MASSIVE Increase in Traffic
Ok, I have waffled on a fair bit in a reply to a previous post already this evening but have one post I want to make today.
Its been a long time since I had a good look at the stats for my main Heritage site. I know traffic is up on last year by a considerable amount but when I checked my hosting stats, I noticed that the bandwidth used wasnt up by a great deal - certainly not enough to write home about.
What could be causing this? Well, it kind of implies that the number of visitors was up by a lot but that they werent hanging around for long, ie, not using alot of bandwidth.
A quick look at the stats and the culprit was soon found - "google images" !! If I had the time I could quote the stats - believe me, they are pretty astonishing. The number one referrer to my site this month is, by far and away, google image search. I think out of the top 20 referrers this month, google images, google images uk, google images south america, google images europe, google images timbuctoo, etc, etc, etc were pretty much the only referrers present.
Why didnt I notice this before you may ask? Well, I kind of did. The situation has been growing. I could see it coming last November but what with the xmas rush and that, it had escapde my notice up until now.
Is it good or bad? Hmmm... Pass, ask me another! On the one hand, I have always maintained that bandwidth is cheap. Very cheap compared with the other costs of running an online shop. So if bandwidth is cheap and it means people see the Heritage site, no matter for how short a period, and they have come from a totally free link, well.... , if I get one sale out of 10000 visitors, then that is one I wouldnt have had without the great google images.
On the other hand, when you see just how slow your site is running at particular times of the day and you know that half of your visitors probably cant even speak English, dont know where the UK is, have absolutely no intention of buying a gift and are simply looking for a photo of a schitszu puppy the same colour as their own, you have to start questioning how far you are prepared to go for untargetted traffic.
I know I could ban the google image bot from the site - should I? I get the feeling, if I was to post this on either my webhosts forum or the osCommerce forum, the overwhelming response would be ban it. Personally, I am still thinking, but at present, the only down side I see is the speed of the site and this should change when I upgrade the hosting to a semi-dedicated solution - something I will have to do before next xmas either way. The plus side - Well, how much is it worth to have something like 3-4000 people seeing your sites name in a day? May not be worth much if they are from South America, but for the fairly high percentage from the UK, it may just trigger something in them around the festive season when they are looking for gifts and stumble on the site for a second time through a more targetted link.
As ever, let me know what you think. Just please dont tell me to put adsense on the site - I am already far too tempted :) - Talking of which, I believe I recently read a post on someones blog that indicated they were trying to use google images as a source of adsense traffic - might be worth a little more thought for the adsensers amongst us!
Cheers,
Rich
Its been a long time since I had a good look at the stats for my main Heritage site. I know traffic is up on last year by a considerable amount but when I checked my hosting stats, I noticed that the bandwidth used wasnt up by a great deal - certainly not enough to write home about.
What could be causing this? Well, it kind of implies that the number of visitors was up by a lot but that they werent hanging around for long, ie, not using alot of bandwidth.
A quick look at the stats and the culprit was soon found - "google images" !! If I had the time I could quote the stats - believe me, they are pretty astonishing. The number one referrer to my site this month is, by far and away, google image search. I think out of the top 20 referrers this month, google images, google images uk, google images south america, google images europe, google images timbuctoo, etc, etc, etc were pretty much the only referrers present.
Why didnt I notice this before you may ask? Well, I kind of did. The situation has been growing. I could see it coming last November but what with the xmas rush and that, it had escapde my notice up until now.
Is it good or bad? Hmmm... Pass, ask me another! On the one hand, I have always maintained that bandwidth is cheap. Very cheap compared with the other costs of running an online shop. So if bandwidth is cheap and it means people see the Heritage site, no matter for how short a period, and they have come from a totally free link, well.... , if I get one sale out of 10000 visitors, then that is one I wouldnt have had without the great google images.
On the other hand, when you see just how slow your site is running at particular times of the day and you know that half of your visitors probably cant even speak English, dont know where the UK is, have absolutely no intention of buying a gift and are simply looking for a photo of a schitszu puppy the same colour as their own, you have to start questioning how far you are prepared to go for untargetted traffic.
I know I could ban the google image bot from the site - should I? I get the feeling, if I was to post this on either my webhosts forum or the osCommerce forum, the overwhelming response would be ban it. Personally, I am still thinking, but at present, the only down side I see is the speed of the site and this should change when I upgrade the hosting to a semi-dedicated solution - something I will have to do before next xmas either way. The plus side - Well, how much is it worth to have something like 3-4000 people seeing your sites name in a day? May not be worth much if they are from South America, but for the fairly high percentage from the UK, it may just trigger something in them around the festive season when they are looking for gifts and stumble on the site for a second time through a more targetted link.
As ever, let me know what you think. Just please dont tell me to put adsense on the site - I am already far too tempted :) - Talking of which, I believe I recently read a post on someones blog that indicated they were trying to use google images as a source of adsense traffic - might be worth a little more thought for the adsensers amongst us!
Cheers,
Rich
posted by richandzhaoyan | 1:19 AM
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