How much traffic do you get?

[ctabuk]

Simple question

How much traffic do you get from Natural Searches?

How much from PPC/Adwords


How much from Direct Mail/ Advertising?

[wrmineo]

I don't do any PPC or Adwords campaigns.

The majority of my traffic comes from search engines.

On the main site for my female celebrity website (it has 11 subdomains) I had the 3987 search strings queried last month. The top 20 being:

1 2552 5.24% beyonce
2 2255 4.63% kate hudson
3 1816 3.73% jamie lynn spears
4 1664 3.42% evan rachel wood
5 1652 3.39% eva longoria
6 1453 2.98% olsen twins hot
7 1326 2.72% britney spears pregnancy pictures
8 1089 2.24% mary-kate
9 1008 2.07% evan rachel wood pics
10 869 1.78% jamie lynn spears pictures
11 836 1.72% jesica alba
12 721 1.48% danica patrick pics
13 637 1.31% mary-kate and ashley olsen
14 606 1.24% mary kate and ashley
15 592 1.22% mandy moore pictures
16 574 1.18% mary kate
17 548 1.13% mary kate and ashley olsen
18 511 1.05% britney spears pregnancy pics
19 498 1.02% hot celebs
20 489 1.00% lindsay lohan

I guess that's not bad for not ranking well in Google huh?

[Duncan Pollock]

Perhaps I can answer the question by asking another one (which is maybe not as simple), namely: how can I tell the two sources of my traffic apart?
I know I appear in the Top Ten SERPS for most of my keywords (real estate community) and run Adwords for them as well. I use WebCEO to see the number of daily visitors (usually either side of 50 per day). I can also see my clicks and CTR for Adwords with averages of six or seven clicks (spread over nine keyword specific Ads) and CTRs of 1.0-3.0 each day.
However, the people who contact me invariably click on the e-mail link on my webpages, which results in my knowing the specific page they came from, but that's just about it.
So far, all I can do is make a blind guess that two-thirds of people find me per my web position and another third via my Adwords. The total works out at one kind or another of "live" buyers with the average being a good half dozen a month, which is (more than) enough enquiries to keep me busy and make a decent enough living. Nevertheless, I can't wondering, if only for curiosity's sake, whether there's a way that would enable me to answer ctabuk's question more precisely.

[nullvariable]

I get almost no traffic from searches. A large amount comes from forum posts, ping backs and trackbacks on blog posts and most from word of mouth.

In answer to Duncan's question, I keep a very close eye on my traffic logs from my server. For example I was able to see that SiliconBeat sent me over 500 different visitors within a couple of days when I posted a related blog post with a trackback to thier post about the Google Jet. A careful analysis of incoming traffic is invaluable for anyone concerned with SEO and general traffic building.

NV

[Duncan Pollock]

Hold on a minutre. Maybe I can come up with my own answer.
My AdWords reports tell me the number of people who've punched in one of my keywords (which will appear with the relevant AdWord on the SERP page they reach). If I compare this number with the WebCEO daily visit figure, perhaps it will give me a ratio between the two.
I haven't checked this out, so I can only make another blind guess at it. But if I then extrapolate (I think that's the word) my CTR % for the keyword, perhaps it will start to give me a percentage of e-mail clicks that have their origin with AdWords versus SERPs.
Or, ahem, am I just making things too complicated for my own good?!!

Duncan

[nullvariable]

You may also be interested in the conversion tracking that Google offers. This didn't help me a lot when I was doing Google ads because the main sales ended up off-site for me but it would help a lot if you were wanting to track exactly how many people who came in from your ads were clicking through certain pages or links or filling out certain forms.

NV

[ctabuk]

Thank you. Very interested in the replies from forum postings. I use the pay for version of www.statcounter.com
Just recently my stats have produced record numbers of enquiries. I have a revolving News Desk on my site, basically it is a direct link from Google Alerts on two main keywords 'Right to Buy'and 'Social Homebuy' which are topics of interest in the UK Housing Market. OK we get a fair number of 'Non Related'News Reports. Yesterday A Company named Savills who are one of the largest Estate Agencies and Property Companies in the World, (in the US they are FP Savills)were in and out of my site all day, no doubt their researchers were getting paid for free material found on my pages.
But I am extremely delighted by Duncans input as it was exactly what I was hoping for and it was not Orchestrated or Choreographed between us, I was just hoping. By asking a simple question, either in a forum, or on a website you can generate 'Participation'and as this is a marketing forum I hope you will see my point.
A website is not just a creation of someones desire to make sales, many are there purely as reference points, but if you can begin to bring in Participation, by a 'blog' or a newsdesk or whatever, then the chances of gaining sales are greatly enhanced. We have said it a million times. Think Content.
So to return to forum posts, this has been a subject very close to my heart. I have always maintained that they do generate business, so thanks for saying so.

[kgun]

"Nevertheless, I can't wondering, if only for curiosity's sake, whether there's a way that would enable me to answer ctabuk's question more precisely".

There are a lot of resources to track visitors to your site. WebCEO is one.

You may know these.
http://www.deep-software.com/?ref=ggl&cmp=7
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

You find more tools on my site, more precisely http://multifinanceit.com/it/security/security.htm

If you choose "Links"
http://multifinanceit.com/it/security/links.htm

and scroll down to "Log analysis" alternatively
CTRL + F + Log analysis

you find some other useful tools.

Related page search
CTRL + F + Tracking

Then, how would I analyze that material in more detail? Even if Excel or a spread sheet is not statistical software, the statistical functions should be more than good enough to get a more professional overview / analysis.

If you do not have the time to do the analysis yourself, ask a student at an IT school / university to do the analysis. It may even be used as a Bachelor / Master thesis in IT or information science.

AND THAT SHOULD BE A VERY USEFUL AND PROFITABLE ANALYSIS / PROJECT.

Simple question
How much traffic do you get from Natural Searches? Most.

How much from PPC/Adwords?

Only use Mamma.com hard mapped KW for "Institutional investor". That does not send heavy traffic.


How much from Direct Mail/ Advertising?
Do not use it.

More general:
Heavy users US Commercial and US Education. Why US Education? May be because, if you look at my organization of links, it is organized for
1. People seeking financial information.
2. People seeking IT information for their Web Business. Very much on Digital Ad and branding.

Based on 10 years experience (collection of links). So it is a "subject organised link collection" in addition to a news service.

US Military also find it useful, may be because of my experience working with people "from MIT", http://www.intex.com/ and http://www.intex.com/homepage/Troll.htm
Excellent statistical software that may be used for most purposes, even marketing research if you know how to use it.

In a periode, they crawled my site many times a day.

[freetraff]

Originally Posted by ctabuk

Simple question

How much traffic do you get from Natural Searches?

How much from PPC/Adwords


How much from Direct Mail/ Advertising?

Right now I am focused on viral marketing. It gives both quality and free traffic which is a rare thing right now.

I used PPC/Adwords, not bad. But viral is both free and effective. Well, you just have to get rebrandable book done. My own experience.

[Duncan Pollock]

Just a few added points that are perhaps worth considering:
1. Google's tracking code is limited to a Landing Page. You can, of course, have more than one choice for this, but you then have to create separate AdWords for each page you elect to use. Even so, all the Reports tell you is how many clicks were made against a given keyword and, short of having a page that only a "clicker" can reach, organic search visitors can land on the same page as your AdWords visitor.
2. WebCEO and its alternatives do do a good job of telling you your visit numbers, which keywords were searched for, and what pattern of navigation was followed. However, they still don't, as such, tell you whether people reached you via an organic search or a PPC click.
3. I suppose that unless you are somewhat buried in the SERPS and therefore have to assume that most visitors have found you per your PPC campaigns, it's difficult to tell just where everyone's coming from. Even then, however, there's the fact that, assuming a number of sites (e.g. directories) link to you, visitors may be arriving by a variety of other means that are neither PPC based nor as a direct result of an organic search for one of your keywords.
All told, I guess we simply have to rely on a gut feeling as to which way people find us -- and be truly thankful that they do!

Duncan

PS. Having done some (very quick and far from complete) extrapolation (see my last post), I'm seeing that about one person in six visits my site via a given search phrase. Of them, one in six clicks on my Adword. And, ha, ha, about one of this sixsome ends up becoming a (buying) client. As we're forever saying in the real estate business, it's all a numbers game. Or as a life insurance guru once said, you need to do three things: 1. see the people; 2. see the people; and 3. see the people.
Ergo, let's raise a hurrah to the search engines for making it so possible.

[nullvariable]

Duncan,
I see your point about the tracking code for Adsense. In which case I fall back to my orignal source for all my numbers, the server log. My server logs tell me what page the visitor comes into my site from. So to make use of that I setup a simple 301 redirect from a subdomain into the various landing pages that I wanted. I just setup a link for each ad. Just disallow these redirect urls in your robots.txt and google will not index them. This lets you track only the traffic coming from those links as they will land on these pages before making it to a sales page.

This setup can be a little complicated but I hope it makes sense. Numbers are numbers but if you have accurate numbers it can help you make much better choices.

To demonstrate: Page A is on your site. It ranks well on google and gets plenty of traffic. To guide users who are click on adwords links to this page don't link it directly. Instead link Page B. Page B doesn't really exist, instead it is a directive on the server that tells the users browser that Page B has been moved to Page A. In this method the user doesn't have to click anything or load a page before you get them to the intended page but your logs will show them accessing Page B before going to Page A.

Something like:
Search --> Page A
AdClick --> Page B --> Page A

If you do something like this, be sure to exclude this link from being searched so that your count is purely from the Ad clicks. If you are running on a good web server you should be able to do all of these things.

Hopefully this wasn't to confusing ;)

NV

P.S. If you have a sec I just finished redesigning my site and I'd love to hear what you think of it.

[Duncan Pollock]

NV: It's certainly an imaginative idea that would give me the number of PPC visitors. Nevertheless two things occur to me:
1. My AdWords reports in fact now tell this.
2. I'll still not know whether an e-mail enquiry I receive resulted because someone reached me by PPC or via an organic search. I can only guess which route brought them to me.
I could, I suppose, ask them, but I'm content enough to accept the fact that they're in touch with me. Thus, although ctabuk's question has piqued my interest, I think I'm going to stick with a gut feeling rather than making things too complicated!

Duncan

P.S. Re your site -- and at the risk of embarrassing you in front of a WPW audience -- I'm quite prepared to say it's nice and clean, very readable, and of undoubted interest to the folk that reach it. My only reservation is whether your signature title "Google Tips" wouldn't be better worded as "Google News". This seems to be more the thrust of its content, although perhaps you're planning to vary the points periodically. I'm also assuming that you encourage your web design clients (including potential ones) to visit it regularly, which would also suggest a need to keep refreshing things.
However, perhaps I've got it all wrong and you intend the site as a blog type one.

[kgun]

I. A comment to your Opera story on your site.

"Not a bad move on Opera’s part. I think there are enough people out there that are fed up with Internet Explorer to at least try it out. As far as publicity goes this is a great push for them. I know I’ll be adding Opera to my list of web tools. I’ll be using it at the very least to check compatibility issues".

I once said to my son:
1. Teach yourself Opera, Firefox and Redhat Linux.
2. Now he lowes the Opera web browser, and very often he says when I ask for a functionality in IE. It is possible in Opera.
3. My life is too short to learn new software every day. I use Opera, but mostly IE.
4. What about security in Webbrowsers?
5. What about webbrowsers for mobile phones?

II. Blue on black on the right menu. Isn't there a better colour combination? General advice, do not mix too many fonts and colours. You have a lot of them on that menu.

III. Where is your contact, company, about us information? The more the better.

IV. If you want to make a Blog of it, use tools so that it does not end as a "Blogged Chat". Divide your visitors in at last three categories.
- Junior
- Senior
- Professional

with different rights.

V. You may even put a chat on your site. I think there are free software that you can paste into your code.

[nullvariable]

Duncan,
Sorry that my last post was so confusing. I track my visitors based on the server side logs. When I use the method outlined above it lets me identify each IP address separately. This way I can follow the path of each visitor through the site. Another thought would be to use a unique landing page and set a cookie based on that page that follows the user through the site. Then when they reach your contact form...I assume you are using a form instead of having them just email you...you can add a hidden value to this form that reads the value of the cookie placed when they first reach your site. This may be interesting to you if setup correctly. Now not all visitors will allow cookies but most will. So if you were to have a setup that sent me a cookie when I came to your site based on the referrer page and you were to include that as a part of the form sent to you when a user requests more information you'd be able to see which users came from Google, AdWords, and other sites that link you.

Thanks for the comments on the site. I appreciate the input. Being a full time college student means my time to focus on certain projects is limited so this site is somewhat of a personal place to post topics that I find of interest. I think that I need to focus the subject matter more and better define my audience but that is difficult for me to do ;) I like to write about a lot of things :D Perhaps I will setup a separate blog dedicated to Google news and tips (there are tips there, you just have to dig past the news). I'll be tweaking the theme some based on your input.

Thanks!
NV

[Duncan Pollock]

NV: It's good of you to keep pounding ideas out for me, but the problem is that I DON'T use a form for people to contact me. They're anathema as far as I'm concerned.
None of this "How many bedrooms do you want? How soon do you plan to move? Do you have a house to sell?" &c, ad nauseum, that so many of my collegues use. No way jose!
I simply use a "click here to e-mail me" line on a number of my pages and let people talk to me the way I'll end up talking back to them (i.e. I'm not an advocate of auto-responders either).
So relax, relax. I'm going to file ctabuk's question away in my "Acadamic" file --and I'm sure he won't mind one bit if I do.

Duncan

[nullvariable]

Duncan,
I can see where you are coming from. I don't like forms in the sense that you describe them either. I tend to use a form that looks like an email for contact on my pages to cut down on spam. Just depends on the situation. Perhaps this article can help explain my obsession with numbers:
The secret John D. Rockefeller used to build Standard Oil.

But otherwise I think the original question is still open...

NV

[kgun]

The reason I succeeded:

"I saw the details other people overlooked."

[MarcieZoob]

#1: Direct Mail / Local Advertising
The majority of our traffic, inquiries and leads still come from local endeavors like direct mail, local advertising, networking events, volunteer opportunities and community involvement.

We get plenty of visitors to our site from a variety of search strings on SEs. Web design is such a saturated market, however, and I don't really expect our website or a PPC campaign to be the major source of our leads/clientel.

[Duncan Pollock]

Regardless of what portion of enquiries reach me via Google organic searches or my AdWords, I'm now having to do a tad of rethinking and perhaps it will do no harm (and even be of some academic interst) if I report what seems to be a recent development, as follows;
1. For some length of time, I've seen this sort of result:

Real Estate in the Niagara Peninsula - Homes for sale in St ...A different approach to finding and buying real estate in the Niagara Region. ... www.duncanpollock.com/ - 35k - 1 Oct 2005

whenever I chose "pages in Canada" for a variety of search phrases that read (without the quotes) "real estate in such and such a place".
2. For the past week or so, however, the results appear only if I choose "the web".
3. At the same time, the Canad