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What is the conventional wisdom on the right balance of SE traffic from different sources?
Google: 42.2 %
Yahoo: 24 %
MSN: 22.8 %
AOL: 5.1 %
AltaVista: 2 %
Dogpile: 1.5 %
Lycos: 0.7 %
Earthlink: 0.4 %
Looksmart: 0.3 %
Yahoo/Google: 0.3 %
Alltheweb: 0.2 %
Mamma: 0.2 %
AT&T: 0.1 %
Sympatico: 0.1 %
Virgilio: 0.1 %
Fireball: 0.05 %
DMOZ: 0.05 %
t-online: 0.04 %
Evreka: 0.03 %
Referral percentages [webmasterworld.com]
What do yours look like?
Hot and Cold [webmasterworld.com]
Best ROI so far is Google followed by link referrals from competitors.
No. That only indicates those AOLers *who search with the AOL browser*. If an AOLer goes direct to google.com, that shows up as a Google referrer. While I concede that the clue level of AOLers has to be the worst on the Internet (AOLers using that horribly buggy Usenet interface that breaks crossposts ticks me off no end), a lot of AOLers do know how to use IE and go to Google direct.
No matter how much we try and cultivate traffic from PPC and other search engines if everyone uses Google what can you do to aleviate your reliance on Google. Thats why many businesses have all their eggs in one basket. Because there is no alternative. Merry Christmas everyone.
We find MSN referrals convert to sales better than Google/AOL. Although our MSN referrals are considerably less than Google/AOL, they convert to approximately equal sales.
As a side note, we prefer to pay INK $25/page for guaranteed inclusion than to rely on the "Google gamble" to include us favorably each month. (Of course, we do both and everything else that provides us with a favorable ROI.)