A record traffic weekend sounds good. But was the traffic valuable?
All web traffic is not created equal. Most web site owners know this, and smart domain name parkers understand it, too. Yet I frequently see people new to the industry saying “hey, a visitor is a visitor and a click is a click, right?” The answer is an unequivocal “no”.
Consider this weekend on Domain Name Wire. On a typical business day I typically have 20-30 people surfing at DNW at any given time, and on weekends the number tampers off.
But a story I wrote about Toys.com losing its Google rankings made it to the front page of Digg on Saturday. At the peak Saturday, I had well over 500 people on the site at a time. I had about 30,000 page views on Saturday and Sunday alone. (Clarification: 30,000 combined across both days).
This sounds great, and I’m not complaining. But was this good traffic?
It’s not nearly as good as getting 30,000 visitors from Google search, Domaining.com, or my other sources of traffic. On the face of it, you may think a Digg visitor is “qualified” since they clicked on a link and were aware of what content they’d see. People say this about parked pages all the time (“The person clicked on the ad, so why does it matter where the visitor came from?”)
But the typical Digg visitor doesn’t view more than one page and hangs around for about 16 seconds. I count a “good” visitor as someone who views more than one page, stays on the site for a couple minutes, interacts with the community by leaving comments, considers returning to the site, and is hopefully a qualified visitor for one of my advertisers.
Here’s a look at my top 10 referrers over the past month, ranked by average time of visit:
As you can see, the typical person visiting from Digg isn’t highly targeted and leaves the site after reading one article (if that). This is typical of most “social” traffic, which is a quick hit and then moves onto the next site. To be sure, a small percentage of the visitors are more qualified and will return to DNW in the future.
Compare this to traffic from domain name related sites and people who search a domain name term on Google (or click from the RSS feed on Google Reader). They are highly targeted and more likely to stick around. They’re also more likely to leave a comment or click on an advertiser’s banner (this is one reason I don’t sell ads by CPM…that would just incentivize me to drive lots of low value traffic).
Sometimes an influx of non-domainer traffic is good. For example, when a TechCrunch article links to DNW I see an uptick in banner clicks. The TechCrunch audience is technical in nature but doesn’t know as much about domain names. A visitor might see National A-1’s ad for buying domains and say “Hey, I’m a techie who registered some domains in the 90s. I should see what this is about”.
You can make a similar argument for a parked page. Type-in traffic is probably best, since someone said to themselves “I’m looking for fruit cobbler, so I’ll type in “fruitcobbler.com” because it’s intuitive. Residual search engine links are a rung below that, because people think they are going to a particular article or information source, and will not find exactly what they expected. As for purchased traffic and arbitrage? You get the picture.
Steve M says
What?! You mean sevenmile isn’t one of your top 10 referrers? 😉
Andrew Allemann says
Steve – I actually still do get a good amount of traffic from SevenMile, even after it’s been inactive for so long.
Steve M says
..yea; like me, Andrew. 😉
Just got in the habit of “working” off of Frank’s site…such an easy address to remember.