Search engine referrals
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The other day I was looking at our website's stats to get an idea of search engine referral ratios. While I fully expected Google to win comprehensively, the actual figures based on the last 10,000 page views were certainly an eye-opener:
| ALLTHEWEB: | 0.13% |
| ALTAVISTA: | 0.24% |
| AOL: | 0.12% |
| GOOGLE: | 95.05% |
| LIVE/MSN: | 3.5% |
| YAHOO: | 0.95% |
| OTHERS: | 0.01% |
The remarkable thing is just what a huge gap there is between first and second. Also interesting is that Live/MSN are nothing more than a "very minor player" as far as our visitors are concerned and Yahoo are basically insignificant.
Does it tell us anything about users who prefer Google as opposed to those who use Live/MSN? Our experience indicates that it's generally beginners who search the internet via Live/MSN and the more savvy users choose Google. Because we're essentially a technical website, I fully expected significantly less traffic from Live/MSN and Yahoo but I didn't think Google would be this far in front.
Could it be that Google favours blogs and therefore gives them more prominence? Is it also possible that the US market share numbers have been over-estimated in favour of the "smaller" players?
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About the author
I'm Ivan Lutrov and I'm the owner of Lutrov Interactive. I have 25 years of experience producing interactive work and I create cost effective business websites that are simple, engaging and easy to use. I practice what I preach and I say what I really think, even if it's sometimes not what you want to hear. Subscribe to the Lutrov Interactive feed via RSS and follow me on Twitter.