Search Engines Refer Only a Small Percentage of Traffic...

Source: WebSideStory's StatMarket

[tedres]

Search Engines Refer Only a Small Percentage of Traffic to Web Sites Worldwide
[biz.yahoo.com...]
[websidestory.com...]

Quick stats:

Direct navigation/bookmarks: 47.01% of global referrals
Internet links: 46.13% of global referrals
Search sites: 6.86% of global referrals

Direct navigation and bookmarks include sites that are typed directly into the address bar and sites that are bookmarked on a user's browser.

Internet links include banner advertising and other paid links, affiliates, and sponsorships. It does not include links from e-mail campaigns and newsgroups.

Search referrals are those users that are referred to other sites from search engines.
---
The only date associated with the report is Dec 17th. Does that mean they measured on that day only - a Sunday in the middle of Christmas Shopping season? Where do banner ads from search engines get placed? Are the sites that use statmarket/Hitbox typical of all internet sites? What's the breakdown by country?

I may contact them to get more clarification, but in the meantime, what other questions can be raised?

And beyond questions of how accurate are these conclusions, how much weight does WebSideStory carry?

[chiyo]

i remember this is discussed a lot at search engine forums like this.

It all depends on the site of course, and remember that getting in the SE's is an art. The great majority of sites dont optimise at all. People here i would guess would have a greater ppercentage becuase of their interest in optimization.

Add also to the mix the vast number of sites that dont really want public traffic; they have a website cause they have to or more intranet focussed.

[eljefe3]

>>Direct navigation/bookmarks: 47.01% of global referrals
Internet links: 46.13% of global referrals
Search sites: 6.86% of global referrals

Take Webmasterworld as an example for the above. Once you found the site, you probably bookmarked it. To go from one forum to another you follow a link instead of going to a search engine to find the topic.

I believe that these stats are skewed in that this takes into account every website and click you make regardless of if it's your first visit to the site, or your 1000th.

A better and more accurate stat might be for how someone finds a website for the first time. Here I believe the number will be somewhere in the 80-90% range.

[Machiavelli]

Chiyo has an excellent point. More important than "where is the most traffic coming from at the moment" is "where is the most potential for producing traffic, when considering the time and money needed to produce it".

This will depend greatly on what you are trying to sell (if anything at all), and what efficient methods already exist to get your site found on the web.

The beauty of SEO, certainly in the past, was that it was ludicrously cheap - in a way, getting something for nothing. Now that there may be increasing costs to it all, the finer points of SEO may soon not be the benefit they were.

[rencke]

PC Data Online has been showing search engine share of all clicks around 6% for a long time. But remember, those 6% translate into >300 million searches per day which is enough to push the major engines and directories to the very top of all Internet sites, as shown in this report:
[pcdataonline.com...]

Also to keep in mind: All those bookmarks and all those external links must have gotten there somehow and one way is through a previous visit to a search engine.

The day is long gone where I am and so far I haven't visited an SE yet, but clicked myself around WebmasterWorld more than once. The logging software on my PC will tally my clicks today as a bad day for the SE:s and this will eventually wind up in MMXI statistics, where they will be multiplied by 3000.

[Bentler]

Here's an interesting study from the 9th World Wide Web Conference in Amsterdam last year. It's entitled, "Web Search Behavior of Internet Experts and Newbies" and represents a detailed analysis of how people find information on the Internet. The upshot is that 90% of info searches utilize a search engine at some step along the way.

[www9.org...]

-Fred

[rcjordan]

>the upshot is that 90% of info searches utilize a search engine at some step along the way

Hey Bentler, thanks! I've tried very hard not to rant about how far OFF the mark I think the single-digit SE referral figures are. My gut call has always been around 60-70% for my travel info sites.

And welcome to WmW!

[Mike_Mackin]

Bentler

Welcome & nice link.