Traffic as we all know as bloggers is one of the most crucial stats to the websites success. For many bloggers, traffic from Google or ‘organic’ traffic is their main source of traffic (organic traffic being traffic you got naturally). However, understanding the traffic can be quite difficult. You will be thinking ‘what is there is understand?’. Well, from me just looking through my Google traffic, I made a big discovery.
We all like to check out our stats be it in WordPress or Blogger. For blogger, we can see our traffic source from Google as this:
You will see two types of traffic from Google:
- www.google.com/url?
- www.google.com/ everything else (this can be /search?, /#hl=en and many more.
What does each Traffic Sources from Google mean?
Well, go to Google and type in anything, let’s say ask will online (link to search results from ‘ask will online’) Look at the address bar. You will see something similar to this:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ask+will+online
If you click on the askwillonline.com link, my traffic from Google will appear as this.
Now, go back to the search results and open the same link in a new tab, you should see a URL in the address bar similar to mine very quickly before the address bar goes to askwillonline.com:
As you can see, the traffic source to my blog now is .co.uk/url?. So now you will be able to tell if visitors opened your site straight from Google or opened it in a new tab. But what does this mean for you?
- Those that opened in a new tab will have most likely opened other results in Google so are multi-surfing for what they are searching. This will get a higher bounce rate as the visitor will know they can click straight off your site and read the next site they opened in a new tab.
- Those that clicked straight onto your blog from Google (i.e. .com/search or anything apart from .com/url?) will spend more time on your site and will have a lower bounce rate. This is because they would rather read the post than go back and look for another search result.
Ultimately, the best traffic from Google is the traffic where visitors didn’t open your blog up in a new window or tab. Just keep that in mind where you browse your traffic stats…
Very helpful info.Thank you