Connect to Site from

The “Connect to site from” report has two sections: top and bottom. Figure 3-14
shows the upper part of the top section.
First is the traffic (pages and hits) coming from people who type your
URL—direct addresses—or use a bookmark. These are your regular customers
or readers, your core traffic. They know where your site is from memory
or they have your site bookmarked. Chances are, they’ll be back because
they know you have what they want.
The second line of the upper section is for people coming in from newsgroups.
Newsgroups are one of the more ancient forms of Internet communication,
the killer app of 1991. Newsgroups, which tend to be very uncontrolled
and egalitarian, are falling by the wayside, whereas conduits where content
can be controlled (such as mailing lists and web forums) are on the rise. There
was no incoming traffic from newsgroups. If there had been, it would have
indicated that there was some word of mouth about your site and that people
were visiting based on recommendations from other visitors.
The rest of the upper section lists search engine activity. Google tends to rule
this list, with five times more traffic than everyone else put together. The first
line has numbers for the aggregate of all search engines. The rest of the lines
have names of individual search engines with two unlabeled numbers. Those
numbers should be labeled, from left to right, Pages and Hits.
The bottom section of the table lists the external URLs that drive the most
traffic. The top URL in Figure 3-15 is a Google AdWords ad. Fourteen (of 25)
other URLs in the top-external-links list are either ad forms that repurpos
Google results or are AdWords-for-content placements from third-party web
sites using the Google AdSense program.
Clicking Full List will give you a full list of all external URLs. On SkateFic
.com, the vast majority of those URLs are AdWords-for-content placements.
But you have to know what to look for. You can’t count on AWStats to tell the
difference between a real external link and yet another AdWords placement or
search engine result.
You can, however, filter the full list results. Figure 3-16 shows only the
results that explicitly come from Google (there will be others that come from
Google but don’t say so). It’s worthwhile to note that the percentages given on
a filtered full list refer to the percentage of that filtered data set, not to the overall
full list of external links. So the 63.1 percent of all the ads that reference
Google comes directly from AdWords placement on Google’s own web site
So what does this all mean? Should you be concerned with the raw numbers
or only with the percentages? How should your percentages of direct-address,
search engine, and external-link traffic compare?

It’s like this: You want to keep current readers and customers coming back.
You also want new readers and customers to find you. A very low percentage
of direct addresses may indicate that people are not returning after their first
visit or that your offline promotional efforts are not effective. This means that
your site is not sufficiently sticky, or that people get to your site and don’t find
what they need. It means you’re not building a core audience.
A low percentage of search engine-driven traffic can mean that your site is
not well optimized for search engines and people are not finding it. About two
years ago, Mary overhauled SkateFic.com with search engine optimization
(SEO) in mind. The percentage of traffic driven by search engines doubled, as
did total traffic.
If the external links aren’t bringing in the traffic, you need to be concerned
about word of mouth and viral marketing. This is especially so if most of your
external-link traffic is coming from repurposed Google searches, small search
engines, and AdWords placements. It means that you don’t have a lot of sites
that spontaneously link to yours.
So how is SkateFic.com doing? Search engine traffic is about 50 percent—
not too shabby. Bringing in that many new people every month is growing the
core readership by hundreds of eyes every month. Direct-address traffic is
about 43 percent, which means SkateFic.com has a happy and returning fan
base and is a healthy content site. But with only 6.3 percent of page views coming
from external links, and many of them from small search engines and
AdWords, SkateFic.com isn’t doing very well as far as word of mouth. Putting
more effort into getting links from other sites, especially figure skating–related
sites, could pay off handsomely in the long run. Independent external links are
a crucial part of an SEO strategy and would improve search-engine results,
bringing in more, better-targeted traffic.