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Friday, July 14, 2006

Traffic "Patterns" from useit.com

A few good nuggets from the useit.com site this week.  Traffic patterns using statistical measurements.  The data on referring sites caught my attention:
.Zipf distribution of incoming referrals from other sites, sorted by traffic rank
The data follows a predictable pattern except for the #1 referrer: Google.  They note:
"The chart's one obvious exception to the theory is that the site that referred the most visitors accounted for many more visits than predicted. Google (depicted as an extra-large dot) referred 257,040 visitors; in theory, it should have referred only 52,479.

Google is five times as popular as the theory predicts, but this phenomenon could fade as other search engines catch up. Only time will tell."
I suppose something will come along eventually to change the dramatic influence of Google, but for now it sure seems like the pattern will continue for awhile.

The next comment is spot on as well:
"Also, while Google is disproportionally important, when taken together, the other 35,631 referring sites accounted for 35% more traffic. Clearly, it's not a good idea to focus only on #1. "
Filed in: analytics

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2 comments:

  1. Eric: The article was a great read and your post is spot on. It is usually very hard for us to stress to our decision makers that yes you should spend time and energy on SEO and optimizing for Google but don't forget that the entire world is not Google and care about rest of the world as well. There is just so much hype working against that latter recommendation.

    Great post.

    -Avinash.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Avinash. Definitely smart folks over at useit!

    ReplyDelete

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