We all know that things change very quickly with respect to the Web. For instance, the way that people find your site has changed a lot. Think of the days when Yahoo was the site of choice for people to do research and find a site that would help them accomplish their goal; whether it was to plan a family vacation or to get forms for income tax filings. In recent months and years, it seems that when we do informal surveys in rooms of 20 or 30 people, virtually everyone raises their hand when asked “who has done a Google search today?”.
Knowing that Google has a huge percentage of the North American and global market share, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is typically the number one referrer to a Web site. Before talking too much about referrers and some related benchmarks, it’s important to highlight a quick definition. What is a referrer? In its simplest form, a referrer is a Web site which sends traffic to another Web site and can be a search engine, a social media site, a privately run site, a partner site, etc. When a person sits at their computer and enters a search term in to a search engine, a list of results is returned (called a ‘Search Engine Results Page’ or SERP for short). Upon clicking on one of the results, the keyword they entered in the search engine is captured in the server logs as a ‘keyword’ and the site which sent the visitor is the ‘referrer’. For example, when searching in Google for ‘government of canada’, the top listing on the first page is a link to ‘Government of Canada Official Web Site | Canada Site’ which, when clicked, takes the visitor to ‘www.canada.gc.ca/home.html’. In the log data for this Government of Canada Web site, the ‘referrer’ would be tracked as ‘Google’ and the keyword would also be captured as ‘government of canada’.
Getting reports on ‘top referrers’ to a site is relatively straight forward and is a standard out of the box report from Web analytics tools such as WebTrends, NetInsight, Omniture, Google Analytics, etc. It is common for clients to ask for the top 10 or top 20 referrers, and while we can provide that, we prefer to provide them information which is far more valuable; referrer groupings with benchmark data. Rather than looking at the top referrers, usually out of curiosity more so than for practical decision making, we group referrer traffic in to the following major categories (listed with their benchmark values):
As we can see from this data, Google is a predominant source of traffic for the Web sites analyzed. Given the size of the data set, we believe this trend would be similar for most other sites similar in nature to those in this study (i.e. Government Web sites). Given this trend, we strongly support that clients search engine optimize their content to meet the needs of Google, first and foremost, while also considering other avenues for traffic generation (i.e. links on partner Web sites, Pay-per-click campaigns, etc.).
Now that we’ve touched on some major benchmarks with respect to referrer traffic, part 2 of this blog will outline some of the major reasons why it is important to understand this aspect of your site.
The data within this blog was derived by analyzing several Web sites from within our client base. Cumulatively, the data set consists of over 200 Million visits and 1.2 Billion page views and ranges from January 2007 through December 2009. The data was considered on an annual basis and future efforts will be invested to creating similar benchmarks on a monthly basis. Clearly, when analyzing this data on a more granular level, such as weekly or monthly, these numbers would potential have much greater ranges and we will be pursuing this research to include in the near future.
For a more elaborate definition of a ‘referrer’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer.
We update our data regularly and will be producing a more granular report exclusively for our clients who choose to be involved in this benchmarking program. Participation ensures confidentiality of the data specific to each client, however, provides mutual benefit across all those who participate. If you would like to be part of our benchmarking program and have your site’s data included, please contact Tyler Gibbs at 613-232-8500 x 102 for more information.
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