What do you think is driving hubpages traffic?

1. 59

   keirnanhollandposted 11 years ago

   Me personally I can't tell if it's google search that drives the traffic on HP or if it's the user's who contribute and their own fascination with hubs and  the content they create themselves.. One user described this site as like the ring that that golem treasured.. It's like if you contribute a treasured subject, you will revisit the site to marvel at your creation. If this is what drives traffic, then I'd think that critiquing people's hubs would detract from that behaviour. Just sayin'

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   1. 94

      wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      The "traffic sources" on the stats page tells me that 95% of my traffic is from search engines feeding traffic directly to the hub.  Another 4+% comes from my subdomain, leaving under 1% from hubpages itself.

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2. 86

   rebekahELLEposted 11 years ago

   It varies for HP writers and how they use the site.  Often a newer hubber will receive more internal traffic from fellow writers, and from making yourself known by participating in the community, (leaving comments, forum and question/answer posts).  It can take a while to start gaining traffic from the search engines.  It used to be much easier a few years ago for hubs to rank well when first published, now it can take a while.
   
   Ideally you want a nice mix of search engine, social media, direct and referral traffic.

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3. 78

   Greekgeekposted 11 years ago

   Ooo! Ooo!  Learn the wonders of traffic stats. I mostly use them to see what my visitors searched for to find my page -- which helps me know what they want to know, so I can answer it! -- but it also gives you precise insights into how people are finding your Articles.
   
   Here's how to use Google Analytics so you can see all this stuff:
   
   1. Register for Google analytics and add a tracking code to your hubs. Here's how.
   2. Wait a few days so it starts compiling data.
   3. Log into Google Analytics. Stats! Pie charts! Info. What is all this?
   4. Under "Traffic" at left, click "Traffic Sources." You'll get a more detailed breakdown of all your traffic as a list. You'll probably want to change the "rows" of data to more than ten a page (lower right).
   5. Click the pie chart icon at right to get a pie chart representation of the list. Here's mine today, which shows the sources of traffic for one of my Hubpages accounts in the past month:
   
   
   
   What's all this mean?
   -- Bulk of traffic from Google
   -- "Direct" traffic is traffic for which Google doesn't know the source. This includes visitors using a device/browser that doesn't pass any info about them, browser bookmarks, bookmarks clicked on in email, or if someone copied a bookmark from one of my YouTube videos (YouTube doesn't let us put HTML in video descriptions) and pasted it into their browser.
   -- This list of different traffic sources actually goes on for about 280 rows . After about line 70, each "source" sent only one or two visitors. As you see, each of the individual traffic sources in the gray block sent less than .5% of my total traffic, but together they add up to a lot. This is what we call the "long tail." It includes links from other webpages pointing to mine, smaller search engines, and, sometimes, links from other Hubpages hubs.
   
   How many Hubpages hubs? I'm not smart enough to figure out whether those are non-Hubpage-members visiting my hub from a link on another hub, or Hubbers visiting my hub from elsewhere on the site, but I can tell you the sum total of both of those groups of visitors.
   
   Just above this chart, there's a search box where you can filter the results. So:
   
   
   At upper left, you see that 2.99% of all the visits to my hubs came from visitors surfing in via links elsewhere on Hubpages.
   
   But that's just my own traffic. I know how to write for search traffic and write content that attracts links, so maybe my results are atypical. There's actually a way to check Hubpages as a whole: Quantcast.com.
   
   I do this often, because I'm interested in this kind of thing. (Ya think?) Quantcast is a tracking service that puts a tiny 1x1 pixel graphic on every page of a participating site, and that graphic works like a turnstyle; it can then see every time a page gets loaded.
   
   Here's what Quantcast sees, as far as Hubpages' total visitors:
   
   
   A little hard to decipher what they're saying there, but what it means is, At least 70% of Hubpages' overall traffic consists of people coming in from outside. It's still not a hard-and-fast number, because "regulars" could consist of non-Hubpages-members who use the site often, and "passersby" could include some Hubpages members who stop by once or twice and never again, but that's probably a pretty close estimate.

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   1. 60

      Paul Maplesdenposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Superb, in-depth reply Greekgeek, thanks for sharing.

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4. 61

   Skylandersposted 11 years ago

   I recently lost my number 1 ranking hub, to someone else who wrote on the same subject. I was annoyed at first, and still can't work out why mine fell from grace, but then I realised a lot of my traffic is coming from his hub. All I can think of is that people are clicking on my hubs after reading his?

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5. 72

   waynetposted 11 years ago

   ....a Car?

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