I've been going through my traffic stats today and looking at where my visitors come from and I find that 72% come from direct address/bookmarks, 10% from the search engines (8% google) and 17% come from links on external pages. The ratio between SEs and external links is believable as although I rank well for some keyphrases they're obscure whereas I appear high up in the listing for more popular searches on sites like hotscripts. The problem I have is with the direct links. Although it would be nice to think that my visitors are passing my url around to their friends in emails and instant messages I don't really believe that this can account for all these visits. Does anyone else have suspiciously high direct links? Is it actually a common phenomenon and I just wasn't aware of it? Getting more into the details I was viewing my stats using Awstats. Are there any more reliable tools available that can easily be integrated into an existing website?
Hi, The confusion comes from the way AWStats counts the referrers. There are three things to know: - AWStats counts a referrer for each page that is viewed and for each hit, while you probably expect to only count a referrer for each visit. - AWStats disregards internal referrers (when going from page A of your site to page B of your site). - every hit from a web client that hides referrers is counted as "direct address/bookmarks". The result of this AWStats weird way of counting referrers is that the percentage of "direct address/bookmarks" is overestimated if you look at it as a percentage of visits. I have tried to build a tool to correct this here: AWStats referrers - visits. Jean-Luc
That's great Jean-Luc, very useful (I given you rep). Using your tool I get a more realistic 21% for SEs and 36% from other websites.