Traffic Analysis

Is this normal? What should I be happy with?

[absolutelyme]

Around last year I started the first real version of a site that I wanted to get established in the travel industry in a particular region. Not to earn money straight up, mind you, but at least to get traffic.

Unfortunately growth has been quite slow and I'm beginning to feel a bit demotivated about the whole thing, maybe I should focus my attention elsewhere... which is a bad idea, because I haven't yet realised the true functionality yet I wanted for the site.

FYI the awstats over the last few months are pretty flat, as follows:

November (so far) 3258 visitors / 36190 pages
October 3248 visitors / 19348 pages
September 3568 visitors / 26329 pages
August 3914 visitors / 31931 pages
July 3943 visitors / 26874 pages

In September I moved the site to an alternate server (China instead of the US), as well as making technical changes, and the amount of visitors seems to have dropped. However, total page views have gone up. This month I introduced Max Media Manager as a banner advertising system, and added a banner advertising another business of mine that is not wholly related. It has been scoring nearly 3000 impressions per week, of which 15 people clicked through. I haven't generated any business, though.

Traffic is highly targeted, the whole things is extremely complex, and investment in the site in terms of my time is huge, but it doesn't seem to be taking off. Basically I'm just after some advice from the experienced, general or specific.

[rocknbil]

This is an excellent question, one that I have limited answers for because I ask it of myself daily, so I'll throw our general stats in. My wife opened her small business retail site last year, we only started really marketing it in February. Or budget is limited, so by "marketing" I mean only search engine submission, a $5/day adWords campaign, and local schmoozing. Prior to February it had under 1000 uniques a month:

Jan 2006 614
Feb 2006 1165
Oct 2006 7554

I know this is still peanuts, but IMO from under 1K to almost 8K in 10 months is phenomenal growth, am I wrong? But this brings me to point one, one of the things that determines how much traffic you will get is how long you've been available. Another, of course, is content.

As for generating business, 3k+ uniques a month should bring you something. So while you're waiting for your traffic to ramp up, figure out what it is they're not finding. Content maybe? Prices not as competitive? Company image or trust issues? How easy is it to use your service, does it take them off site for a purchase, anything long they have to read?

I would bet once you address those your traffic will also skyrocket. But most of all, don't give up. A lot has to do with how long you can hang in there.

[absolutelyme]

Thanks for sharing your own experiences.

I think there is definitely issues with the content that I haven't had time to address. Judging by your figures, however, I'm not doing too badly. I guess I should just hang in there.

Perhaps one of the harder parts of getting well in to this 'occupational webmastery' stuff is sliding down the time you spend on other things and ramping up the time you can spend on your sites, while balancing the budget.

(I am simultaneously starting two businesses, of which the website is only partly related to one... maybe too much workload ;) )

[vite_rts]

@ OP

hI Fellow, I notice you are talking about visitors whereas the other chap mentioned uniques,

You may find that an enomous percentage of your visitors are spiders or robot generating what looks like decent traffic , but is nothing of the sort.

Sometimes, 50-70% of my visitor hits are spiders as indicated by my 2 analytics packages plus my own IP filter device, if you have a large number of pages in your site, the larger the number of spider visits you'll have

I am also struggling to build up geniue traffic, ppc is a valid source if you can afford it

[vite_rts]

@ Rocknbill

Hi there did you submit to all the little engines as well, you know, those ones whose names we generally don't remember

Also, do the little search engines spider dmoz for sites?

[rocknbil]

No, just the big ones. As you probably know, many of the minor engines use the same databases as the larger ones. The question is what does everyone in your geographic zone use to search the web?

I should probably mention that search engine submission is a deprecated method unless the site is completely new. Most of the major search engines will index your site and re-visit it once it's in their database, but for a new site, suggesting it will get you in that loop sooner.

I agree a percentage of unique visits are spiders, one must eliminate that from the equation, but most of the ones I get appear to be large number of "page views" for every visit. In that respect I'm going to take a wild guess, 10% of the unique visits are search engines indexing the site? Honestly I haven't really sorted them out, I suppose I should . . .

[absolutelyme]

My visitors were 'unique visitors' as defined by awstats, after throwing away spiders, search engines, etc.

[vite_rts]

Hi absolutelyme

A couple of things

If your target audience is the US, a server in china, with a IP geolocated in China, on an international tld, like .com, .info,.biz .net, org, is probably a very bad idea for Search engine traffic

Next, my new start on the internet, now 6 months old gets 60 to 120 uniques per day, spread over 2 active sites an other not really active sites, an I must say that at this level business is not good,
I am thinking that one really needs upwards of 300 uniques per day for decent business to flow, i got that figure from some unrestricted PPC i did, it worked well at that level

So, I just a beginner think out loud, I wish us luck

cheers