Where does your traffic come from?

[MichaelCorfman]

Most portal sites receive traffic from a variety of sources. Google analytics classifies traffic sources into four categories:

1. Search Engines
2. Referring Sites
3. Direct Traffic
4. Other.

GPWA member libbert recently asked members to share information about distribution of traffic by google analytic traffic source. I thought that made an interesting poll question, so I've added this preface to his post.

Please share your specific traffic source distribution with us in a post below. It is clearly there is a lot of diversity for different portal sites.

And just so we have a summary pole for part of the information, please share how much of your traffic is from referring sites in the summary poll in addition to providing details for the four different traffic sources in a post.

Thanks,

Michael

[libbert]

Hi All
Just thought that it could be interesting to get a quick traffic poll.
My traffic comes from:
Direct Traffic: 65.4%
Referring Sites: 32.8%
Search Engines: 1.8%

How about you?

/Michael
Poker Bankroll Blog

[Fortune Palace]

According to Google Analytics:

Search Engines 87.82%
Direct Traffic 6.75%
Referring Sites 5.40%

and the very interesting

Other 0.03%

[TheGooner]

All traffic sources sent a total of 146,768 visits






48.44% Direct Traffic







24.80% Referring Sites







26.75% Search Engines

[aksana]

Referring sites - 44.43%
Search engines - 42.40%
Direct traffic - 13.17%

[TheGooner]

LOL - 4 sites and 4 widely varying ranges - looks like anything goes.

[Isaiah]

All traffic sources sent a total of 251,496 visits








55.00% Direct Traffic







21.52% Referring Sites







23.48% Search Engines

[LiveCasinoPartners]

6.76% Direct Traffic
7.28% Referring Sites
85.97% Search Engines

This probably means my site isn't sticky enough becasue I'm not getting more direct traffic.

[libbert]

Interesting!


@Isaiah, TheGooner

Over how long time is your visitor count?

[TheGooner]

default time period - so the last month?

[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]

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.

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.

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.

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