Web Traffic Analysis Part II

There is another interesting phenomenon I have noticed over time with my blog traffic.

Most hits on a website can be placed in one of three categories:

1. Direct Traffic comes from someone who has your web page bookmarked or typed the web address directly into their web browser.
2. Referring Sites come from links that other people have placed on their web sites directing people to your web site.
3. Search Engines come from someone Googling things like:

• Poop specific gravity.
• What naught.
• Navy officer housing complaints Oahu.
• What is the nature of the tattle-tale.
• How to kill Hale Koa trees.
• Speedo grandpa diving
• "Did you figure it out yet" Top Gun quotes best pilot
• How long will doorbells last?
• old weenie arm George Washington
• how do handing cap people go pee and poop
• land shark beer nonprofit for kids
• fun things to do with a weenie
• missed toilet pee
• what is another word for big boobs in hawaii
• spanking boy scouts

Aside: I kid you not. Those are actual Google searches that brought people to MY blog.

When I first started blogging, most of my traffic was direct traffic from family and friends that I told about my blog.

As time went on, the percentage of referring sites went up as I made friends in the blogosphere and those friends put links to my blog on their blogs. It's either that, or I've written some earth-shatteringly witty and interesting blog post and a bunch of people provide a link to it.

After a while I got bored of looking at my blog stats and just stopped checking for a while. About the time I stopped checking my stats regularly, I was sitting at about 33% direct traffic, 33% referring websites, and 33% search engines.

I recently went back just to take a look at my average daily hits and percentages, and the pie-chart of direct traffic versus referring websites versus search engines was quite different. Now that I've been writing for over 15 months, I have written about enough different topics that my blog shows up in more and more internet searches. I now get about 45% of my traffic from search engines, 30% from links, and 25% from direct traffic.

I know some of you more experienced web designers and bloggers are probably saying, "Well duh!" These are probably basic patterns of web traffic that you'd find in some introductory textbook on running a website and what to expect in your first year online. In the absence of any such formal training on running a website or what patterns to expect though, I found the trend interesting.

(You may now silence the "geek!" alarm going off in the back of your head.)