Referrer Logs

Understanding where people are coming from

[Bradley]

I am looking into buying a website, but I am fairly confused as to where all of their traffic is coming from. The lady that owns the site has an online reporting tool that details her traffic stats.

The reporting tool is indicating that she is getting, on average, 400 user sessions per day.
The following is an example of her referral traffic:

88.76% from [NameOfWebsite.com...]
2.19% from [delphi.com...]
2.07% from [google.com...]

The top referrer is her own website! Is this saying that 88% of her traffic is coming from visitors that are typing in her domain name directly and/or have the site bookmarked? Her rankings in the search engines are very poor. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[dwedeking]

I know sites that I monitor will get a lot of self referrals when they have alot of traffic from AOL. This is due to the way that AOL assigns new numbers for almost every hit (as opposed for every visitor). So when an AOL visitor hits the front page the log file will count each graphic as a unique visitor instead of as the same person. I usually add the number of visitors that state No Referer and add that to the number of referals from other sites (search engines and such) this will give you a better view of unique visitors.

HTH

[cfhoney]

dwedeking- Thanks. I was wondering the same thing.
According to the reports I have, less than 12% is from SE's, but adding the no referrers changes that number to 35%-45%. This seems to make a little more sense, although I wonder if it is accurate.

[chiyo]

Depending on the log anaysis method you are using, hits from clicking on one page on your site to another page (internal links) usually count as a referrer if you use default set ups.

Most people filter our referals from their own siteto get a better idea of external referrals.

Such a situation is normal and good.. Really if you have a site that has quite a few pages and good navigation you would be worried if people are only looking at one page and not clicking on to other pages on your site. (unless you sell of that one page of course)...

[Bradley]

Hmm..interesting points. I do know that the lady that owns the site is not too technical savy. She is using an online reporting tool provided by her hosting provider, nomonthlyfees.com. (anyone have any experience with them and can tell me how they report ther numbers?)

I looked at their online manual to see if I could figure things, but this is all that I could find:
[mympc.com...]

If anyone looks at this link, can anyone decipher how they track a unique visitor? Does the documentation really say?

The lady does state that the site gets between 50,000 and 90,000 pageviews per month. (is there anyway pageviews can be a misleading figure - like hits or these "user sessions"?) So, that is ROUGHLY 2,000 pageviews per day. If 400 people per day are hitting the site, it would seem feasbile that people are viewing 5 pages per visit. That seems reasonable.