Read Between the Web Pages
Sun Review March 24, 2001

A recent study released by Statmarket (www.statmarket.com) makes the surprising claim that only a small percentage (6.86%) of global website referrals come from search engines, website directories, or the Internet equivalent of a phone book. Direct navigation and bookmarks together accounted for the largest percentage of referrals with 47%, and Internet links accounted for 46%, according to StatMarket.

"This data shows two things: That most people already know where they want to go on the Web, and that Internet links, such as banner advertising and affiliates, still remain a very viable way to attract customers," said Geoff Johnston, vice president of product marketing for StatMarket.

After reading the StatMarket press release, you might ask "why should I be focusing my efforts on marketing my website to search engines if they refer so little traffic?" However, shifting your marketing budget without looking closely at the data would be a serious mistake.

First and foremost, we must look at the source of the data for the study. StatMarket derives their statistics from their hit counter service HitBox (www.hitboxenterprise.com). Unfortunately, this service is commonly installed only on home pages rather than on all pages of a site. Therefore, HitBox is logically going to count far more referrals that tend to go to homepages than to sub pages of a website. Search engines can drive traffic to any page of a website that is indexed. It is common to have dozens of internal pages ranked very high in several search engines, but few people place hit counters on these internal pages. Hence when HitBox collects its stats, it will show a disproportionate number of referrals from "direct navigation" or bookmarks. And when someone types in a URL directly, it's almost always the home page.

When you do a search using a search engine, you often enter a site through a page other than the homepage. If we consider how hit counters are used on the average website, a large portion of the "global search engine referrals" are not properly accounted for in the StatMarket study. However, regardless of how many people navigate to a site via a bookmark, they must still FIND your site in the first place. And the most common way to do that is by performing a search on a major search engine.

Still have your doubts? Look at any number of other studies out there on where traffic comes from. A recent Forrester Research study that determined that 81% of consumers find Web sites using search engines, and "Links from another site" came in a distant second at just 59%.

Questions or comments? E-mail inge@ingenius.bc.ca or visit www.ingenius.bc.ca/webwoman.