Return visitors or skewed stats ?

[pcm535]

I just looked at our statistics for february. On our two major sites, over 40% of the visitors directly enter the sites by typing in it's address or enter through a bookmark, according to aw stats. This seems surprisingly high. We do very little print or other advertising. We get around 400 visitors a day. Does anyone know if 40 % is an average percentage for direct / bookmark entry for a site that's a few years old ?

[mavahntooth]

I just looked at our statistics for february. On our two major sites, over 40% of the visitors directly enter the sites by typing in it's address or enter through a bookmark, according to aw stats. This seems surprisingly high. We do very little print or other advertising. We get around 400 visitors a day. Does anyone know if 40 % is an average percentage for direct / bookmark entry for a site that's a few years old ?

no... IMHO it is pretty high. make more traffic. i guess your website is very interesting so many people go to your site!

[brian.mark]

40% does seem awfully high, but that depends on what's being counted.

If you're seeing 100 visitors per day, have the length of time between pages set too low, you could easily account for 20 - 30 of those per day. Are you excluding your own IP from the reports? How about competitors? I personally see a lot of IP's belonging to Amazon in our stats, and those are all directly entered.

The only other possibility I could see at the moment is that you've just got a great domain name that people are typing just to see what's there, or it is a misspelling of some other popular site.

One of our sites sees a 40% return visitor rate, but even so it's only 23% direct request. I find it's typical that 1/4 to 1/2 of our return visitors are direct requests. If that holds true for your site, you'd need to have around 80% to 160% return visitors, which isn't real likely. You've got to have a first time visitor in there somewhere for them to return.

What's the domain? Maybe that'll lead to clues.

Brian.