Website Statistics - Top Referring Sites and URLs

Posted on October 26, 2004
Filed Under Website Statistics |

 

Argh! This is my second try - I had a wonderful article typed up in my blog backend, hit Post… but instead of posting, it died. And disappeared. Completely. Drat.

OK… trying again.

There are many reasons why you might want to use the Top Referring URL and Top Referring Site statistics - they can point out some interesting trends in your website customers. But first, let’s define both of them:

Referring Site: the site name of the place the visitor was before coming to my website.

Referring URL: very similar to site - the specific URL of the place the visitor was before coming to my website.

In both cases, you can also get “No Referrer” - that’s when the user has either typed in the URL in a browser rather than clicking on a link and “surfing” to get to your site, or he/she has your site bookmarked as their homepage in their browser.

With those definitions in hand, let’s take a look at my website’s Top Referring Sites and URLs from June 1 until today:

Referring Sites:

1   No Referrer   529,835 
2   www.kclibrary.org   250,501 
3   www.kcpl.lib.mo.us   35,231 
4   kclibrary.org   17,484 
5   www.google.com   13,736 
6   images.google.com   5,854 
7   www.kcforum.net   5,651 
8   www.kcpl.org   5,197 
9   search.yahoo.com   5,027 
10   catalog.kclibrary.org   3,580 
11   search.msn.com   3,114 
12   p218.ezboard.com   2,692 
13   aolsearch.aol.com   2,592 
14   kcpl.lib.mo.us   1,993 
15   kcpl.org   1,723 
16   www.kcskyscrapers.com   1,663 
17   images.kclibrary.org   1,487 
18   www.kansascity.com   1,229 
19   staff   922 
20   www2.lib.udel.edu   828 
21   64.233.167.104   782 
22   web.ask.com   696 
23   www.excitementmachine.org   669 
24   members.tripod.com   653 
25   www.worldcatlibraries.org   609

Referring URLs:

1   No Referrer   529,698 
2   http://www.kclibrary.org/   182,328 
3   http://www.kcpl.lib.mo.us/   24,693 
4   http://www.google.com/search   13,315 
5   http://kclibrary.org/   11,684 
6   http://www.kclibrary.org/guides/searchengines/   8,775 
7   http://www.kclibrary.org   7,593 
8   http://images.google.com/imgres   5,796 
9   http://www.kcforum.net/forum/viewthread.php   5,628 
10   http://search.yahoo.com/search   4,632 
11   http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/list.cfm   4,400 
12   http://www.kcpl.org/   3,866 
13   http://www.kclibrary.org/calendar.cfm   3,402 
14   http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/subjects.cfm   2,952 
15   http://www.kclibrary.org/guides/teens/   2,721 
16   http://www.kclibrary.org/index.cfm   2,451 
17   http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search   2,437 
18   http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/   2,384 
19   http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/media.cfm   2,226 
20   http://kclibrary.org/temp_staffsearch.cfm   2,063 
21   http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/search.cfm   2,018 
22   http://search.msn.com/results.aspx   1,791 
23   http://p218.ezboard.com/fjambandsfrm2.showmessage   1,777 
24   http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/collections.cfm   1,712 
25   http://www.kcskyscrapers.com/kcforum/viewtopic.php   1,641

Interesting - there’s a number of things you can glean from these stats:

  1. A LOT of customers know our URL, and either type it in to their browser, or have it bookmarked in their personal bookmarks. That’s very cool! It also shows that our short URL (kclibrary.org) is easy to remember, and has some “brand recognition.” We need to keep that up!
  2. I suppose it also means that a lot of people are hitting our site from inside the library on one of our public PCs - where our website is set as the default homepage.
  3. Search engines are our friends! Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask Jeeves have all visited us pretty heavily - those search engines brought in around 30,000 visitors. So obviously, customers are finding us using search engines (more on that in a future post).
  4. Our “other URLs” are still helpful. We used to be kcpl.lib.mo.us, then we changed to kcpl.org for a short while, and now we are www.kclibrary.org (but also use the shorter “kclibrary.org”). Each of those other URLs has sent more traffic our way - approximately 60,000 visitors. So it’s a good idea to keep those URLs up-to-date on our name server (and continue paying for the kcpl.org domain name). Even though we’d consider those URLs to be incorrect and not really matching our brand recognition, they still bring in a sizeable chunk of web visitors.

So it’s important for us to remember to keep adding unique, original content to our pages - customers are finding it in a variety of ways!

That’s all for now.

 

Share: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Furl
  • Technorati
  • BlinkList
  • Reddit

Comments

One Response to “Website Statistics - Top Referring Sites and URLs”

  1. TS on October 2nd, 2005 2:31 am

    Nice Blog!!!   I thought I’d tell you about a site that will let give you places where
    you can make extra cash! I made over $800 last month. Not bad for not doing much. Just put in your
    zip code and up will pop up a list of places that are available. I live in a small area and found quite
    a few. MAKE MONEY NOW

Leave a Reply