Referral Patterns

My latest Rankings

[CyberSpaced]

I thought I'd start up a topic where we could post our referral percentages for comparison. Hopefully by seeing other people's percentages and knowing their type of site, we can learn a little...

(If this is already being done in another thread, I apologize... I didn't see it so...)

Mine are;
Google 32.51%
Links From Other Similar pages 22.86%
AOL 11.18%
Yahoo 10.21%
Message Boards 8.6%
MSN 3.35%
Netscape 3.23%
DMOZ 2.41%
NorthernLights 1.90%
Other Seach Engines 3.74%

Unfortunately, I can't give you direct referral numbers. (bookmarks, business cards, etc.) But I'd like to see how other people see their traffic...

[2_much]

This is what it looks like for us..this is for a site with top 10 rankings in most engines (not too competitive KW)...
First time ever that Yahoo is outperformed..hhhmmm...
Don't know why the no referral is so high...

1. no referral 70.3%
2. msn.com/results.asp 5.9%
3. yahoo.com/bin/search 4.8%
4. msn.com/spbasic.htm 4.3%
5. google.com/search 2%
6. yahoo.com/search 1.9%
7. yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/blablabla/ 1.8%
8. excite.com/search.gw 1.3%
9. yahoo.com/bin/query 0.8%
10. aol.com/dirsearch.adp

[Mike_Mackin]

>Don't know why the no referral is so high...

What tracking software are you using?

[2_much]

Urchin

[skiguide]

I posted this at SearchEngineForums too, but maybe it's relevant in this thread too:

I was wondering if anyone else knew anything about AOL browsers using privacy blocks that prevent website traffic logs from seeing where visitors are coming from. I had heard this awhile ago, and I want to know if anyone knows more specifically how to account for AOL users.

For most of my clients, I see minimal to average referrals from AOL, but then when I look at the browsers used, a significant number of visitors - 2805 out of 7303 total, used AOL versions 3-6.0. Can I correctly assume they found the site on AOL, or do you think AOL users go to Yahoo to search (since newbies hear the name a lot) - if so, would those be counted in the Yahoo referrals? I know that these clients can be found easily on AOL, so that makes me wonder why the referrals from AOL Search are so low compared to Yahoo/MSN.
##
I've used Urchin, LiveStats, & several other major reporting packages that seem to do this as well.

[CyberSpaced]

What I noticed is that you normally get a ton of referals from hundreds of different proxy servers, even if the same user is clicking on multiple pages. Since AOL caches everything, it only hits you with it's proxy servers when it has to. I have all sorts of problems with dated material being shown long after it's date on AOL...

The only way I've found to combat this is to attempt to lump all AOL's proxy servers into one big batch. If you can combine referers (Like webtrends and some other programs do) you can use a wildcard to take all AOL referers and count them as one.

[evinrude]

Our site is for a rural electric utility. These numbers are rounded.

~50% - Direct Request (lots of people here have it as their start page.)
~5% - Local University Job search pages (there's like 3 or 4)
~3% - Google
~3% - MSN
~3% - Utility Connection (Utility indexer)
~2% - yahoo
~1% - nreca.org (National Rural Electric Cooperative Association)
<1% - search.netscape.com, altavista, excite, netcraft (!!), and lycos among others.