While TV by the Numbers still gets a strong plurality of its traffic from search engines, primarily Google, that share has slowly trended downwards during the 2+ years of the site's existence as more and more visitors arrive directly (by a browser bookmark, for example), or from a referring site (any site linking to TVBTN). As to what's in the Other category, you've got me (but perhaps Robert knows), a year ago that category had effectively none of our visitors (0.03%).
And while the Drudge Report has been a strong referrer for a while (we're the "TV Ratings" link on the site), we had a direct link to a Syndicated ratings post in the past month that drove a disproportionate number of visits from it during the period.
Source: Google Analytics, 11/11/09-12/11/09
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This could be completely off base, but I would guess that “other” is search engine bots.
Julia, my (wild) guess is that the increase in “Other” is due to a change in the way Google classifies traffic, and your guess is a reasonable one that they might have reclassified.
GA is very good about not including bots. If it wasn’t, our visits would be MUCH higher. Quantcast is good about excluding them too.
Most of the “other” traffic is referring site traffic that for whatever reason isn’t tracked by Google Anatlytics as referring site traffic. It seems more like a classification issue with certain URLs since GA is catching it, but just not lumping it in the right bucket.
Edit: and a whole bunch of it is Twitter. For whatever reason #6 above is not tracked as “referring site traffic.” Also, Google doesn’t aggregate all of Twitter (or Facebook, for that matter) up into one mega category so there were more (smaller, the biggest was ~500) line items for Twitter that weren’t in the top 10.
I’ve always been curious about this. I added TVBTN to my Google Reader. So when I click on a headline and come here to read the article does that count as RSS or as a Google referral? I’ve always suspected that Google is taking credit for these clicks.
Rose, those would be the items in number 7 in the table above. If you simply skim through the RSS feed without clicking a link, you’re not counted as a web visitor. We do separately see Feed statistics about which items were viewed (whether completely ignored or not!) in the feed.
Now, some significant portion of the Google Organic traffic listed above is merely people who use Google as their bookmark system. Our biggest queries are searches on variations of “TV by the Numbers”, but that will probably be covered in a separate post someday…
I have to admit… I can’t remember how I found this site…. My guess would be Whitney Matheson’s Pop Candy blog but I’m not sure.
That’s really interesting. Thanks for the info, Robert!
I’ve had you guys bookmarked almost as long as the site has been up.
I click over from my daily newsletter email. And you should all do the same, I mean subscribe, of course.
The icon’s right under the banner on the far right.
And Robert and Bill didn’t even pay me to write this.
I use the RSS feature and when I load my Google home page each day there it is all neat and tidy.
I forget how I was first directed to the site but I’m sure I clicked into it!
LOL, thanks for the free marketing Joe B. Though we can’t separate out visits back to the site from the daily e-mail “newsletter” of the RSS feed (upper right, under the banner, as Joe notes), we have ~1,600 people who subscribe to the RSS feed that way.
you guys are definitely at the top of my bookmarks!
I have your RSS feed on my.yahoo.com homepage and that is usually how I get there, I still do have to scroll down a page or so as I have a lot of RSS feeds that I track.
I always scan my RSS feeds but they respond so slowly to updates. I know the daily ratings updates come in around noon but they don’t hit my feed until around 1pm. So I always come in on my bookmark between 12 and 1 – use the feed other than that. Anyone know why the feed is slow to update?
Marenmoo, if you’re using Google Reader it’s because it sucks at polling our feed and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. I wish it would update as soon as the feed itself updates. But, sadly, it doesn’t. You could try bookmarking the site Feed rather than the Feedburner feed by adding tvbythenumbers.com/feed if you haven’t already, but my experience with doing that is it still doesn’t update in anything close to real time.
you might try adding our twitter feed to your RSS reader:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/23849131.rss
I haven’t tried this in a while but my prior experience was it updated much faster.
That Drudge Report data really explains the stuff that gets posted in the cable news section.
Now the real question is how does this affect your advertising revenues?
I don’t remember how I found this site, but it is one of my favorites! ^^
I got here first via Google (because Nielson drives me NUTS not releasing ratings to the public), now come here directly when I want ratings. AND I post links to interesting posts on my own Twitter.