Website Statistics – Top Referring Sites and URLs

Argh! This is my second try – I had a wonderful article typed up in my blog backend, hit Post – but instead of posting, it died. And disappeared. Completely. Drat.

OK – trying again.

There are many reasons why you might want to use the Top Referring URL and Top Referring Site statistics – they can point out some interesting trends in your website customers. But first, let’s define both of them:

Referring Site: the site name of the place the visitor was before coming to my website.

Referring URL: very similar to site – the specific URL of the place the visitor was before coming to my website.

In both cases, you can also get “No Referrer” – that’s when the user has either typed in the URL in a browser rather than clicking on a link and “surfing” to get to your site, or he/she has your site bookmarked as their homepage in their browser.

With those definitions in hand, let’s take a look at my website’s Top Referring Sites and URLs from June 1 until today:

Referring Sites:

1. No Referrer – 529,835
2. www.kclibrary.org – 250,501
3. www.kcpl.lib.mo.us – 35,231
4. kclibrary.org – 17,484
5. www.google.com – 13,736
6. images.google.com – 5,854
7. www.kcforum.net – 5,651
8. www.kcpl.org – 5,197
9. search.yahoo.com – 5,027
10. catalog.kclibrary.org – 3,580
11. search.msn.com – 3,114
12. p218.ezboard.com – 2,692
13. aolsearch.aol.com – 2,592
14. kcpl.lib.mo.us – 1,993
15. kcpl.org – 1,723
16. www.kcskyscrapers.com – 1,663
17. images.kclibrary.org – 1,487
18. www.kansascity.com – 1,229
19. staff – 922
20. www2.lib.udel.edu – 828
21. 64.233.167.104 – 782
22. web.ask.com – 696
23. www.excitementmachine.org – 669
24. members.tripod.com – 653
25. www.worldcatlibraries.org – 609

Referring URLs:

1. No Referrer – 529,698
2. http://www.kclibrary.org/ – 182,328
3. http://www.kcpl.lib.mo.us/ – 24,693
4. http://www.google.com/search – 13,315
5. http://kclibrary.org/ – 11,684
6. http://www.kclibrary.org/guides/searchengines/ – 8,775
7. http://www.kclibrary.org – 7,593
8. http://images.google.com/imgres – 5,796
9. http://www.kcforum.net/forum/viewthread.php – 5,628
10. http://search.yahoo.com/search – 4,632
11. http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/list.cfm – 4,400
12. http://www.kcpl.org/ – 3,866
13. http://www.kclibrary.org/calendar.cfm – 3,402
14. http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/subjects.cfm – 2,952
15. http://www.kclibrary.org/guides/teens/ – 2,721
16. http://www.kclibrary.org/index.cfm – 2,451
17. http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search – 2,437
18. http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/ – 2,384
19. http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/media.cfm – 2,226
20. http://kclibrary.org/temp_staffsearch.cfm – 2,063
21. http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/search.cfm – 2,018
22. http://search.msn.com/results.aspx – 1,791
23. http://p218.ezboard.com/fjambandsfrm2.showmessage – 1,777
24. http://www.kclibrary.org/localhistory/collections.cfm – 1,712
25. http://www.kcskyscrapers.com/kcforum/viewtopic.php – 1,641

Interesting – there’s a number of things you can glean from these stats:

1. A LOT of customers know our URL, and either type it in to their browser, or have it bookmarked in their personal bookmarks. That’s very cool! It also shows that our short URL (kclibrary.org) is easy to remember, and has some “brand recognition.” We need to keep that up!
2. I suppose it also means that a lot of people are hitting our site from inside the library on one of our public PCs – where our website is set as the default homepage.
3. Search engines are our friends! Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask Jeeves have all visited us pretty heavily – those search engines brought in around 30,000 visitors. So obviously, customers are finding us using search engines (more on that in a future post).
4. Our “other URLs” are still helpful. We used to be kcpl.lib.mo.us, then we changed to kcpl.org for a short while, and now we are www.kclibrary.org (but also use the shorter “kclibrary.org”). Each of those other URLs has sent more traffic our way – approximately 60,000 visitors. So it’s a good idea to keep those URLs up-to-date on our name server (and continue paying for the kcpl.org domain name). Even though we’d consider those URLs to be incorrect and not really matching our brand recognition, they still bring in a sizeable chunk of web visitors.

So it’s important for us to remember to keep adding unique, original content to our pages – customers are finding it in a variety of ways!

That’s all for now.