Analysis of my HubPages Traffic Sources

HubPages provides a wealth of statistics. This essay focuses on the Traffic Source breakdown page, http://hubpages.com/my/traffic_source. Note that only registered HubPages members have access to this page, and only to their specific data. HubPages does not share this information between hubbers.

The following table breaks down all the referring sites since I started hubbing, about 6 months ago. I have enjoyed 26060 referrals. My most frequent referrer has been google.com, which has provided almost half of my total referrals. A distant second is HubPages.com, with 6119, or 23 per cent of the total.

One interesting traffic source is SwagBucks.com. Having never visited the site, I don't know how it learned about my hubs. SwagBucks has provided 88 total referrals over the life of my account, but they may or may not have generated income. In order to learn if any SwagBucks referrals have been profitable for me, I could use Google Analytics.

According to the "My Account" page, http://hubpages.com/my/hubs, my hubs have hosted 31252 page views. This number differs radically from the total referral count, 26060. I assume that visitors to my hubs have viewed more than one page per visit: 31252 / 26060 = 1.199 page views per visit. That number passes my sanity check.

What does this all mean? On the surface we can imply that currying the favor of Google is a good thing. The other 2 major search engines, Yahoo.com and Bing.com, don't seem to be in the game at this point. We know that Google handles 70% of all internet searches with Yahoo a distant second at 17%. This does not make Yahoo referrals any less valuable, although time spent optimizing for Google is time better invested when considering volume of traffic.

Source: http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10133.html

Google thoughtfully provides country-specific search engines. For example, google.it is Google Italy and google.de is Google Germany. Individually they each represent a tiny fraction of my total referrals, but collectively they are an interesting indication of my global outreach.