Percentage of referrals from Google.co.uk?

versus Google.com

[vitaplease]

I have been ploughing through my Webtrends stats of my .com site, hosted in the Netherlands and found this to be strange:

month june:

Google.com 3500 referrals
Google.co.uk 80 referrals

and for the same period:

most active countries:

USA 8000 visits
UK 200 visits

Given the relative population, two things come to mind:

1. Less people on-line relative to population in the UK than US
2. People use Goolge less in the UK
3. People who do use Google in the UK use the "pages from the UK" more often.
- or - have the google.com installed as default.

In this thread [webmasterworld.com...]
similar low google.co.uk percentages were presented (at that time automatic Google redirects did take place?).

Are there general UK-IP recognition problems?
How can these low UK numbers be explained?

[edited by: vitaplease at 1:35 pm (utc) on July 5, 2002]

[Iguana]

Your google.co.uk figures sound very low. I just checked my June figures and
Google.com 13000
Google.co.uk 2500

My site is uk based (although a .com) but I can't believe that people really click on the UK only button every time they want to search.

With my site, searches are music-related and mainly for the name of a band - so the geography of where the page is shouldn't be important. Maybe it's something to do with the theme of your site related to the google.co.uk users? Perhaps they are all music junkies and come to me?

[Abrexa_UK]

I think that most people in the UK just use the default Google.com searches - especially those with the toolbar installed.

The same applies to all of the main search engines - UK visitors often visit the main '.com' version instead of the region specific. This is why some of the larger portals have installed those intensely annoying and patronising redirect scripts to push people into the UK versions. Let's hope Google never stoops so low.

[vitaplease]

Abrexa,

Are you saying Google does not automatically redirect to google.co.uk in England?

If Google toolbar searches give google.com referals in the stats, than I still find a relatively low UK referal percentage compared to other countries (given that the searchers from those countries most probably also use the toolbar).

Iguana,

check the thread in the first message. Others also have low (though not as bad) google.co.uk referal percentages.

and thanks for both your inputs..

[bateman_ap]

I am based in the UK and have a IP that is correctly recognised as being in the UK but use google.com and am never redirected. And never really ever click on the UK sites only button.

When I search for something I don't want to just limit my search to servers based in the UK, if I want to tie it down a bit more i'll just put UK at the end of my search which pretty much sorts everything out

[Iguana]

Vitaplease

looking at the thread you link to (you've left a trailing comma in the link by the way) there's a large variation in pattern of referrals - depending on the type of site.

I suspect that Google use in the uk will be very biased towards the internet-savvy user who has discovered for him/herself that Google is a superior search engine. I've never seen an advert for Google over here, but there have been TV campaigns for Lycos, AskJeeves, and some Yahoo. Of course, the internet-savvy people will be just as likely to go straight to Google itself rather than wasting time talking to his little brother.

[Iguana]

Hi again

I just checked a days logs and I found that 38 out of 49 google.co.uk searches were done using the UK only filter.

[tigger]

odd my figures for .com & .co.uk are almost the same.

so far this month

.co.uk 2579
.com 2873

[billy_t9]

---------june2002-------------
google.com --- 8500
google.co.uk-- 0890

us --- 11000
uk --- 2200

[dcheney]

of course UK is a wee bit smaller than the US...

[europeforvisitors]

For June:

1st - www.google.com - 30.37%
6th - www.google.co.uk - 2.92%

Overall, Google in its various incarnations delivered 62.06% of my search referrals in June.

[ukgimp]

For June: for what its worth

Referers
com 4629
co.uk 489

Countries
UK 54447
US 25435

[jimbo_mac]

>>>>odd my figures for .com & .co.uk are almost the same.

so far this month:
co.uk - 36%
com - 35%

which one will finish first at the end of the month??
I have a got .com name.

the only worry is most of my traffic is from google - wasnt so nice a few months back when I had the PR0 penalty.

[GodLikeLotus]

June 2002

1. www.google.com 34.74%
2. www.google.co.uk 24.15%

.co.uk domaim aimed at the UK

[vitaplease]

The population ratio of USA [census.gov] to UK [cia.gov]= 287 to 60 or 4.8 to 1

According to Google [google.com] (see the graph lower on the page) the ratio of US searches to UK searches is approx 4 to 1.

In this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

google.com to google.co.uk

Edge 41 to 1
Keyplyr 28 to 1
Eric Jarvis 18 to 1
Uhuru 10 to 1
Kapow 8 to 1
Mark_roach 3 to 1

and half of the above messages 10 to 1

So the preferred settings (internationally) to google.com (addicts) must play an important role, plus the fact that members of WebmasterWorld probably use google.com a lot for searching their own site, thereby distorting the mentioned stats.

Does anyone know how Google's ads-click-throughs are shown in Webtrends stats under >>Referrers >>Top Referring Sites ?

Do they - as standard - show up as Google.com referrals and American visits?
That could also be a reason for a lot higher google.com stats and more US visitors?

[4eyes]

Loads of people in the UK use Google.com - I have from day one, been thru God knows how many ISPs and never been redirected.

[vitaplease]

4eyes,

thats interesting, even if you delete all cookies etc?
that would mean Google has some problem locating UK IP's?

here in the Netherlands you are always redirected to google.nl

[webmasterworld.com...]