fall.

Referrer Domains

1. Webmaster-Talk – 1932
2. WebProNews – 1445*
3. Marketing Pilgrim – 894
4. Improve The Web – 835
5. SEO Book – 519
6. ProBlogger – 495
7. SEOmoz – 354
8. Small Business Forum – 347
9. SEO By The Sea – 322
10. Blogger – 270
11. CopyBlogger – 209
12. Seth Godin – 219
13. Bloglines – 219
14. Netvibes – 182
15. Search Engine Land – 178

*WebProNews numbers include several sites across the iEntry network. iEntry picks up this blog and republishes posts on a variety of sites. WebProNews accounts for most of the traffic, but other sites include iEnty itself as well as SearchNews, SmallBusinessNews, and EntrepreneurNewz. If you’re curious what I look like you can click on the WebProNews link above and see a picture.

I put a lot more effort during 2007 into building referral traffic and it shows in the numbers. Most of the sites above were not on the list last year. Webmaster-Talk forum still tops the list with slightly larger numbers in 2007. Most of the traffic above comes through comments and/or trackbacks left on blogs and in a few cases a link or two from each of the blogs. I think I’m on the blogroll of two of the blogs above as well.

This list speaks volumes to the power of participation in online communities. The numbers above are cumulative across each domain. Most are in the form of less than a dozen visits each from many, many individual posts. The numbers do add up if you stick with it.

Search Engine Traffic

1. Google – 41072
2. Windows Live – 9397
3. Yahoo! – 2587
4. Google Images – 1197
5. Ask – 560
6. MSN Search – 377
7. Technorati – 363
8. AOL – 276
9. Google Cache – 76
10. Dogpile – 52
11. AltaVista – 47
12. Netscape – 36
13. AllTheWeb – 20
14. Earth Link – 18
15. Sphere – 18

Google still makes up most of the search traffic coming into the site, but the growth in Yahoo traffic far outpaced the growth in Google traffic. The numbers from Windows Live are very much in error. Nearly all the 9397 visits from Live Search are part of Microsoft’s spam tests. The real numbers are much closer to the numbers showing for MSN Search. Ask didn’t make the list at all last year, which meant they didn’t send at least 2 visits this way. 560 visits is large improvement.

Search traffic makes up a lower percentage of the overall traffic here than it did in 2006, but the number of visits from search engines has improved similarly to traffic in general. Both are positive trends.

Search Phrases

1. computers internet blog – 707
2. i need money now – 214
3. need money now – 213
4. proper grammar usage – 181
5. proper grammar – 176
6. seo basics – 133
7. google_hints – 127
8. 3 column css – 124
9. css shapes – 124
10. css _height – 110
11. css navigation bar – 106
12. going to bed hungry – 102
13. seo tutorial – 101
14. social media icons – 99
15. good bounce rate – 98

25,002 unique phrases were used to find some page of the site, yet the top phrase above only accounts for 1.3% of the total search traffic. That should lead you to think of the long tail of search and understand why keyword research is important.

I did not optimize for most of those 25,002 phrases. No one realistically could. What I did in many cases was understand the keyword themes around which a post should be optimized and then write naturally in order to pick up phrases around the main theme. If you compare the list of phrases to the posts that were viewed the most often it’s easy to see a correlation.

Keywords

1. css – 9469
2. column – 3562
3. layout – 2581
4. grammar – 2310
5. navigation – 2301
6. bar – 2214
7. proper – 2194
8. div – 2066
9. web – 2051
10. html – 1887
11. customer – 1661
12. seo – 1503
13. blog – 1412
14. google – 1334
15. simple – 1295

As with last year, I removed a few stop words like ‘a,’ ‘to,’ ‘the,’ from the list of words above. Once again it should be fairly easy to see the correlation with the most viewed posts. The 2007 list is very similar to the 2006 list with only two different entries.

Social Media

1. StumbleUpon – 14,683
2. Reddit – 747
3. Sphinn – 302
4. MyBlogLog – 154
5. del.icio.us – 133
6. Digg – 128

2007 was the first year I looked at social media as a way to market myself. For me that means participating in social media communities, networking, and building strong profiles. I’m not active at Digg or Reddit, but I am with the rest of the sites listed above.

StumbleUpon has clearly sent the most traffic this way. The numbers from Reddit and Digg are each based on a single post. The Reddit numbers in particular indicate how much traffic can flow into a site with one successful submission. The majority of those 747 visits occurred over a 48 hour period and I saw a significant increase in subscribers to the blog shortly after.

Last year I promised numbers on subscribers. However I’d still like to hold off on sharing those stats. Perhaps next year will be the year.

Thanks again to everyone who makes up any part of the statistics above. I hope you’ll be included in the 2008 numbers along with a whole lot of new people who’ve yet to find there way here.

What I like about the engagement factor is it makes sense. It measures page*seconds/visit which does sound like engagement. While time spent and pages per visit each aren’t perfect in measuring engagement, chances are as each value increases a visitor is interacting more with your site.

Again that’s not 100% true. Visitors might visit a lot of pages because they can’t find what they want. They may leave your page open in a tab in the background while they surf other sites and close your page before ever reading it. But combined they probably help to limit the other’s inaccuracies. The person who leaves the page open in the background and closes it isn’t visiting a lot of pages. The person who can’t find what they’re looking for doesn’t spend a lot of time on the site.

Not perfect, but better.

Considering bounce rate it makes sense that people who never click beyond the entry page aren’t engaging with your site. As bounce rate goes up engagement goes down. That’s exactly how the formula calls it too. Looking at the example from the Fresh Egg post it seems like they’re using 50 as the divisor in the equation when the bounce rate is 50%. It would be better to call it .50, but since the end result is simply a ratio and the number are more readable using 50 it’s not a big deal.

My post on developing a 2 column css layout has usually done well bringing search traffic. Two thing I’ve always noticed is the page has a high bounce rate, but visitors also average a fair amount of time on the page, more than enough to read and digest it. Now I’m probably not doing a good enough job getting people to click through from that page to another on the site, but the high average times on the page lead me to believe people are finding it useful. I would think they are still engaged with the page even if the page doesn’t lead them to visit the rest of the site.

Given the engagement factor is calling for pages/visit this isn’t something you can use to measure interaction with a single page, but rather your entire site. And it is something that will need to be looked at in relation not as an absolute. Saying your engagement factor is 25 is meaningless except in comparison to last month’s 22.

The engagement factor might not be perfect, but from what I’ve seen so far it’s as good as any metric for measuring how visitors interact with your site. I think it’s a good start toward measuring visitor engagement that could possibly be developed into something more.

What do you think? Does the engagement factor seem like a good way to measure user interaction with your site? What might be missing? What flaws might it have? Would you use it to gage the health of your site?

Some Background

One of the first things I did after purchasing my first laptop and connecting to the internet was to sign up for a Yahoo email account. I can’t remember if my then dial up provider (the one that was through k-Mart) directed me to Yahoo or I directed myself there, but within a few minutes I had my email account. A short time later I was also using the my.yahoo version of Yahoo as my home page.

It didn’t take long before I started customizing the content and the look of the page to suit me and I’ve been using that same page with an occasional modification ever since.

I’m not completely loyal to the page and could be swayed to try something else as a home page easily enough. Most of the web portals I’ve seen offer me essentially the same content and a good enough starting point for the day’s surfing. In fact there are probably a few out there that offer more. So why do I keep my.yahoo?

1. Habit – I’m used to the page and it’s a familiar point of departure and return.
2. Quick link to Yahoo email – Yahoo is also the only email account (I now have dozens) that doesn’t make it easy for me to download email into Thunderbird and it’s the only one I still read online.
3. The customized look – Yahoo recently upgraded my.yahoo, but I was still able to keep the colors I had set up years ago.

One and two above keep me using the page, but number three is the one that keeps me from experimenting with a new one. If Google for example let me choose the colors and perhaps even the layout for iGoogle instead of limiting me to their pre-designed themes it might very well become my new home page.

The Survey

The survey request appeared as an overlay ad on my home page over the weekend. The survey asked the same three questions about a handful of web pages. Nine pages if memory serves.

1. What was your impression of the download speed of the above web page?
2. Approximately how frequently do you visit the above web page?
3. How cluttered or uncluttered does the above web page appear to you?

At the end of the survey there are also some questions about how I rate my web expertise and what kind of internet connection I have as well as what my home page is.

Given that Yahoo’s main page is often referred to as being cluttered and that Google’s uncluttered design is often hailed as one reason for it’s success it’s reasonable that Yahoo might want to know the impression it’s pages leave with users. Some of the nine pages in the survey were Yahoo pages and the rest were pages from other search engines.

There’s nothing wrong with the survey per se and I’m glad to see Yahoo asking questions to hopefully improve the user experience. However I think the results they get might end up being somewhat deceptive.

My Answers

Looking at the questions it seems that Yahoo is trying to determine if impressions of the speed of a page and how cluttered the page appears are what determines how often the page is visited. Again nothing wrong with that, but I wonder what my answers indicate to them. For example I think my.yahoo home page is incredibly slow, but I have my reasons for keeping it. If it were any other page I might not wait around for it to finish loading. I may not think it’s too cluttered, but only because I know where everything is after years of use. I put it there after all. Obviously I visit the page many times a day.

Should Yahoo conclude that download times and clean design aren’t important to me? I hope not since both are important. My feelings about my home page have a lot to do with my familiarity with that page. I would feel different about it if I had only been using it a week. I’ve often cursed the page while waiting for it to load and as I said if another portal would let me customize the look completely I could easily switch. Habits can be broken and if sufficiently motivated I know there are workarounds to using the email.

I hardly ever visit the Live Search page. It loads fast and is very uncluttered, but I don’t care for the search results so the only time I use the search engine is when I want to know how a site is ranking in it for a specific phrase. On the other hand Google’s page also loads fast and is also very uncluttered. I do visit that page often during the day since I think the search results are good. Same impressions of the page yet very different frequency of use.

Another page in the survey was the Yahoo News main page. I never visit that page, but once again it has nothing to do with the page’s design. My my.yahoo home page already has links to the main news items I want. I’m in and out of Yahoo News all day. Just never on the main page.

Are The Results Misleading?

I realize I’m only one person and when you put together all the numbers this survey might show Yahoo some useful things and lead them to some valid conclusions. But since I was invited to take the survey through the my.yahoo home page I’m guessing that many others taking the survey also have my.yahoo set as their home page and that many people might also feel a bias one way or the other toward their familiar page.

Maybe I’m the one misleading myself here. I can say all I want that it’s important to me for a web page to download quickly and have a clean interface, but is it really that important to me? I visit quite a few sites daily that are painfully slow and suffer from information overload. The content is so good though, that I’m willing to wait and my familiarity with the site allows me to ignore the parts I don’t need to interact with. Fortunately for those sites I had sufficient cause to wait for the download on my first visit and I started engaging with the content before looking around at what else was there. I don’t think I’d be so patient with a site new to me.

What do you think? Could these questions easily lead to the wrong conclusions? Are my questions simply my own lack of understanding about surveys? Is Yahoo looking for something different than I think they’re looking for? In the end will the statistical numbers make up for a few oddball sets of answers? Or will the averages only hide what’s really going on in the minds of users?

If you’re interested in taking the survey you can find it here.

ClickZ has done a brief write up, Google Unwraps Multi-Variate Site Testing, Anoints Partners, along with news that Google will partner with some trusted consultants to help users set up and analyze tests. And you can get an overview of Website Optimizer from AdWords Help Center.

If you currently use AdWords then signing up for Website Optimizer should be a no-brainer.

After seeing SEOmoz release their stats a little over a week ago, I was inspired to do the same. Hopefully it’s not too far into the new year to make a review of last year seem out of place. If you missed Rand’s post have a look at SEOmoz’s 2006 Stats in Review.

Everything here comes from awstats, not because I think it’s the best analytics package, but simply because it’s the only package I’ve had installed all year.

Most Popular Blog Posts

1. 2 Column CSS Layout – 2520
2. Interview With Guest Blogger Yuri Filimonov – 1292
3. Simple Navigation Bar With CSS And (x)HTML – 1234
4. 3 Column CSS Layout – 1219
5. Simple Menus With (x)HTML Lists And CSS – 1076
6. SEO Basics Tutorial – 846
7. Creating Sitemaps In WordPress – 750
8. How Important Is Proper Grammar And Word Usage To Effective Communication? – 721
9. Google Advanced Search Operators – 650
10. Centering With CSS: Web Pages And Block Level Elements – 594
11. Tips For Getting Backlinks – 581
12. Link Baiting As Part Of An Effective Link Building Campaign – 495
13. Creating Shapes With CSS Borders – 492
14. The Goal Of SEO – 471
15. Can You Get Rich With AdSense? – 464

I won’t make any claims that the above posts are my best, but they were the posts that received the most views over the course of the year. I wrote the majority of them in first half the year giving them more time to to be viewed, though three of these posts were written as recently as October.

Unique Visitors / Visits

1. January – 403 / 741
2. February – 503 / 1016
3. March – 705 / 1400
4. April – 1140 / 2456
5. May – 1375 / 3027
6. June – 1689 / 4011
7. July – 1605 / 4131
8. August – 1339 / 4592
9. September – 1206 / 4084
10. October – 2819 / 6764
11. November – 5318 / 11261
12. December – 5559 / 12643

The totals for the year are 23,688 uniques and 56,126 visits. The numbers aren’t as impressive as SEOmoz’s stats, but I take encouragement in the growth from the beginning of the year. Uniques are up 1300% and visits 1700%. If that same growth were to continue through the next year, then December 2007 stats would be 71,886 / 215,716. And 2007 as a whole could see 306,236 uniques and 957,626 visits. Wish me luck.

Referrer Domains

1. webmaster-talk.com – 1575
2. small-business-forum.com – 558
3. webpronews.com – 280
4. www.smallbusinessbrief.com – 203
5. v7n.com – 190
6. kingbloom.com – 155
7. webhostingunleashed.com – 133
8. improvetheweb.com – 102
9. makcustomfence.com – 94
10. ientry.com/ – 79
11. seobook.com – 72
12. searchnewz.com – 54
13. cre8asiteforums.com – 47
14. officesupport911.ca – 47
15. techcrunch.com – 46

The above numbers are only for traffic that arrived at the site through links from another domain. Direct traffic and search traffic far outweighed referrer traffic. One thing that stands out to me from the above is I spent an awful lot of time on forums during the year as a third of the sites above are forums where I regularly post.

It’s also clear that allowing the blog’s content to travel and be republished on the iEntry network, which includes WebProNews, accounted for a good deal of traffic, especially when you consider it only began a couple months back. How about a shout for social media optimization.

Search Engine Traffic

1. Google – 8446
2. Google (Images) – 224
3. Yahoo – 149
4. MSN – 106
5. Unknown search engines – 52
6. AOL – 43
7. AltaVista – 24
8. Ask Jeeves – 15
9. Dogpile – 6
10. AllTheWeb – 5
11. Netscape – 4
12. DMOZ – 3
13. Yandex – 3
14. Earth Link – 2
15. Excite – 2

You’d think I’d be happy with all the Google traffic, but I would prefer the search traffic to be a little more mixed among the engines. Though I don’t think it likely, a few algorithm changes at Google and just about all my search traffic would be gone. Going against the norm Google has been driving traffic since early in the year and the other engines have only recently begun to send searchers. I think Technorati accounts for most if not all of the unknown search engines

Search Phrases

1. 2 column css layout – 41
2. google_hints – 39
3. 2 column css – 29
4. ilq extension toolbar – 25
5. fantastico auto installer – 23
6. 2 columns css – 22
7. proper word usage – 19
8. online business blog – 18
9. site wide duplicate content analyzer – 18
10. compare neomail horde squirrelmail – 18
11. css shapes – 18
12. how to get backlinks – 17
13. domain apps – 17
14. css navigation bar – 16
15. centering web pages – 16

6057 keyphrases were used to find me this year. Given how quickly the above lists drops off in the number of searches for each phrase it’s easy to understand that most of the 6057 were unique long tail phrases. It’s a good lesson for new sites to learn about keyphrases and it should be noted that I did little to optimize the site for most of those 6000+ phrases

Keywords

1. css - 2639
2. column – 1023
3. layout – 789
4. div – 587
5. navigation – 475
6. menu – 430
7. bar – 421
8. html – 400
9. simple – 361
10. grammar – 333
11. columns – 312
12. web – 311
13. proper – 285
14. google – 272
15. adsense – 263
16. seo – 263

I removed a few stop words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ and ‘to’ from the above list since they don’t really add much value. It’s easy to see looking at the list of top keywords why the most viewed posts were most viewed. I am happy that the top keywords are generally webmaster and seo related words. It does make me feel like I belong. Keep in mind the site wasn’t found for these keywords in isolation. They’re all part of longer phrases.

Unfortunately I don’t have information about subscribers, but I will next year as I signed up for FeedBurner earlier when I started putting together this post. Shame on me for not having done so sooner.

Thanks to everyone who became any of the statistics above. Hopefully you’ll also be part of the stats for 2007.

Creme king of what?

That was my reaction too when I first noticed several people had found their way here using ‘creme king of baits‘ as a search term to find the post in the previous link. Many results for the term revolve around using soft plastic worms for fishing bait, an idea originally pioneered by Nick Creme. But type link bait a few times, refer to Rand Fishkin as the king of said link bait, and mention how the cream will rise to the top, and you may find yourself ranking well for a term like ‘creme king of baits’ too.

Needless to say seeing the term driving traffic to the site was unexpected and I thought it would be fun to look over the stats for the past year to find some other unexpected keyphrases that drove traffic my way. Consider this a sort of top list of unexpected keyphrases for 2006. I’ve linked the phrases to the pages that ranked for the terms.

• creme king of baits
• humorous billiard terms
• geico caveman evolution – (I do like the Geico cavemen and reference them often)
• join a commune
• 5 sentences how you are similar or like the pilgrims – (my apologies to the boy or girl who was hoping I could help with their homework)
• nielsen ratings monday september 18th – (I was watching Monday Night Football, while writing a blog post)
• popular dog toy search phrases
• espn background color code
• banquet halls in charleston il
• supplemental robots- (wouldn’t this make a cool title for a movie about killer robots?)

If you look at any of the pages that attracted those terms you can see why those pages appeared at some point in search results, but I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting any traffic for the terms above. Of course now that I’ve linked to each with the search phrase they’ll all likely jump a couple places or three in the results.

Searching For SEOs

Those weren’t the only phrases I came across in the stats that I found interesting. I’ll bet Matt Cutts would like to know that Google sent at least one person to my site who was looking for matt cutts email contact. In fact Google results include two posts on this blog for Mr Cutts email.

Matt Cutts wasn’t the only name in the seo community that led someone to the site. People found their way here looking for Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, and even Quadzilla of Seo Black Hat. The phrase quadzilla seo still has two pages here ranking well at Google.

It’s not just the A-listers either. People looking for friends like Yuri Filimonov and Matt Johnson somehow found me instead. Don’t worry guys it was only one visitor each.

Andrew McDonald a web designer here in Colorado, who I don’t know, may not appreciate that if you search for andrew macdonald web design colorado the number one result at Google is my web design portfolio. The result is no doubt due to the fact that I have a client with the same name, though spelled differently. Maybe I’ll get one of those angry emails telling me to stop ranking for his name that I can use as linkbait.

Searching For Poets, Playwrights, and Artists

There were some who I’m sure were disappointed to come across posts here when searching for phrases associated with Lewis Carol, Shakespeare, and even Vincent Vangogh. Google still mistakenly sends people looking for the philosophy behind the style of van gogh to a page about the philosophy behind my business.

Never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public is a famous quote by P.T. Barnum yet it helped drive traffic to a post about calls to action.

Looking Forward To 2007 Searches

These were far from the only unexpected search phrases I came across going over the stats for the site, but for whatever reason these are the ones that stood out. Hopefully 2007 will provide a more diverse set of phrases to amuse.

Have any good phrases that brought traffic to you this year that you’d like to share?

Far too many people still seem to consider ‘hits’ a useful measure of web statistics so I thought I take a little time to define a few basic website measurements. Web analytics are an important of running a successful website. Being able to track visitors to your web pages and what they do once on your site is an essential part of SEO and PPC advertising. You really can’t do either effectively without knowing something about the traffic your site is or isn’t getting.

This isn’t meant to be an all inclusive post on web measurements. No single post could hope to do that. The field of web measurement and analytics is growing rapidly and anyone that can master it can easily draw a six figure salary in today’s market. We all need to start somewhere though, so here are a few of the more important terms.

Page Views

A page view can be defined as any time a document on your site successfully loads due to a request by a visitor. If someone sees a page on your site a page view should be recorded. Page views are perhaps the most fundamental unit of web measurements. They can be used to determine the most popular pages and sections of your site and are used as a building block for many other measurements.

By following the pages someone views while on your site you can track their clickstream or the sequence of pages they visit. In knowing a person’s clickstream you can determine things like click through rate (CTR), a highly useful measurement for knowing whether or not your copy and calls to action are leading people where you want them to go.

Why Hits Are Meaningless

Hits used to be the favored statistic, though in truth it’s always been rather meaningless. A hit is any time a request is made on the server. When a browser requests a page that page often makes many requests on the server. The html file is one request, an external css or javascript is another. Any image on the page will also be a request on the server. Each of those requests is recorded as a hit. If you create a page with five images on it then you’ll have at least six hits when anyone visits the page. One for the html and five more for the images. Adding five more images to the page ups the hits to eleven. It’s easy to see why hits are meaningless since they rely so much on things outside the realm of people actually viewing your pages. You can easily record hundreds of hits on a single page by adding code to that page that makes additional requests on the server. Hits can’t really compared across pages because of this.

Visits

Visits are generally defined as the collection of pages someone views when browsing your site. You may also see them called user sessions, but visits is the most common term. It’s easy to understand when a visit starts. You browse to a page on your site and it starts. When it ends can be a little subjective though. If you were to browse some pages over the course of a few minutes, do what you came to do, and them leave to browse another site it’s pretty clear your visit is over. But what happens when you land on a site, click around and then the phone rings. You take the call and maybe go off to make lunch. After you finish eating you come back to the site and continue to click around more. Was that really one visit? Maybe two, one before the call and one after lunch?

It’s really hard to know, so a visit is defined as ending when a certain amount of time passes between clicks on the site. The time frame can really be anything, but the standard is 30 minutes. So a visit is better defined as the collection of pages someone views as long as the period of inactivity between page views is less than 30 minutes. Your visit itself can last more than 30 minutes, but if after viewing a page you don’t do anything on the site for 30 minutes your visit has ended.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors are about people. A unique visitor is recorded when a person uses a web browser to visit a website. They can view one page or 1000 pages. Obviously a single person can visit your site more than once, so unique visitors are only considered unique over a given time frame. Usually the time frame is a day. If I visit your site in the morning and come back later in the evening I am one unique visitor for that day. If I come back again the next day I will be seen as one unique visitor on the first day and one unique visitor on the second day.

Referrers

Referrers are anything online that sends traffic to your site. It can be another website, a search engine, a banner ad, a contextual ad, an email, etc. Referrers are obviously important since you want to know where your traffic is coming from. You want to know if an add you placed is working or if the link in your newsletter is effective in driving traffic to your site. If you want to know if your seo efforts are paying off you want to see more referrals from the different search engines.

Knowing where visitors come from can tell you a lot about where to concentrate future marketing. If you’re paying good money for a text link on a site and no one ever visits through that link you probably want to use that money elsewhere.

That’s a quick walk through of basic web measurements. It’s far from everything you’ll want to measure, but these are the building blocks from which many other statistics are born. Lets all stop talking about how many hits we get on our sites and instead compare page views, visits, and visitors. Let’s all pay attention to who’s referring the traffic as well.

One good way to find new content to create for your site is to look at your web statistics package and see what long tail search phrases are bringing traffic to your site. The long tail searches are an indication that there’s an interest and also that it’s probably easy to compete for the phrase. So how can you make it work to increase traffic and conversions?

It’s pretty easy really. You look at your web analytics package and find some phrases that sent traffic to one of your pages. If you don’t have a web stats package you should go out right now and get one. Google Analytics is free as are several others. There are many pay analytics packages out there as well and there’s a good chance one is available for free with your hosting account.

Now that you have web stats there should be something in there showing you what keyphrases someone used to find your site. There’s also a good chance some of those searches will be for phrases you never expected would lead traffic to your pages. You probably didn’t optimize for them and only on looking at the page again did you even realize you had used some of those keywords. That’s a pretty good indication there’s not much competition for the phrase. You’re ranking well enough to drive traffic and you didn’t even try. What would happen then if you did try?

Stands to reason you could get a page ranked for the phrase easily enough. You already have once after all. The trick is in figuring out what the person who typed that phrase might have been looking for and giving it to them. Even better find a way to monetize that page or get them to visit some of your other pages to convert that traffic into a paying customer.

This site gets found routinely for phrases along the lines of ’squirrelmail horde neomail comparison.’ If you want, take that phrase and check Google and you’ll see my hosting plan comparison page sitting #1 in the results (At least as I’m writing this it’s #1; Edit: The page was on the previous domain for this blog. The page doesn’t exist on the new domain). I should be proud right? Well I didn’t really do anything to optimize for that phrase or the others like it. Look around on most sites that happen to offer hosting and there will usually be some table comparing the different plans they offer. Mine happens to mention all three of those web mail programs since they come with all hosting plans here and I also happen to use the word ‘compare’ in the title and level 1 heading and the word ‘comparison’ in the url. I chose those words without search engines in mind at all. I chose them because the page is a comparison and it made sense.

Most of the traffic that comes to the page from any of the related webmail searches leaves just about as soon as it gets here. And why wouldn’t it. The person typing that phrase into Google most likely wasn’t looking for a comparison of my hosting plans, but rather information about the similarities and differences of the three webmail applications. Maybe they want to know which one has certain features or which would be the best to install on their own server. There’s certainly an interest though.

If I were smart I’d do some research on all three programs and put together an article or two or three. Maybe one on the features of each. Maybe an article on how to set up an install each. Anything else really that someone might be looking to find. It would be easy enough to optimize each the articles for slightly different terms, especially given how little effort it took to get the hosting page to rank well. I could also easily add links on that hosting plan comparison page to the new articles.

Writing a page that I actually optimized would not only pull in the traffic I’m already getting, but probably traffic for more related phrases as well. The new pages will most likely lead to new ideas for pages and more long tail searches appear in your stats analysis package.

Having hopefully provided some useful information that traffic could be directed to my hosting pages and ideally convert and become new hosting clients. That traffic might not need hosting, but maybe some would turn into loyal readers here, that I could convert at a later date for one of my other services or a product I start to offer. Maybe in my research I discover a commercial webmail option that is better than the freebies and attempt to sell it as an affiliate. There really are a lot of possibilities for what can be done with the new targeted traffic

The goal doesn’t have to be convert the traffic, but rather to help generate more traffic to the site. Looking at the results for the webmail comparison searches leads me to believe there aren’t many pages out there offering the information searchers are likely looking to find. Maybe the new content would result in some links and improve visibility for the site as a whole.

You can continue this content generation based on what you find in your web stats over and over. Each new page you create will likely lead to new long tail searches for which you can create new content. The searches are telling you someone is interested in the potential new content and the fact that you are ranking without having optimized already should tell you page you create will have a good chance of ranking too. The new optimized pages will be written with a very specific set of searchers in mind and thus lead to highly targeted traffic. The strategy is one that can easily lead to more visitors and even better visitors that find what they’re looking for and have you to thank for it. Happy visitors are much easier to convert into customers than frustrated visitors. And it all started in your web stats package.

Bounce rates can be an important measurement for your website and web pages. They can help determine whether a certain ad campaign is successful, whether you’re targeting the right keywords, or whether changes you make are improving your site. Knowing the bounce rate of your site and individual pages can give clues about what is and isn’t working for your site.

What Is Bounce Rate?

A bounce occurs when someone enters your site and never clicks beyond the page where they arrived. Bounce rate is naturally enough a measure of the rate at which this happens. If 100 people enter your site at the home page and 64 of them leave without visiting another page the bounce rate for your home page is 65%.

Ideally you’d like to have a low bounce rate, particularly on landing pages like your home page. It can be hard to always know, though what is a good rate and different types of pages will often have different acceptable rates.

Possible Reasons For Bounces

Bounces can happen for a variety of reasons. Some possible reasons people may leave your site without clicking deeper are:

• an unattractive design
• slow page load times
• sending visitors to the wrong page in an ad
• optimizing for the wrong keywords
• poor content
• too many annoyances on a page

Any of the above can cause people to bounce from your site. And a low rate isn’t necessarily a cause for celebration. You may have an attractive design, bit a poor navigation and people click around for awhile never finding what they were looking for. They may visit several pages before leaving so your rate was low, but only stayed because they wanted to find what they were looking and couldn’t.

On the other hand there are reasons why someone might bounce from one of your pages and it can still be considered a successful page. If the page carries contextual advertising and someone bounces via one of your ads then you’ve made some money and are probably happy. Maybe someone came to your site looking for your phone number and you provided it on every page of your site. They found it right away closed their browser and reached for the phone. It’s also possible that the page in question met the visitors needs well enough that they no longer looked for more information. Hopefully they bookmarked your site before leaving if this is the case.

How To Improve Bounce Rates

Since there are so many possible causes why someone would bounce you may be wondering how knowing the rate can help improve your site. Well first if your bounce rate is particularly high across most of your pages it’s probable that some changes are needed. This is especially true of landing pages since often your landing page isn’t the final page a customer will see when completing a purchase. Typically you want people to move deeper into your site to convert them into present or future customers.

Bounce rates can tell a lot when you make changes to a page and have measured the bounce both before and after the change. Maybe you’ve added some calls to action and in so doing your bounce rate has increased. It might be an indication that your call is too overt and causing people to lose trust in you. Maybe you decided to change some colors on your site since it was looking drab and after the change less people were bouncing from your site. It’s a strong indication the color change worked well.

You can also use bounce rates to test your marketing campaigns. You might have an ad, but aren’t sure where to send people who view the ad. You have two in mind, but aren’t sure which is best. You can try both and measure which page has the lower bounce rate. In a similar vein you may be bidding on a certain keyword phrase like ‘inexpensive acoustic guitars’ and are noticing the bounce rate from that ad to be very high. It could be an indication you are sending people to the wrong page. Perhaps you have the ad directing people to your home page instead of a page with an inexpensive acoustic guitar on it.

It’s possible you’ve sent them to the best page, but the copy in your ad was misleading. Maybe your version of inexpensive is far different from your visitors since all the guitars in question are custom made. The high bounce rate can be an indication you either need to change the ad copy or bid on a different keyword phrase.

Similarly with organic search you may have optimized your page for the more generic ‘guitar’ and while you’ve done a great job showing up in the results pages people are bouncing away. Maybe what they were really looking for with that search was guitar instruction of guitar lessons. It might be a good idea to add some modifiers to the page to let people know you sell guitars on that page.

The main idea to improve your rates is to measure what’s happening and if you feel a change is necessary make that change and measure again. You may not always know why someone is leaving your site, but often you can get some very good ideas of what might be the cause. Measuring the result of the change will lead you to improving your site and marketing efforts.

What Is A Good Bounce Rate?

It can be hard to know what is and isn’t a good rate for a given page and a site in general. In part this is due to all the possible reasons someone may decide to leave your site. As I mentioned above people may be bouncing via your ads in which case a high rate isn’t necessarily bad. It may even be your ideal. It’s also possible they’ve found you through a search and the page they came to answered their question well enough that they didn’t need to click further. Chances are, however, you want your bounce rate to be low. You’ll also probably want them lower on landing pages like your home page or main section pages. 50% is probably a good bounce rate for these pages, though there are certainly plenty of sites that have a better rate. Your deeper pages, especially ones that get found for searches you might not have anticipated will likely have a higher rate. Bounce rates over 80% are a good indication you need to change something.

Bounce rates can give you a clearer picture of what someone might think when they first encounter your site. They can give clues to which pages are working well as landing pages and let you know if you’ve pre-qualified visitors well in your various marketing campaigns. They can be very useful to measure when making changes on your site. Knowing the bounce rate before and after a change can give a very goof indication of whether or not any change was successful.