First, how about a chart:

That’s the number of visits to the site over the past year. I’ll do another version of that chart further below and call out what caused some of those spikes. But some key takeaways:

• Visits: 3,250,000
• Pageviews: 5,200,000
• Average Time On Site: 1 minute, 23 seconds
• Percent Of New Visitors: 71

How are people getting to us? Another chart:

To recap those for the picture challenged:

• Referring Sites: 53%
• Search Engines: 28%
• Direct Visits: 18%

Time to drill down. I’ll give you a table, which I’m going to resort later in various ways:

Digg by far leaves all the other referring sites in the dust. But how do all those Digg visitors measure up, in terms of engagement? I’ve bolded in each column the three sites that lead for that particular metric. In terms of pages viewed, most from Digg only read a single page. In comparison, those from Eric Ward, our own Search Marketing Expo blog, and the New York Times read nearly three pages during a visit to Search Engine Land.

Pages viewed aren’t the entire story, of course. A page view means someone loaded a page, but did they spend much time actually reading it? The stats say most Digg visitors did not, which doesn’t surprise me given the comments you often see on Digg, where it seems like people are only reacting to a story as summarized, rather than properly reading it. Digg visitors were fourth for spending the least amount of time on the site. In contrast, visitors from Eric Ward led by spending over 4 1/2 minutes here, on average. Visitors from my Daily SearchCast podcast site spend nearly as long, with those from our Search Marketing Expo site spending nearly 4 minutes.

I’m especially proud to note that visitors from our own social media site – Sphinn — spent nearly three minutes when they came to an article at Search Engine Land. Three minutes, versus about 18 seconds for a Digg visitor. Search marketers have taken plenty a bad rap by some at Digg. At least the stats give some indication that search marketers are a thoughtful, considerate bunch that actually take the time to read articles before commenting.

Digg is NOT the site with the most newest visitors to Search Engine Land, though it is fairly high. Instead, those are two political blogs, no doubt having people come to view our story about George W. Bush no longer being a miserable failure on Google.

Now some problems with the chart above. Mainly, it’s that it considers all "referring" sites to be the same. In reality, there are these general classes of sites:

• Social Media: You get traffic from people sharing your content with others.
   
• Feed readers: These are generally your existing readers who see that you’ve posted something through a feed on their personalized home page or start page and click through.
   
• News Sites: Places where you generally go to find news.
   
• Topic Sites: These are web sites about particular topics. For us, generally sites about search.

How do they break down in terms of our traffic? Social media:

The feed reading sites:

The news sites:

The topic sites:

Now to summarize, I’m leaving off the feed reading sites. As I explained, these are pretty much people who already know about new content on our site through feeds or email we send them. That’s super important, but it’s not quite the same thing as a referral from another sites. The percentage breakdown of referrals:

• Social media: 79 percent
• Topic sites: 13 percent
• News sites: 8 percent

Short story? There’s a lot of gold in those social media sites. Sure, we might joke about making top 9 lists to please the audiences there or consider carefully the headlines we put on stories to appeal to the social media crowd. And we can say the audience isn’t as engaged. But the sheer amount of traffic they can send can’t be ignored. For more on that, I’ll give you this short reading list:

• Categorizing Social Media Sites
• Social Media Marketing: The New SEO?
• Beyond Google: Social Media Engines First, Other Search Engines Second

Also see Search Engine Land’s Social Media Marketing category and Let’s Get Social column and for past articles. Don’t forget — our SMX Social Media show also returns in April 2008 to help people get up to speed on social media marketing.

How about search engines, what this entire site is about? As I blogged early on last year, the biggest struggle Search Engine Land has had with search engines is being a new "untrusted" site. As someone who ran a "trusted" domain with a 10 year history, I know that virtually anything I posted about a topic at that site could do well over other sites, similar to what we just posted about today hitting Google. But a new site? Sadly, the authority of authorship from an old site doesn’t get passed along to your new domain.

Here’s what I said about the challenge back in January 2007:

Wait a minute! Did I say miserable failure! Wasn’t there something in the news about that again recently? Oh, yeah — in fact, it was our top story last month, as you might recall. And so what happens on Google if I do that search?

Our story isn’t in the first results. WebProNews, which mentions the story, makes it to the second page. Search Engine Guide and Search Engine Lowdown, with really short fresh stories on the subject, also make it to that page. But our comprehensive piece? Nah — we’re invisible.

Keep going through the results, and you’ll find other pages that mention our article, including Boing Boing or our listing on Digg:

But us? Not in the top 100 listings.

Sigh. It’s stuff like this that makes Google sound like a mockery when they suggest there is no "sandbox" or "sandbox-like effect" that holds new sites back. Clearly from our experience, there is. It’s easy to find many searches like the ones above, where other sites that reference our own content outrank that content. It makes no sense, nor is it particularly relevant.

I know it will change, and I’ll patiently wait while we build up our trust – though c’mon, just how many trusted links do they want? We’ve got plenty so far! I’m also increasing our domain registration from the initial year I did to 10 years, which just might possibly make Google think we’re going to be around and are a tiny bit more trustworthy.

It has gotten better since then:

That’s a chart of all our search-related traffic over the past year, and you can see it has climbed. We probably get around 2,000 to 4,000 visits per day from search now, versus the 500 to 800 per day back last January. Those two big spikes, by the way, are due to traffic from searches on fires in Southern California and people looking for how to track Santa Claus. I’ll come back to those in a bit.

Who sends the traffic? Here you go:

I look at those stats, with Google being so far beyond everyone else, and all the things I said last January seem still perfectly applicable:

Why’s TechCrunch doing so well on Google and not the other major search engines? It could be that TechCrunch is optimized best for Google and missing out on the other major search players. But c’mon. search marketers know that the major search engines don’t have that many differences in how they rank pages. Yes, maybe if you load your URLs up with keywords, you might do a bit better at Microsoft Live.com. Perhaps if you do paid inclusion, you might see more traffic flowing from Yahoo. But a page that does well with Google generally should have as good a chance at doing well with the others.

Another caveat is that TechCrunch is probably getting Google News and Google Blog Search traffic mixed in with the overall "organic" figures (see this recent stats post I did about Search Engine Land traffic sources to understand this more). Sure, including those sources as part of Google searches overall could help make Google seem an even bigger resource. But the reality is that many sites constantly report that Google is by far the search traffic leader.

Rich Skrenta’s post Google’s true search market share is 70% back in December was a great call to renew attention about this fact. My own post after his, Google By Far The Leader, If You Look At Site Owner Traffic Stats, provides some further perspective. Overall, it’s hard not to feel that the other major search engines aren’t major traffic drivers, despite the shares of searches they generate. Certainly the stats I’ve been doing for Search Engine Land keep reflecting this.

Search Engine Land is a Google News & Yahoo News source (for the record, we had to request inclusion in both places like everyone else — it wasn’t automatically done, and we got in at both places after about a month). I know that keyword-based searches from Google News are no doubt fueling the Google pool. But it’s still amazing to see someone like Yahoo – with supposedly around half the share of Google in terms of search activity — still so far behind.

Top terms?

That’s nearly 1 million visits to the site through search. Absolutely – social media is a traffic driver that can’t be ignored. But so is search. Just a little care of basic things — title tags, ensuring you can be crawled, and so on – and there’s a continual stream of traffic that can flow your way.

In particular, note the "Other" line at the bottom. In 2007, there were nearly 300,000 different search terms that sent traffic. Over 80 percent of search related traffic was NOT from the top 15 terms. That’s search’s long tail in action (see Screaming About The Search Tail for more about this).

Leaving behind web visits, how are things on the feed front? Here’s the chart:

We currently stand at 18,333 subscribers as of January 1, 2008. That’s down due to the holidays. Our high about two weeks ago was 19,948 — just shy of hitting the 20,000 mark.

Some readers may recall I had a goal to hit 15,000 by the end of the year. I made it with lots to spare! Actually, I have to revise that goal to around 18,000. See that big spike on the chart? That was when Google Reader stats started getting reported to FeedBurner for the first time for all sites across the web. For us, it immediately gave us about 3,000 more subscribers. I did make the goal in the end, and even with a bit to spare. For 2008? I’d like to hit 40,000 or more.

By the way, some will recall that Google Reader and iGoogle themselves are reporting direct stats, plus you can get them from places like Bloglines. More about this can be found in the articles below:

• How Feedburner Adds Up Subscriber Numbers
• Google Reader Now Reporting Subscriber Figures

Figures for us, as of January 2, 2008:

• Bloglines subscribers: 1,814
• iGoogle subscribers: 1,629
• Google Reader subscribers: 6,180

And the feed reader breakdown from FeedBurner for the last month:

As always, we appreciate those who subscribe to our feeds. You’ll find a full list of our feeds here, and here are the buttons for our main feed, to help you along:

Get Our Search Feed:

You can also can get special pages or tabs for many internet start pages that list headlines from us and other search news sources. Check them out below:

• iGoogle Search News Tab
• My Yahoo Search News Page
• Windows Live Search News Page
• Netvibes Search News Tab
• Pageflakes Search News Page

If you want yet more ways to keep up with us, try these options:

• Facebook: Our Search News App
• Facebook: Search Engine Land Page
• Facebook: Search Engine Land Group
• Twitter: Search Engine Land Feed

What about good old email?

• 5,250 readers take our SearchCap newsletter via email. My goal was to be at 17,500 at this point, so I have some revising to do. I’ll aim for hitting 15,000 by the end of this year. Honestly, we think there’s no better way to get a full recap of everything that happened in search than to take SearchCap. Check it out, via email or feed.
   
• 2,800 readers take our Search Month newsletter.
   
• 100% Organic is our most popular column in terms of email subscriptions, with about 600 readers. Many more read it through visits to the site directly. Link Week is at 450, and all but one of our columns has more than 200 email subscribers.

What are people reading when they get here? Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories Of 2007 has our top read stories of the past year with descriptions, and here they are in summary:

1. Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
2. Google 2.0: Google Universal Search
3. Mapping The Southern California Fires
4. Google Universal Search Means Looking For Raccoons Is No Longer Family Friendly
5. Billboard Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm
6. Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American
7. George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google
8. Google Maps Causes US Navy To Change Its Swastika Building
9. Goodbye Froogle, Hello Google Product Search!
10. Google Birthday Logo: Nine Years Old
11. Google Maps Adds Terrain View, Replaces Hybrid View
12. Ask Relaunches: Now "Ask 3D"
13. Larryos, Raisin Brin, Porn Flakes & Other Google Cereals
14. Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
15. Gphone? The Google Phone Timeline
16. The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles
17. Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide
18. Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
19. iGoogle, Personalized Search And You
20. Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools
21. Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
22. Instructions On Tracking Santa With NORAD & Google: The 2007 Edition
23. What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
24. Wikipedia Enters Top Ten Most Visited Sites
25. How To Win Friends And Influence People In Social News Networks

That brings me back to the traffic chart. How’s it look in terms of the spikes? Let’s see:

1. 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 (hit Digg and Reddit)
2. Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs (hit Digg, though over time, Google has sent seven times more traffic)
3. Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools (hit Digg, delicious)
4. Netvibes: Will Google Remain ‘The Start Page For The Internet’? (hit Digg)
5. Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates (hit Digg)
6. George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google (hit Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Netscape)
7. Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American (hit Digg, Crooks and Liars, Stumbleupon)
8. Goodbye Froogle, Hello Google Product Search! (hit Digg, also high traffic from TechCrunch)
9. Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American (hit Digg)
10. Google 2.0: Google Universal Search (hit Digg, and over time, Google’s sent nearly half as much traffic)
11. Ask Relaunches: Now "Ask 3D" (hit Digg)
12. Google Bad On Privacy? Maybe It’s Privacy International’s Report That Sucks (hit Digg)
13. Google Universal Search Means Looking For Raccoons Is No Longer Family Friendly (hit Digg)
14. The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles (hit Digg)
15. How To Win Friends And Influence People In Social News Networks (hit Digg)
16. Larryos, Raisin Brin, Porn Flakes & Other Google Cereals (hit Digg)
17. Google Birthday Logo: Nine Years Old (hit Digg – and number 18 below was on same day)
18. Google Maps Causes US Navy To Change Its Swastika Building (Yahoo Tech, Clicked, then StumbleUpon has sent Digg-level traffic over several months)
19. Billboard Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm (hit Digg, StumbleUpon)
20. Mapping The Southern California Fires (Google News, Planet Chiropractic)
21. The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play (hit Digg)
22. Google Maps Adds Terrain View, Replaces Hybrid View (hit Digg)
23. Instructions On Tracking Santa With NORAD & Google: The 2007 Edition (Google News)
24. Keeping It Private On Google Reader (hit Digg)
25. Deconstructing Google: Chapter 4, After The Google Breakup (hit Digg)

Sometimes I look at the list of top stories and sort of want to sigh. You pour your heart, soul, and energy into a long write-up on some important subject that perhaps few will notice. Then a reader emails you about an image of a dog and a raccoon apparently getting it on — which shows up in regular Google search results — and that’s one of the top stories of the year?

Mostly, I don’t worry or try to measure if a story did well based on immediate views (or total views at all). Especially over time, some stories pick up legs. In fact, I wanted to somehow make a list of the top articles that were NOT driven by social media traffic, but that proved too hard to do quickly. But from the top 25 for the entire year, here are ones that did well without social media love:

1. Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
2. Gphone? The Google Phone Timeline
3. Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide
4. Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
5. iGoogle, Personalized Search And You
6. Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools
7. What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
8. Wikipedia Enters Top Ten Most Visited Sites

Finally, I’ll wrap up our year with some of the recognitions we’ve earned. These are also listed in the bragroll on the site:

• Wall Street Journal Recommended Reading
• Ad Age Power 150 Blog (currently fourth, though on a points shown basis, we’re tied with four others for first)
• Technorati Top 100 Blog (currently 37th)
• TopRank Top 10
• Self Made Minds Top 100
• Larry Chase Top Pick
• SEJ’s Top 2 & 3 SEO Bloggers (and fingers crossed for this year’s awards)
• Best SEM Newsletter
• eBizMBA Top Tech Site, Blog & SEO Blog
• Daily Blog Tips Top 25 SEO Blogs
• Top 50 Marketing Blog To Watch In 2008
• Techmeme Leaderboard Source

Thank you everyone for your support of Search Engine Land over the past year, from our dedicated writers, to our editors, to our sales and technical staff, to our readers that we love to serve!

Google No Longer Linking To Yahoo, MapQuest Maps was our top story, with about 1,000 views. Most people came from Techmeme, about 400 in all. Google keyword searches sent about 100 visitors, with terms like Yahoo and MapQuest seeming to send them from Google News. Then smaller chunks of 10-20 visitors came from places like The Only Republican, Greg Sterling’s blog [who wrote the post and mentioned it there], Google Blogoscoped and Jeremy Zawodny.

The takeaway here is two fold. First, listen to your readers. Our post came out of an email we got from reader Aaron B. Hockley, telling us he spotted the change and noted it on his Another Blogger blog. Taking a look at that, then going a bit further to reconfirm the change and get a comment from Google helped us develop the story further.

Second, reach out to other blogs. If Aaron hadn’t gotten in contact, we might not have seen this via him (and provided a link back). But he did, we did, and I hope new people discovered his blog.

comScore: Google Wins Again & IE7 Doesn’t Stop Microsoft’s Slide was our second most popular story, with about 700 views. Techmeme again lead the referral sources. About 170 people came from there. Google keyword searches sent another 120, from things like microsoft at Google News. Google News also sent another 40 from those browsing headlines. Search Engine Watch noted our write-up, which sent another 40 people our way. Dare Obasanjo of RSS Bandit (my newsreader) kicked over another 10 or so people.

SEO Blogs Under Hack Attack was the third most popular story, with about 500 views. That was driven from SEO sites, SEOmoz sending about 35 visits and the Online Marketing Blog another 10. The bulk of visits came from our own readers, seeing the story showing up in their feeds or in the SearchCap newsletter that we send out.

Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites was the fourth most popular story, with about 400 views. StumbleUpon was a top source, sending about 50 visits. Search Engine Guide shot us another 30. It didn’t make Digg big time, but we’ll take the 10 visits Digg did send! Bruce Clay’s blog sent us another 7 readers.

I had fun doing this story. Often you read about studies briefly, but people don’t dive deep and read into them. Instead, they’ll write about whatever the key points are that are being highlighted by the authors. With this study, it was focused on the impact that long descriptions might have on users in results. I was more interested in the user behavior of interacting with the top results. I also had one of my key audiences in mind, that of search marketers. So I made sure to cover the story in a way to bring the findings home to them. So the takeaway? Read those studies and dig out the interesting nuggets for your particular audience.

Wikiseek: Leveraging Wikipedia For Web Search, Poorly was the fifth most popular story, with Google keyword searches sending the most traffic, about 60. This came off of terms like wikipedia and wikiseek via Google News, as best I can tell. Takeaways here? Think about your page titles, of course. I made sure to have the names of both key players in the page title, to help do better for those words.

Second, not being first can suck! I knew Wikiseek was coming. Many bloggers did. They’d been in contact with several. But the company clearly gave Techcrunch the nod, knowing that handing over to them first would generate a lot of attention. Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim suggested Techcrunch somehow didn’t wait. Not at all. Techcrunch clearly went out with a story "early" with Wikiseek’s cooperation. That fueled getting Techcrunch a ton of Digg love.

Hey, I get to go out with stuff before others at times, and I love when that happens. But if you can’t get the scoop, what can you do. I debated dropping a comment at Digg to my own article. But I didn’t have time to engage in the conversation there. I had a ton of other things to write yesterday. So I avoided doing the link drop. In other cases, this might have been a great way to tap into the traffic blow. Neil Patel has great tips on this in his There Is More to Digg than the Homepage post.

If you can’t get the scoop, what can you do? Do something different. For me, it was easy. I decided to actually use the darn search engine and see how it worked, rather than just write about how it was supposed to work. As it turned out, I found it disappointing. But it would still have been a good different angle if it was great, simply because I didn’t see a lot of people doing comparative reviews.

So that was yesterday, with just under 9,000 page views and 5,100 overall visitors. Overall top sources were:

• Direct Navigation: 1,458 visits
• Google Organic/Keyword Driven: 728 visits
• Techmeme: 526 visits
• Google Home Page/Reader Referrals: 418 visits
• Bloglines: 189

At sixth place as a referral source was Download Squad. I haven’t mentioned them yet. That’s because the were a major source of traffic but not for one of the top five stories yesterday. Instead, they’d seen our More Spotting Google’s Related Searches At Bottom Of Page post and referenced it. That sent about 100 visitors.

There’s another takeaway here. We’d reported on those darn searches back in December. Then I started seeing everyone talk about them again. Part of me thought "old news." But clearly there was a ramp up with these, plus people weren’t aware that these had started over a month ago. So it was time to do a short revisit. Old news can be new news.

Also interesting is how last week’s powerhouse article 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines from Jennifer Slegg kept bringing in the referrals. It still drew 200 views yesterday, with Jen’s own site sending probably around 100 visitors over the past few days, and StumbleUpon contributed as well. When I do the monthly recap, it will be interesting to see if all the traffic from that article from various sources can rival Digg traffic. Sort of tapping into the long tail of referrals, I suppose!

Before I dive into the stories, just a quick tip on what I’m doing, which may be helpful to other Google Analytics users. I’m reviewing the Content By Titles option. I pick a particular day from the calendar (yesterday, in this case), then "Content By Titles" under the "Content Performance" menu.

There’s also a Top Content option that’s a waste of time. That doesn’t show the titles of your articles, so it’s hard to know what exactly was doing well at a glance. Content By Titles is basically the same report — just with page titles! It would be nice if those page titles were also links to your articles, one of my many wish list features.

For each article, there’s a little red button next to the rank number of the article. Click on that, then Cross Segment Performance from the next menu that pops up, then select the Source [Medium] option, like this:

That will show you all the ways that people found that particular article, such as with this report:

25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines from Jennifer Slegg was our top article with about 2,600 unique views. It was the number three article the day before, and I’d mentioned how it made Digg but wasn’t worthy of front page status. Well, the Del.icio.us community respectively disagrees. It made it to the Delicious popular page at first, then moved to be the number one item on the main Delicious home page, around 3pm Eastern time. It stayed on that page for some time. In fact, I had a chuckle when later on, I saw us sitting on the front page along Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Someone bookmarked one of his SEO tools. I don’t remember what exactly which one, and sadly Delicious doesn’t seem to let you go back to see what hit the home page over time.

Delicious sent us about 800 visitors. But then there’s an entire Delicious effect that rolled forward from that. Hitting the Delicious home page meant we made the home page of Popurls, which is a great site that shows the top stories on Digg, Delicious, Reddit and a number of other meme and news sites. That sent over another 300 people. Doggdot does a similar thing and sent 40 people.

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion saw the story, linked and was the third largest referral source sending 80 visitors. Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide linked and sent another 50. Along with this, our feed generated traffic via places like the Google Personalized Home Page, Bloglines and Netvibes. Direct Navigation was another 500 visitors.

I doubt all those people actually directly navigated to this story. Instead, that probably represents some Delicious people who have browsers set not to pass along referrer information plus perhaps people already on Search Engine Land that clicked from the home page to read.

Google Named Fortune’s Best Place To Work, But Rich Early Employees Checking Out was the top article two days ago but still hung in there to be number two yesterday and drove about 370 views. This seemed to be mainly people searching for google on Google News, where the story must have continued to come up, though dropping lower in the rankings on Google News as it became more dated.

Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain was the third most popular article, with 200 views. There was no strong referral source for it. No one really linked over, sniff sniff. But it’s a case where the existing audience can make a difference. That traffic came mostly from feed readers. Web Pro News mentioned the story and gave us 6 views, not a ton on its own but pretty high when you compare to Google for that day. We picked up another three views via being on the home page of Spam Abuse.

Google Blog Search’s People Search Spam Problem came in fourth with 180 views. Feed readers were again the big driver, though Google sent about 35 visitors via search related traffic — Google News search, actually, as FeedBurner helped me know. More on this below.

Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog & More On How It Works was the fourth most popular story two days ago and slipped to fifth, driving 165 visitors. Delicious was a top driver here, generating 22 views. Search Engine Roundtable sent another 14 and Google Blogoscoped remained a driver, sending us another 11.

I said it was a new record day, at least excluding the days when we’ve hit Digg. We had about 9,000 page views and 5,700 visitors. Overall, top sources were:

• Direct Navigation: 1,431 visits
• Delicious: 808
• Google Organic/Keyword Driven: 693 visits
• Google Home Page/Reader Referrals: 409 visits
• Popurls: 281

Finally, you may have heard that FeedBurner started offering site statistics last week. I’m now running those. We already use FeedFlares from FeedBurner, which I’ll talk about in a future post. That means the tracking code needed for stats was already running, so why not try it?

One plus is that FeedBurner stats are far more recent than Google Analytics, which can often be six hours behind. I always want to know what’s happening right now! The Google Analytics delay is one reason why Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz tells me he goes with the fee-based Indextools service. I might play around with that in the future, plus I’ve always loved ClickTracks and may get back to using them as well. You’ve also got Rand to thank for me doing these break downs. Hey, the guy inspired me with his competitive intelligence project last year, so now I’m hip on the let’s be open and share our stats stuff :)

FeedBurner was nice, because I could see Delicious as a driver much earlier than Google Analytics was telling me. That meant I could get over and see exactly how Delicious was driving traffic before things changed. Often, you’ll turn up on a site and discover you’ve moved off the home page or some other place, so it’s guesswork as to what was the traffic generator.

Interestingly, the FeedBurner and Google Analytics page view stats were pretty much the same. Sometimes stats programs can be wildly different. But the other plus with FeedBurner is that when drilling down on a page, I can see the entire referral string and breakout on subdomains. That’s important with Google traffic. As I noted in my monthly review, some of the consolidation Google Analytics does makes it hard to know if you have traffic from Google News, Google Blog Search, Google regular search and so on. But look here:

See how in the drill down I’m shown the entire URL for news.google.com traffic? That lets me know that Google News, for the Google Blog Search’s People Search Spam Problem story, was sending me traffic for "google people search" via Google News. You can see those words embedded in the URL. Alternatively, if you click on that row of the table, you drill down further where you can click through to see the results actually on Google. We’re still there for the moment, though that will change over time.

My main hope is that FeedBurner makes the links they are showing in the overview report live. It’s a pain to have to drill down if you want to click through. I can see the URL there — make it live so I can pop open a window and check on it.

Google Named Fortune’s Best Place To Work, But Rich Early Employees Checking Out had about 900 unique page views, our top page. Most of those came off of people searching for google on Google News, about 450 visits from that. Those browsing and finding us on Google News sent another 75 or so visitors. It got on Digg from someone spotting it, but it never got any legs there, sending only 25 people. For us, this story was really Google gold.

Blogs take a lot of flak especially in Digg comments for simply seen as regurgitating the news. I think this is a good example of how you can go beyond regurgitation and add some value. It wasn’t one story I was summarizing. I actually combined three related looks at Google employees into one. Google got named the best place to work from Fortune, but the San Francisco Chronicle found some rich ex-Googlers talking about a culture change at the company. For dessert, I tossed in a reference to an AP article on how Google insider sales are fueling California’s tax coffers.

Open Letter To Wikipedia Editors: Yes, Matt Cutts Is Notable was second most popular, with about 700 unique views. Here, the audience was completely different. Most of those coming from Google News are probably interested in Google but not search marketers, I’d say. That’s fine — I want that audience. But the Wikipedia article was especially meant to help rally search marketers to turn out and support Matt. Threadwatch is an especially heavy search marketer oriented site, and that was our top referring source, about 110 visitors from there. Another 100 came over from Techmeme. HighRankings Forums sent another 25, as did Mikkel deMib Svensen’s blog.

25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines from Jennifer Slegg came in late in the day but still quickly shot up to be our third most popular story, with about 500 unique views. It was yet again a third type of story — not a news summary, not a rallying rant but instead an informative tips based article. Stumbleupon sent the most, about 100 people. I confess — I’ve yet to get my head around how exactly Stumbleupon works, in terms of how readers submit to it and tracking what happens there. I’ve got it on my to do list to return to. The story also hit Digg but hasn’t risen enough (only 16 Diggs right now) to drive any significant traffic. FYI, an entire range of new sources are sending traffic to the article today — I’ll return to it if I do a review tomorrow.

Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog & More On How It Works was our fourth most popular story, about 350 visitors. This was a mixture of news of the acquisition at the top but mainly a how-to about the service. Everyone was already writing about the story as I could see on Techmeme when I started my day. I knew we had to mention it, but I wanted to do something different. Figuring many of our readers might be unfamiliar with the service, I went the "intro to how you can use" it route. That slight difference was probably enough to help break me out of the pack of stories at Techmeme, which sent us the most visitors to the story, 60 of them. Google Blogscoped sent us another 20 or so.

Google Moon, Google Mars, Now Google Universe? Google Partnership With Space Telescope Project May Make UniTube Possible was the fifth most popular, with about 220 visitors. Most of those came off of people searching for google on Google News, just over 100. That rises to about 125 if you count in those who found us through browsing. Fark sent us another 15, or at least the TotalFark subscription area did. This was another potential case of news regurgitation. But unlike the AP story that triggered our post, we linked to the actual telescope project site, noted the involvement of a former Google engineering VP, pointed at a past interview of him plus gave some background on other Google-related space projects.

Overall, top sources were:

• Direct Navigation: 1,185 visits
• Google Organic/Keyword Driven: 949 visits
• Google Home Page/Reader Referrals: 430 visits
• Bloglines: 180 visits
• Techmeme: 171 visits

It was also our busiest non-Digg related traffic day since we launched, about 8,000 page views and 5,000 visitors. Now I’m off to write some stories!

For December 2006, we had about 93,000 page views, or about 4,400 page views per day. Actually, those are "AdViews," the number of times ads were shown as reported by our ad serving software. We only began showing ads from December 11 onward, so I have to turn to our Google Analytics statistics to talk about the entire month. Let’s dive into them starting with a chart:

The chart shows you the overall trend of visits and page views for the month of December. Note that for the first two days after we launched, December 12 and 13, we have no stats or minimal ones because our stats tracking code was accidentally left off as we brought the new web design up.

Overall, we had about 135,000 page views for the month, conservatively rounding up for the missing days — or about 4,400 page views per day, matching what our ad server reports. Visits were about 85,000 for the month or about 2,700 per day.

Digg Spikes

The two big spikes are traffic from Digg. I already covered the first time we hit Digg in December. The second time was for my story on the disappearing sex blogs at Google. FYI, we also hit Digg a third time just after the New Year, for my 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 article. That also resulted in a big traffic spike.

There’s no denying that Digg is a huge traffic driver, especially for a new site. Search Engine Watch, my alma mater, was Digged occasionally. Given the huge traffic it received from other sources, Digg made a spike but nowhere as high in proportion as I see with Search Engine Land.

That’s something I want to correct, of course. Problogger had a nice look recently at how Digg spikes can help build a traffic up over time. That will be great if it happens here. However, that’s not what I’m building Search Engine Land upon.

I don’t want Digg to be my primary traffic driver any more than I want to have a site completely dependent on Google sending traffic. A single source simply leaves you vulnerable if something goes wrong with that source. More and more sites are reporting that they’ve been banned from Digg, for example. That’s dangerous for a new site, if their traffic strategy is all about Digg.

So for me, Digg traffic is a nice surprise, the frosting on the cake — but I’m baking a cake with many traffic source ingredients. I’m successful if the overall line between the spikes continues to rise.

Traffic Drivers

Of course, December was a tough month to look at traffic patterns. Many people aren’t online as much during the holiday period, at least for a "work blog" like ourselves. In addition, we didn’t formally launch the site until December 11. January will be our first real "normal" month.

Still, there’s plenty to learn from December. What were those other ingredients in the traffic cake? We had 1,417 overall traffic referral sources. Here were the top 25:

There were some big differences from my preview of December stats just after we launched. Digg, I’ve already covered. Direct Navigation I didn’t mention before, because I’d used a slightly different chart from Google Analytics, Referral Conversion. That shows all the traffic where there’s a known referral source as reported by your browser (IE, the browser tells your web server the last place it came from). Instead, the chart above is the Source Conversion report. That shows all sources sending you traffic — referral links, search engine traffic plus direct navigation.

Direct Navigation From Press Mentions?

One thing I was curious about with Direct Navigation was whether press mentions made any spikes. I get a lot of calls from the press. Some of them result in quotes and mentions of the site. Typically, these online mentions won’t have direct links. But does having the name of the site out there alone generate more visits?

One recent article I remember was USA Today looking at Google’s traffic. That came out on December 28, so potentially I should have seen a rise. And the chart says?

Indeed, there was a spike. Direct Navigation sent 806 visitors on the 27th, the day before the article. That dropped to 682 ,the day of the article. Then it leapt to 1,536 the day after it ran (and 940 on Saturday, December 30).

So there’s your proof. Press mentions do pay off, even without links. Well, maybe. Why didn’t the traffic go up on the day of the article? One reason could be that the story also hit the wire services, so it might have made it into other papers over time. Plus, people might not have gone online to check out the site until after reading it.

Also complicating things is the fact the Direct Navigation spike came around the time both Digg and Boing Boing sent a lot of traffic. That spike might be due to people simply hearing about the site from these sources and visiting it directly, perhaps after an initial visit.

Going forward, I’m going to watch Direct Navigation traffic more closely after a press mention, to see if I can pin that down more definitively.

Our third big driver of traffic, searches on Google, I’ll deal with separately below. Similarly, I’ll deal with Google Reader and other feed reading services in a section on feeds.

Drill Down On Traffic Sources

Boing Boing was a new traffic driver for us, all related to the sex blogger story. I think there’s also a lesson here on how traffic can result because of an active participation in your community, as well.

The sex blog story hit when I was off for Christmas. When I’m gone, I usually take a day upon returning just to dig out and catch up on things that are going. Then for a big, complicated story, I want to spend more time trying to look at what’s happening rather than just blogging away.

I’d seen the sex blog story as part of my regular review, when I got back. It kept growing and growing until it hit Boing Boing. I reviewed that story, and I couldn’t help but feel that Google deserved some more credit than it was getting. I dropped an email over to Xeni Jardin, who I’d talked with last year several times about Google issues. Could she add a postscript with some of my comments? I thought they’d help provide some balance.

Xeni did (thanks, Xeni!). And there was even a link, which started driving traffic. But getting a link wasn’t my prime motivation. Trying to get some balance and information out was. I routinely comment on blogs or email people on issues relating to search. I put a considerable amount of time into it, actually. I do this because I’m passionate about the space. But a side benefit is that occasionally, that type of sharing gets returned as people link to you.

I went on and then did my own story on the topic. It was a long look at the sites involved and some of the issues. This type of original content is both my chief goal for Search Engine Land and for myself personally. I know we do a lot of referring to what others are writing about. That’s not going away. People write great stuff, and I want my audience to know about that whatever the source. But I personally find nothing better than being able to roll up my sleeves and dive into a story to try and make sense of it for others.

The story resulted in a second Boing Boing mention — plus it also got Digged. Lesson? Good content gets rewarded, something I’ve talked about since I started writing about search engines back in 1996.

Now what’s that The Daily that sent so much traffic? Pretty simple. My guess is that whoever runs it noted that I was listing all my referral sources when I did my stats preview and figured if they could send me enough traffic, they’d get listed. You did.

The Daily has a number of start pages. Perhaps you’d like to see a different woman in a bikini each day. Here you go. And right at the top, there are three links. For a period in December, we were one of those three links. Hey, it’s not all about bikinis. You can also see a different scenic shot each day, or a different animal or just a page of links. But yeah, it’s the bikini page that seems most popular. Of the 2,200 visits from the site, 74 percent came from the bikini page, followed by 19 percent from the scenic page, then the rest from others.

Planet Internet was another traffic driver. This came off a news story over there, referencing my The Lies Of Top Search Terms Of The Year article. Again, good content (well, I thought it was good) can bring in the traffic.

In my preview, I’d already mentioned how Search Engine Watch was one of the top referring sources to Search Engine Land. That remained the case, as the month ended. From the SEW Blog, about half the traffic (47 percent) came from my going away post, with another 17 percent from Elisabeth Osmeloski’s best wishes post. With the going away time now over, I’d expect that traffic to drop. FYI, Daggle, Search Engine Roundtable, Google Blogoscoped and Search Engine Guide sent traffic primarily based on the site launch.

A more typical "spike" from Search Engine Watch would likely be the 148 visitors referred our way from a post about our article on Google Patent Search, for example. And that’s another lesson about original content. If we’re not providing something new, we aren’t going to get the referral traffic. Rest assured, original content will continue to grow. That article was also the top traffic driver for us from ResourceShelf.

Several other search engine blogs I’d noted in my preview still made the top list. Threadwatchers especially loved the news of our SMX search marketing conference happening this June, judging on clickthrough from the site. SEOmoz sent a bunch of traffic, but because of the way Google Analytics drops the ?ID= portion of SEOmoz’s URLs, I can’t tell what particular topics drew interest. Grrr — stop that, Google Analytics! I’ll do a post on this in more depth in the future. The same problem means I can’t tell what Search Engine Journal readers liked.

John Battelle’s SearchMob — a Digg for search stories — showed some legs, with a post there about me sharing site stats sending along 61 visitors. Most traffic from SerachBlog seemed related to the quick news we posted on the Yahoo reorganization. That story also sent traffic from Scripting.com.

Our post no real original content. But I had the release up from what Yahoo emailed me faster than I think Yahoo itself got it into a HTML form that people could link to, plus I quickly added links to more commentary. While original content is key, covering key search news even if briefly is part of our mission — and that, too, can pay off.

Finally, I’ve only listed the top 25 traffic sources. Remember, I said there were 1,400 in all. The other 1,375 collectively drove about 15,000 visits. There’s a long tail to referral traffic, just as there is with search traffic. As a new site owner, I deeply appreciate those links and references from any site, even if they aren’t in the top 25.

Feeds, Feed Traffic & Email

Search Engine Land offers a variety of feeds and email newsletters, as covered here. Getting visitors to subscribe to one of our feeds or an email newsletter is my primary goal with the site. If visitors do either, then I have the ability to continue my relationship with them more easily over time. How’s the relationship building going? Let’s do some charts:

That’s the subscribers to the main Search Engine Land feed since it was offered when the placeholder site went up back in November. The stats are as reported by FeedBurner. Unfortunately, I can’t narrow it down to just the month of December. It’s either one day, last 30 days or all time — so I thought I’d kick off with the all time view.

Overall, the feed is showing a pattern I want to see, spikes each week that keep getting higher. It plateaus a bit during the holiday period, which is understandable. Fewer people are hitting their feeds then, and subscribers only register as they make an active call on their feeds.

Over at Search Engine Watch, our feeds grew to hit the 15,000 level over time. So that’s my goal with Search Engine Land, hit at least that level or try to go past it. I know there’s at least that many people interested in search news on a regular basis.

(FYI, any Search Engine Watch stats I mention here or going forward are all in the public record, things that have been reported on Search Engine Watch in the past or currently. So I’m not passing along anything confidential, in case you were wondering).

When do I want to hit 15,000? Now! In fact, Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped kind of wonders why we aren’t already at that level, in a comment he made on an earlier post:

I was figuring you had loads of traffic already with most SEW readers converting to SEL?

The reality is that Search Engine Land is new, habits are hard and readership is broad. This site has a lot of goodwill from the community, but it still has to prove itself over time as deserving a larger readership beyond just the core search community. In addition, it’s one thing to tell people you’ve moved and another thing for a chunk of the audience to make the actual effort to add a new feed.

In short, Search Engine Land is very much an underdog. And that’s fine – I’ve always liked underdogs. My goal has always been to hit that 15,000 level not in the first month but by the end of the first year.

By the way, I mentioned a "core" search audience. Look back at the feed, and you’ll see how it quickly spikes up to the 1,500 level. I think that may be the hard-core search audience that’s out there, the influencers. Or maybe it’s just 1,500 people who like me and the others here on Search Engine Land!

Where are these people coming from? FeedBurner breaks them down like this:

I’ve condensed it a bit and removed the somewhat confusing "reach" figure (it was 1,460). Bloglines is the biggest driver, as you can see — followed by NewsGator and Pageflakes.

Google Analytics tells a different story, but we’ll come back to that. Let’s look at the SearchCap feed, first:

SearchCap is a post we do each day recapping everything that was on the blog. You can take it in feed form, but it’s also offered as an email newsletter. Given its alternative newsletter format, it shows two key differences from the Search Engine Land feed:

• Weekend drops are minimal
• Most people get it via email

Look at the Search Engine Land feed, and you’ll see there’s almost always a midweek rise, then a plummet at the weekend, then a new midweek rise. That mirrors a regular work week, where you tend to have a lot of people online during the week — and most especially in the middle of the week — and offline on the weekend. The feed stats, as I said, reflect feed calls. You only have a "subscriber" if that subscriber issues a call to get your feed.

Newsletters are much different. Once you have a subscriber, that subscriber stays with you every day, even if they are offline. You only lose them if they unsubscribe. So the stats are more regular.

In fact, the drops you see for SearchCap are only due to the relatively few people who take SearchCap by feed. They contribute to the tiny midweek rises. If they weren’t there, SearchCap would be mainly a steady rising line.

Of the roughly 2,000 SearchCap subscribers we have, about 1,600 of those take it via email newsletter. After that, Google Desktop is the next biggest draw, 112 subscribers.

As with the Search Engine Land feed, I also have a goal for SearchCap. That’s to hit 35,000 email readers in the next two years. Over at Search Engine Watch, the daily SearchDay newsletter is around the 35,000 mark in readership. That largely built up over a course of four years, as Chris Sherman took the helm of it back in early 2001. Once that figure was hit, it stayed largely stable over time. That makes me feel there’s a core email newsletter audience of that size. But gaining email subscribers is harder in these days of increasing spam and feed alternatives. Two years might be too optimistic. We’ll see!

That leads me to Search Month. I ran the Search Engine Report monthly newsletter for a decade. Now I’m doing the new Search Month monthly newsletter for Search Engine Land. That takes me from a readership of about 90,000 to 100,000 to a current one of about 700.

Ouch! I don’t know if we’ll ever hit the 100,000 level, something that took Search Engine Watch about five years to do. I’ll go with a more realistic goal of 50,000 over the next three years. One thing that helps is that the first issue is out. Check it out — I think anyone who wants a regular monthly recap of search news will find it useful.

By the way, both SearchCap and Search Month are full-text feeds, unlike the Search Engine Land feed. The main Search Engine Land feed may go full-text as well. There are some issues to consider there, and I’ll explore these more in a future post. But I’m leaning that way for a change in the near-term.

Now back to Google Analytics. Remember my big chart of referral sites above? Here’s the breakdown of sites that are newsreaders or email referral sources:

That combined Google Reader and Google Personalized Home Page figure? Google Analytics actually reports that as "google.com [referral]." But when you drill into it using the Referral Conversion tool, you can see that about 2,600 visitors are coming from Google Reader (google.com/reader/view) and about 1,400 from Google’s Personalized Home Page (google.com/ig).

Both of these are feedreaders. Neither is showing up in my FeedBurner stats to any significant degree. That’s probably down to Google not providing readership stats the way some of the other feedreaders do, but it might also be that FeedBurner needs to make some of its own adjustments. I’ll be checking with both companies and do a follow up in the future.

Also keep in mind that Google Analytics is showing page views, while FeedBurner is showing feed views. A chunk of people might not be loading up our pages, simply reading whatever is in the feeds. FeedBurner can track those people, while Google Analytics is tracking those who come to the site or load content directly from the site.

News Search Traffic

As a news site, Search Engine Land naturally wants to tap into a key vertical search space that’s suitable for us, news search. In my preview, I’d noted how the site had already been picked up by Techmeme. Traffic from there continued on, ending the month with 1,500 visits.

That’s nothing compared to Digg. However, Techmeme is heavily read by influencers, people I know will be linking to us or making mention of our stories. I love being part of it and appreciate the traffic.

Indeed, out of curiosity, I checked my new visitor to returning visitor stats. For Techmeme, about 40 percent of those coming are return visitors. For Digg, that’s about 4 percent. Now in raw numbers, that 746 people from Digg as returning visitors to Techmeme’s 600. So Digg still can produce a net gain, but the audience at Techmeme is clearly much more different and much more in tune with what we’re writing.

In my preview, I also discussed how much I missed being part of Google News. Later in December, when I felt we had enough content to prove our worth, I formally made an inclusion request using the Google News inclusion form. We were added about a week later. In that short period, Google News sent over 1,200 visitors.

FYI, I plan to revisit both Google News and Techmeme from an inclusion standpoint in the near future. So stay tuned.

Keyword-Driven Search Traffic

Now for dessert, search marketing stats. Here are the top terms that drove us traffic in December

As was the case in our preview, our top terms tended to be those relating to our name.

The terms google and goog are mostly driven off of Google. Google Analytics unfortunately doesn’t break down where on Google these are coming from — Google web search, news search, blog search, etc. I hope they’ll change that or make it an option in the future. But from spot checks I recall doing, these seem to be from Google News and Google Blog Search. That underscores the importance of vertical search. Hey, I’d love to rank tops in Google web search for "google." But there’s plenty of traffic for the term in other types of vertical search areas. Don’t neglect those.

You see a bunch of terms relating to tracking Santa. These come mostly off Google web search, from a post I did in December

Another term that leaps out is "search engines." That’s us ranking in the top results for search engines at Ask. I’m used to seeing traffic for that term when I was at Search Engine Watch, since after being a resource for 10 years, the site’s in the top results of Google, Yahoo and Ask for that phrase. I’d obviously considered "search engines" as a key term I’d like Search Engine Land to be found for. However, I didn’t expect this would happen for at least months.

Instead, sometime in December, we hit the first page of results at Ask. Currently, we’re on the second page. I’ll follow up more with Ask about this, because the first thought many may have is that Ask has simply altered the results to get Search Engine Land higher. Alternatively, Ask has long talked about ranking sites not based on all links from across the web but links within a community of sites. In that case, it makes more sense for Search Engine Land to do better, if it has quickly gained enough trusted links from within a relatively small search community.

Just to benchmark, at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live, Search Engine Land is not in the top 100 results for that term. Here’s hoping that will change over the next few months. Any link donations to help make it happen are happily received!

In my preview, I talked about how paltry my query stream was. Overall, it’s not gained much, but it’s still early days in the content building business. But then again, don’t forget the search tail. The terms above make up about 3,000 visits, about half the search related traffic. Another 3,000 visits came from the remaining 1,900 or so terms not shown.

Two more issues on the search term analysis. Remember above, I said Google sent search related traffic of 6,172 visits? That’s also precisely the same amount of traffic of ALL search related traffic that search engines have sent, according to Google Analytics. The figures shouldn’t be the same. The figure for ALL traffic should be Google’s traffic plus some of the other search engines, making it at least slightly higher. I suspect that Google Analytics is counting things differently using different reports, and I’ll try to track this down further in the future.

Meanwhile, here’s the breakdown on traffic sent by search engine, according to the ALL search engines report:

1. Google: 5,618 visits
2. Ask: 187 visits
3. AOL: 117 visits
4. Yahoo: 114 visits
5. Live: 10 visits
6. Others: 126 visits

Overall, Google sent 91 percent of our overall keyword driven traffic. For this site, at least, that helps confirm the view of Google being by far the top search engine based on referral traffic.

Top Content

Finally, what did most people read? Here are the top articles:

Search Engine Land made the Digg home page yesterday because of Neil Patel’s great article, The New Digg Features Plus, A Submitter’s Perspective. I’ve already covered how as a new site, we’re still growing our traffic. Now I’ve got a chance to show what it means to a new site to get digged.

The picture above tells the tale. Once we hit, the first hour brought in nearly 4,000 visits. Then it tapered off. For the entire day, we had 7,134 visits from Digg, 78 percent of our entire traffic. Bear in mind that this is all "cream," IE — traffic above and beyond what we’d already normally get. Also, the stats are off Google Analytics rather than our ad server. Our official page view stats, when I start doing monthly recaps here on the blog, will come off our ad server data.

A special thanks out to Tiger Technologies, our hosting company. I didn’t discover we got digged until long after it happened. Our server never crashed. Our performance never slowed as far as I could tell. It was just another day in the neighborhood for us. Rob, who runs the company is a good friend plus provides a great service. You need good, solid affordable hosting, check him out. Tiger Tech, now Digg tested :)