Referrer traffic distribution

Posted on 2010-02-01 by Ecliptic Rift
'Get up and glow' by c@rljones

Highlighting other folks

I looked over my referrer[1] stats this morning and noticed something interesting. As you might expect, the sources for my traffic don’t have a uniform distribution. Some sites send more traffic than others. But, even more interesting, they have a fairly classic power law distribution. For example, I threw together this chart of my January 2010 referrer stats[2]:

image

Or see the actual table:

[gdocs st_id=0Akb0fx8Aoie6dHVrRlQwZWxnZy1KOHU2bVh1b2hHSmc wt_id=2 type='spreadsheet']

So, lots of love to CrazyKinux, Mynxee, Kirith Kodachi (one of my ‘blog idols’), and Star Defender!

[1]: Yes, I know the official spelling is “referer”. But the official spelling is wrong, so let’s not go there, okay?
[2]: Stats for different referrer URLs from the same site have been combined. For example, if I got traffic from a blog’s home page and several separate posts, I combined them for this analysis.

Related posts:

  1. Terminology for the demigods
  2. Blog Packin’
  3. How to get readers for your new EVE blog
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  • http://twitter.com/Galen_Druid Ga'len

    Something worth looking at, all those hits in Google Reader. Is that from OPML file users or just people adding you manually? It would be interesting to see that statistic if for no other reason, whether or not being listed in the OPML file has any positive effect for your site. As to how you would find that out, I would guess you would have to poll people. I don't know if Google Reader add the tag location within Reader to the referring site data.

    My stats on my site also have Google Reader as my top and second of EVE Bloggers at 578 and 469 from last month respectively. Twitter ranks around 300 for me with eve-online ranking at 275 (forum signatures do help your traffic).

  • http://rift.chromebits.net Casiella Truza

    I will try to look at the breakout later, because yeah, I see some of the differences there. And this doesn't even start to look at my Feedburner and Google Analytics stats. This is all from the WordPress.com Stats plugin…

  • http://twitter.com/Galen_Druid Ga'len

    I use the Google Analytics plugin to review my traffic. The WordPress one doesn't really break down the real numbers and unfortunately seems to show inflated numbers. Google seems to give numbers that match up with my bandwidth usage for visits to the pages that my hosting provider reports generate.

  • http://rift.chromebits.net Casiella Truza

    I have Google Analytics on the site, too. I should take some more time to understand it, but it just seems a little complex…