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Loads of buzz about the double click top 1000 sites today…

You can check it out here: http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

I got some very interesting sites in the top 100 and shows how many of the sites are non US.

VirginMedia over here in the UK is number 1000..

You can see its stats here: https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile#siteDetails?identifier=virginmedia.com

So..

How to get into the top 1000 sites, well you need traffic and is not a much as you think..

According to the data on the above page you need..

500,000 to million page impression per day.

700,000 visitors per day (makes no sense regarding the page view but hey)

That’s about its..

So some silly maths..

If you paid google 2p per click with zero natural rankings its would cost you £14,000 per day to make it into the top 1000

I spend my sad life getting traffic to sites mainly in the UK and monitoring them like a hawk…

This is post is nothing to do with conversions as I’d need pages and pages to explian my thought process with examples of what has and hasn’t worked and what has changed over the years of being a seo/webmaster thingy.

These examples also have social media elements removed so we can look into search engine traffic trends.

This is just a simple look at a few verticals of the effect of traffic during December 2009.

Why December?

Well as mentioned I work on mainly UK sites with UK traffic so the below stats show what the UK public traffic trends are.

Why is it interesting?

Most of the UK population celebrate xmas in one way or another, many buy online which is expanding at a massive rate in the UK. Most businesses shut over xmas (most people surf the web at work) so for many sites the 25th Dec should be a pretty dead time for traffic. I know from non UK site stats that the effect is a lot smaller  but this post has a focus on the UK and Decemebr 2009.

Example 1

Let have a look at my first example:

[click image to expand]

Vertical: Arts

Weekends

Your be able to spot each and every weekend on this graph with a drop on Sundays each week and a peck on Mondays when every gets back to work. This Sunday/Monday trends on this site is consistent throughtout the year with only anomalies effecting this.

25th December

This site has xmas themed sections and but you will be able to spot the trend starting from the 11th December which is the friday before the 2nd weekend in December which was a massive shopping day for xmas in the UK (I went shopping and is was so busy). The trend continue right up until the 25th with well over 2/3 of the traffic dropping.

Traffic sources

80.5% Search Organic
11% Direct / Bookmarks
8% Referrals
0.5% PPC

As you can see this site has almost all it traffic from natural ranking thus the trends effecting this site are a mix of the theme and organic.

Example 2

[click image to expand]

Vertical: Home

Weekends

Again your be able to spot each and every weekend on this graph with a drop on Sundays each week and a peck on Mondays when every gets back to work. This Sunday/Monday trends on this site is consistent throughtout the year with only anomalies effecting this.

25th December

This site has no xmas themed sections starting from the 7th December which is the Monday just before the 2nd weekend in December which as already mentioned was a massive shopping day for xmas in the UK the trend continue right up until the 25th with yet again well over 2/3 of the traffic dropping.

After the 25th of December the traffic recovery on this site is pretty fast with with traffic increasing well over any amount before the 25th.

Traffic sources

64% Search Organic
10% Direct / Bookmarks
7% Referrals
19% PPC

As you can see this site has almost all it traffic from natural orangic and PCC thus the trends effecting this site are a mix of the theme and search engine traffic. I feel the theme of the site has effected the recovery.

Example 3

[click image to expand]

Vertical: Fashion

Weekends

One again your be able to spot each and every weekend on this graph with a drop on Sundays each week and a peck on Mondays when every gets back to work.

25th December

Same as the previous site:

Again this site has no xmas themed sections starting from the 7th December which is the Monday just before the 2nd weekend in December which as already mentioned was a massive shopping day for xmas in the UK the trend continue right up until the 25th with yet again well over 2/3 of the traffic dropping.

Pecks

21st December this site saw a per xmas peck with last minute online shopping creating this peck.

Traffic sources

57% Search Organic
8% Direct / Bookmarks
9% Referrals
27% PPC

As you can see this site has almost all it traffic from natural orangic and PCC thus the trends effecting this site are a mix of the theme and search engine traffic.

This site has the most PPC of all the above examples but yet again is effected in the same way.

Conclusion

From the above 3 example we can see if you have a UK site its likely you will see a trend of dropping traffic from around the 7th December until the 26th December.

When looking at the keywords for the first example which had a xmas section which brought in a ton of traffic wasn’t enough to offset the downwood trends.

I feel unless over 2/3 of your site is xmas themed your going to feel this effect.

Of course socail media is not included in any of the above info and site I have/work on have very different stats and trends.

I get a lot of sales calls trying to be sold x,y,z on the web…

Some times I think running adwords can hurt more than help but I stick with it

Anyway.. I’m not here to name and shame a company that called but to try and make sense of what is being sold and hope it my help others.

Lets start with some figures that are just examples but are similar to the ones i’ve been given many times before.

Lets call it gabs-portal.

Gabs-portal get 1million unique visitors per month…

Great, sounds like a busy site..

So what’s on offer.. Well I was offered a company listing.. so its similar to any directory.. yes but you can put your logo up too.. fine (whatever)…

My first question is what sort of traffic does this section get.  I was told just over 10%.. So 1 in 10 click on this section, sales person said yes..  OK great that could happen…

Q: So my ad would show up on this first main page of the section?
A: No the 3rd page.

So 3 pages is to far back… I’ll have a think…

Here comes the fun bit.. And the trick to the sales pitch.

1mil >> 10% >> 100,000 visitor per month hit this section per month..

So lots of studies have been done on google serps CTR e.g. #1 get 40%+ vs #10 getting 3% (I just picking random figures out of so many reports and heat maps on the web..

So if the 1mil and 100k was correct (which its not, your see in a min) then being #1 on this page should = 40,000 visitors a month…

(yes this is all assuming that CTR is similar to serps)

So lets assume page 2 gets 2% of the traffic, that would be 2,000 per month..

Lets assume again 2% of page 2’s traffic hits page 3, that would be 20 visitors per month.

OK so i’m at the top of page 3… great… So close to 1mil visitors per month wow.. SADLY no… top spot lets say 40% thus I would get 8 visitor a month OR 96 a year…

As I mentioned above this assumes 10% of a million = 100,000 but this is a lie… .

If a site has 1mil and 10% of its “traffic” visits section x it makes you the potential customer assume ZERO bounce rate.. WHICH IS CRAZY..

Lets be really really nice and give a 25% bounce rate..

1,000,000 * 0.75 * 0.1 * 0.02 * 0.02 *0.4 = 12 visitor per month

Lets be more real.. Lets assume a 70% bounce rate…

1,000,000 * 0.3 * 0.1 * 0.02 * 0.02 *0.4 = 4.8 visitor per month

That’s 57.6 visitor per year..

If you had to pay £1,000 for this then it would be costing you £17.36 per visitor.. WOW..

I hope this may help some people…

Diagram below show one of my sites that has steady highish traffic with no massive up’s or downs with mondays always with the most traffic hence a good site to look at for xmas/new year traffic. 

First arrow showing 25th Decemeber which is 1/3 of the traffic of new year eve and day (second red arrow). 

Click image to enlarge!

NYE and NYD are 1/2 of the avg traffic vs the 1/5 of traffic on xmas day.. Please note the site is UK focused..

So most people around the world have heard about the snow in the uk that has shut down london this monday. Well we expect more tomorrow!

I love SNOW!! 

We don’t get much snow in the uk :( 

Thought I’d have a looky at google trends for the uk with the term “snow”.. 

check it out click here

One odd thing is google doesn’t pick up snow uk news of which is all the news we have really had this week.

One interesting thing is that Wales come no1 for snow searches when it has fewer people and hasn’t been hit that hard vs the over populated south of the UK… 

screen shot here:

BT have “tested” the use of Phorm to match adverts to some 30,000 broadband users in the uk without telling them..

Loads of loads of BT customers got in contact with the bbc this morning regarding how unhappy their web surffing was being tracked by BT..

Nicholas Bohm, of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, said tests without the knowledge of users were “an illegal intercept of users’ data”.

A spokesman for BT said the firm had no comment about the legality or illegality of the 2006 test.

Read more about this here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7325451.stm

 This morning on bbc news reports interviewed parents at london science museum regarding pricary setting on socail networks.

Most of parents hadn’t got a clue but most of the kids interviewed did..

The report suggested that over half of UK childen are now listed on social networks with bebo being the largest in the uk for under 18’s …

The report also suggest govermental reccomendations regarding putting a 999 banner so that kids could phone up the police if they felt at risk from someone on the likes of bebo, facebook etc..

Sadly bbc hasn’t put anything online about this report as yet but times has the following:

To counter the problem, the Home Office will announce on Friday a new voluntary code of conduct for social networks. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook are to agree that, when under18s set up profiles, they will be set to a high privacy setting as a default. To counter the problem, the Home Office will announce on Friday a new voluntary code of conduct for social networks. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook are to agree that, when under18s set up profiles, they will be set to a high privacy setting as a default.

 Children’s social network pages ‘must have privacy lock’ - http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3663312.ece

My friend just IM me this whilst talking about tomorrow.. Yep is the 14th..

 I think the day should be banned. It just rubs it in for the terminally single

So regarding seo have you covered and bases for the “terminally single”

seo-singles.com ? 

single-beds.com ?

i-am-alone.com ?

 I wonder just how many search will contain “-valentines ”

So from a seo point of view you may wish to target “-valentines” in the likes of adwords etc…

Enjoy the day : )

EDIT:

ADDED QUOTE:

I have actually contemplated downgrading my bed to give me more room

hehehhee

I’ve just been looking at some of my referrals from yesterday..

I came accross pipl.. I’ve seen it before and the data it has on me and my friends if pretty amazing..

Its tagged me/friends with some of the keywords that we have been seo’ing for a while..

I’ve also seen ICQ listings with address and phone number etc of friends.. It would seem this site has gathered more info than when I last looked.. It would be a great tool for people to checkout who is who…

Word of warning use a aka that in no way relates to you OR be open with what you do… If your outspoken which i’m not then I’d look at the aka route..

Anyway enjoy looking up your friends or seo’s here: http://pipl.com

No this isn’t a guide.. OR a top 10 OR a How to LOL..

This is my A to Z list of Social sites…

Most you are likely to know but I put a few golden ones hidden in the list Enjoy …

So lets kick off with no other than A

NOTE: PR and Alexa are what I see in my browser right now 

A - http://www.agentb.com/  - Shopping - general - PR3 - Alexa 300k +

B - http://photobucket.com/  - photo - general - PR8 - Alexa 33

C - http://www.contentpop.com/ News - general - PR4 - Alexa 200k +

D - http://del.icio.us/  Book marking - Everything - PR8 - Alexa 388

E - http://www.espinthebottle.com/  Teen - Sick and wrong lol - PR5 - Alexa 15k+ (wow)

F - http://www.furl.net/ Info / news - General - PR7 - Alexa 5K+

G - http://www.godtube.com/ God stuff - video - PR5 - Alexa 7k+

H - http://www.hanzoweb.com/   Archiver - PR5 - Alexa 100k+

I - http://www.icerocket.com/ General - PR7 - Alexa 12k+

J - http://www.jeteye.com/  Jet packs - General - PR6 - Alexa 100k+

K - http://www.kaboodle.com/ Shopping - Shopping advice - PR6 - Alexa 500+

L - http://www.librarything.com/ Book - Lidraries world wide - PR7 - Alexa 17k+

M - http://www.mostfashionable.com Fashion - Shopping - PR6 - Alexa 500k+

N - http://www.newsvine.com/  News - General - PR7 - Alexa 5k+

O - http://www.oyax.com/ General - General - PR4 - Alexa 51k+

P - http://www.plugim.com/ General - General - PR4 - Alexa 30k+

Q - http://www.qoolsqool.com/ Book - Study - PR4 - Alexa 300k+

R - http://www.rrove.com/ Map -Trips and tips - PR3 - Alexa 350k+

S - http://www.stylehive.com/ Shopping - Style - PR5 - Alexa 16k+

T - http://www.technorati.com/ Blog - Blogging - PR8 - Alexa 400

U - http://upian.com/  Web - French - PR6 - Alexa 250k+

V - http://www.virb.com/ General - Music themed - PR6 - Alexa 12k+

W - http://www.wists.com/ Shopping - Images - PR6 - Alexa 36k+

X - http://www.xing.com/ People - Job - PR7 - Alexa 1K+

Y - http://www.yoono.com/ General - Like SU - Alexa 72K+

Z - http://www.zebo.com/ Shopping - Cool stuff - Alexa 12k+