Where does your traffic come from?

[masontech]

Great post, thanks.

Mine are..

Direct - 23%

Referring - 12%

Search Engines - 65%

Thanks,

[Fortune Palace]

Interesting how the more established / successful sites rely much less on Search Engine traffic (and therefore SEO) than relatively new ones.

Direct traffic speaks for itself - if your site's brand is established, people come straight to you.

But what role do referring sites play? Are these generally sites on which you've paid for advertising? Are they sites that link to you (reciprocated or not)? Are they sites and blogs that have picked up your articles / feeds?

I'm interested to know how best to progress - should I focus on-site or off-site?

[MichaelCorfman]

Here is the information for a few different sites we operate starting with the GPWA website:

www.GPWA.org

42.39% Direct Traffic
30.90% Search Engines
26.70% Referring Sites
0.01% Other

Online.CasinoCity.com

62.65% Search Engines
23.59% Referring Sites
9.56% Direct Traffic
4.20% Other

www.CasinoCity.com

64.66% Search Engines
24.36% Referring Sites
10.96% Direct Traffic
0.02% Other

www.CasinoCityTimes.com

54.18% Search Engines
27.81% Referring Sites
9.80% Direct Traffic
8.21% Other

http://www.PokerZone.com

51.99% Referring Sites
42.02% Direct Traffic
5.97% Search Engines
0.02% Other

www.RGTonline.com

36.23% Direct Traffic
33.20% Search Engines
30.34% Referring Sites
0.23% Other

Michael

[thegamblersedge]

Here are stats (www.thegamblersedge.com)

Direct Traffic = 7.97%
Referring Sites = 34.65%
Search Engines = 57.38%

[SharBear613]

Direct Traffic.......77.30%
Referring Sites....15.70%
Search Engines.....6.99%

Which is best? Are these precentages I have for my site good? Still fairly new to all of this. lol

[OnlineBingoClub]

Stats for Unlucky for some

87.06% Search Engines
8.85% Referring Sites
4.08% Direct Traffic

[MichaelCorfman]

Originally Posted by Fortune Palace

Interesting how the more established / successful sites rely much less on Search Engine traffic (and therefore SEO) than relatively new ones.?

Well, in some cases that is true. For example, GPWA.org gets most of its traffic through direct visits to the site. However, CasinoCity.com is certainly a well established site, but receives over 60% of its traffic from search engines. The search engine positioning is strong enough that it generates a lot of traffic relative to the other types of traffic even though the volume of the other types of traffic is large.

Originally Posted by Fortune Palace

Direct traffic speaks for itself - if your site's brand is established, people come straight to you.

Certainly that is true, but it is also the case that the information presented here is based on relative percentages. Casino City is a much stronger brand than the GPWA, and has much higher direct traffic, but the percent of direct traffic for the GPWA is four times that of Casino City because the percent of traffic to the site attributed to brand awareness is higher.

Originally Posted by Fortune Palace

But what role do referring sites play? Are these generally sites on which you've paid for advertising? Are they sites that link to you (reciprocated or not)? Are they sites and blogs that have picked up your articles / feeds??

I think that depends on your marketing strategy. In the case of GPWA.org, many of the referrers are from web e-mail platforms of various sorts. That means a lot of the referral traffic is from either GPWA Times weekly newsletters, and/or from forum notification e-mail messages. Some of the referrals are from people looking at GPWA seal verification pop-up pages.

In the case of our pokerzone.com website, we have pretty heavy promotion within the CasinoCity.com website, so 80% of the referral traffic is from other sites of ours.

Originally Posted by Fortune Palace

I'm interested to know how best to progress - should I focus on-site or off-site?

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a simple answer here. There are benefits to every focus. It's a task of figuring out how much time and how big a benefit in each area.

Michael

[helpyou]

For onlinexcasinos.com


60 % Search Engines
20 % Referring Sites
20 % Direct Traffic