Referrals - what's a healthy ratio ?

How much of your traffic should be referred ?

[fom2001uk]

If you get 60% of all visits from "No Referrer / bookmark", this is good, right ?

This means you have 60% website awareness, or am I being naive ?

This of course means 40% are referred from somewhere. What is a good percentage of referrals ?

What should the ratio be, are there any healthy minimums, for example ?

I always say you should get at least 10% of yout visits from the search engines and directories.

What do you all think ?

[Brett_Tabke]

Referral statistics themselves are a very dicey stat to run your site off of. There are vast differences in the way browsers generate referral strings.

I think a better statistic to look at is the number of clicks per unique user. Although AOL throws that stat out of whack with its proxy cache, it is still more valid than referrals.

> I always say you should get at least 10% of your
> visits from the search engines and directories.

That is going to depend a great deal on the site. Look at us here, we get less than 2% of our visitors from search engines. Other sites we have upwards of 40%.

[ggrot]

It depends on the type of site as well. One would expect that if you are building a community type site or a product site where you are betting on lead losers and repeat customers, return visitors and awareness is more important. On the other hand if you are a small company which is using their web page as basically a brochure for people looking for them online, a high percentage of offsite and search engine referrers are perfectly acceptable.

[fom2001uk]

"number of clicks per unique user"

How do you calculate that, Brett ?

[skibum]

you could do (views/visitor sessions) which would give you page views per visit - roughtly - or you could do (views/unique visitors) which would give you an approximate number or pages each individual visitor looked at during one visit or multiple visits. If possible filter out the spiders cause taht can severly distort the data.

[WebGuerrilla]

>>It depends on the type of site as well.

Another factor is where you are in the lifecycle of the site. It's quite common for a new site to get 40-60% of it's traffic from SE's.

As time progresses, more people find the site in search engines and end up linking to it, so the additional referrals begin to grow. Down the road, the total percentage of traffic from SE's will naturally drop.

That whole cycle is what makes SEO an often overlooked form of viral marketing.

[NetGrease]

My take on this is that it's referrals from other related sites which is most important to my business. And of course, the bigger the referrer, the better - especially if you're a relatively new site (say pre-18 month mark?).

However, I still think that a bookmarked referal is arguably the ultimate compliment.

;)