Who is this guy called "No Referrer"

And why does he like my site so much?

We all like traffic, but there is junk traffic and there is productive traffic and sometimes it's hard to tell if you are chasing the right kind.

If you're a shop then it is easier in a way because productive means "they bought something", and you might even define "possibly productive" as "they got to the checkout even though they didn't actually buy".

But for affiliate sites like most of mine it's harder because we never see the sales details (well, occasionally, but that's another story). So some sort of proxy for "productive" is needed.

Having recently developed one metric for myself -- basically a particular behaviour that only a "serious" reader-potential-buyer is liable to do -- I decided to crunch some numbers and see where my productive traffic was coming from.

If you take the total number of visitors from each source and compare that with the number of productive visitors from those same sources; that gives you a productivity value as a percentage.  So 100 visitors from blog.com but only 5 of them were productive means a 5% productivity value -- a measure of quality of the traffic.

At the same time you can sum up the total productive traffic you have, and look at the productive traffic from each source as a percentage of that.  Say perhaps your total productive traffic is 1000 (which might be only a small part of your total traffic), but 100 comes from blog.com then this means that blog.com is generating 10% of your productive traffic.  This is a quantitative measure.

Search engines are #1 of course and though the absolute figures vary between my sites the overall rankings are the same.

By far the most productive traffic comes from AskJeeves. It is 50% more productive than the next on the list.

"What?" I ask you say, "has she lost her mind". No (well at least not yet), but remember I'm looking at percentages here -- AskJeeves is the most productive traffic -- but unfortunately it is a tiny quantity, perhaps 1% and no more of the total.

Remember we're separating out quantity from quality here.

So, an interesting datum about AskJeeves, but no great potential learnings to be had there.

So who's next? Well surprise surprise it's Google -- and this time we are not talking about minor amounts of traffic. Between 10% and 30% of productive traffic comes via the good old G.

More importantly between 15 and 20% of the traffic Google delivers is productive. So getting more traffic from Google does you more benefit than getting an equal amount of additional traffic from Yahoo! search or MSN search who come in as tied in next place.

Different sites gave me different absolute numbers -- between 9% and 16% -- but every time the numbers for Y and M where within one percentage point of each other.  While the absolute numbers may vary because of differences in the site -- say one site has worse navigation or call to action than another.

The close match between Y and M is at first surprising because the quantity of traffic they provide can vary very widely indeed between sites or even on the same site. However the quality of the traffic -- that percentage of total traffic they send which is productive -- is eerily similar.

If you're a Yahoo-er apparently you think rather like a MSN-er. Strange but true.

After that it breaks up and the traffic varies too much by site to teach us anything.  But I've saved the best for last -- as you may have guessed already I've cheated by missing out the actual top item in my list -- at least for quality of the traffic.

Yes, most of it comes from "No Referrer", at least that's how my stats package lists them.  You may also see this guy listed as "Direct address / Bookmarks" but honestly that's a guess on the part of Awstats, all it really knows is that the log didn't show any referrer so it's presuming that the reader got to your site via typing in your address, or using a bookmark.

A cool 40% to 50% of my productive traffic comes from No Referrer, and though the quality overall is not the highest -- 11% to 15% -- it does go to show that people who return to your site are, surprise surprise, most likely to actually be interested in your topic and maybe even want to buy something!

So, to Mr. No Referrer -- my accountant would like to thank you from the bottom of his heart, and I thank you from my bottom also.