Google Traffic Not The Holy Grail?

1. 68

   Hope Alexanderposted 15 years ago

   Thought I would post this to see what other people's experiences are. I recently had a flood of hundreds of Google visitors to one of my hubs, which one would think would equate to many monies.
   
   Everywhere I go on this great interwebs, I seem to run into the refrain of Google traffic being the be all and end all when it comes to conversions, yet in this case, it is evident that Google traffic is pretty well useless. Some of my other Hubs are earning far more with just a fraction of the traffic, most of which seems to come from yahoo and hub pages
   
   A freak occurrence? Or are Google users simply becoming ad blind?

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      makemoneyonlineposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      How do you know ?

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      DORIS FELIXposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      hello! i am new on hubs and would appreciat your help and support. i am from mauritius island and internet for us is magical a it allows us to cross the ocean in a click...please can you help me and explain to me how to make money through our hubs. thanks so much
      
      doris,

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      relacheposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      It's naïve to think that traffic automatically equates to money.  If your visitors aren't interacting with your Hub in a meaningful way (actually reading, clicking on links, using the info, sharing it with friends) all you get is lookie-loos and that's not really anything.

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      1. 68

         Hope Alexanderposted 15 years agoin reply to this

         Which was the point of starting the thread, there is a great deal of misinformation about that says Google traffic is the be all and end all. But obviously, that is not the case. Some people have said some really useful things about their traffic experiences, so I don't think it was a waste of time bringing the point up. Also, in terms of monies, it doesn't matter if they interact with your material in a meaningful way at all, it matters if they click on the ads or not.

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      terrygposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      I fully agree with you. Being number 1 on Google does not necessarily mean mobs of traffic. To the contrary I find, being third or fourth even eleven, top of page 2 brings better traffic. You are right where you elude to traffic=clicks=money, touted all over the net.
      
      In reality it is not true. When you look at a niche site do you target grandma or the teenage son and daughter, they are the happy little clickers, (HINT to all - Start a niche targeted at teens)
      
      As for ad blind, it is my belief they will only click an ad if they see it so why hide it. The web says to BLEND it in, load of crud, experiment with a few colors and see how the ctr bounces around. Good question and I am glad you brought it up. Makes me feel I am not alone.

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   Om Paramapoonyaposted 15 years ago

   I agree. My most viewed hub isn't the one that got most clicks either. In fact, it got zero click! Totally pointless.

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3. 74

   Inspirepubposted 15 years ago

   Depends on the topic.

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   The Indexerposted 15 years ago

   I'm interested to know how you can tell which of your hubs are earning the most? It is quite obvious which are getting the most hits, but I don't see how you can work out where those hits are coming from, or many many ad clicks they are getting, on a hub-by-hub basis.
   
   Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's only by getting ad clicks that you actually earn anything, isn't it?

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      Peter M. Lopezposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      On the hub itself, click the "view stats" bar at the top and you will see where the traffic is coming from.

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         Maddie Ruudposted 15 years agoin reply to this

         I think The Indexer was referring to the fact that you can't tell which hub's ads are getting the most clicks.

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            Peter M. Lopezposted 15 years agoin reply to this

            Oops, if so, my mistake.

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      Om Paramapoonyaposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      U can go to Google Adsense, and there's a way you can set up url channels and track where the hits come from.

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5. 73

   Maddie Ruudposted 15 years ago

   It doesn't just depend on how many visitors you get, but how click-happy those visitors are.  If you're writing on subjects that draw readers who aren't necessarily in a consumer-oriented mindset, they're not going to be clicking on ads or buying on Amazon or Ebay.

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   The Indexerposted 15 years ago

   Yes, Maddie is correct here. Hope seemed to be saying that you could distinguish between those hubs that brought the most revenue and those that did not, and I was wondering how this was possible, apart from spotting which get the most hits in total.

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7. 68

   Hope Alexanderposted 15 years ago

   If you are tracking your Hubs in Google Adsense, (which I am) and you have added a Hub as a URL channel (which I have), then you get data reports that tell you how many visitors you had to that page, and how many clicks you got on that page, and how much you earned, as well as some other data.

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8. 49

   johnr54posted 15 years ago

   Log into your Adsense account, select the Adsense setup tab, click on the Channels link, it should default to the Adsense for content tab, and select URL channels.
   
   There you can add URL channels.  If you have Adsense running on more than one site, you probably want to add a channel for
   
   hubpages.com
   
   which will aggregate everything for you and then you can also add channels for your individual hubs, e.g.
   
   hubpages.com/Your-Hub-Name
   
   Just be aware there is a limit of 200 channels ( I think), so if you are prolific you may need to be selective.

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9. 58

   spudsposted 15 years ago

   Lots of traffic does not automatically equal lots of people clicking on ads. It depends on what the person is looking for and the content of the page as well as other factors.
   
   Have you ever had a flood of traffic from StumbleUpon? My experience is stumbleupon traffic never clicks on ads.

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      makemoneyonlineposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      But Google is not Stumbleupon . I have none traffic from social networks so all my earnings come from Google essentially and it amounts to more than 80$ last month so I won't say that Google traffic is not worth as for me.
      
      Other factors than search engine traffic also count of course but for most newbies like me we do essentially depend on it.

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      darksideposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      As you've communicated here, it's all about "traffic quality".
      
      The same can be said of certain geographic regions. I once had an unbelievable amount of traffic from Japan for a couple of days (not here at HubPages, on my own site) and the amount of click thrus remained the same as the day before, so the CTR plummeted.

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         Mark Knowlesposted 15 years agoin reply to this

         This depends why they came also. I run a blog entitled "YouCube," and little did I realize when I set the site up - this is a term used amongst Japanese porn bloggers. To this day I get regular traffic from Japan, but it bounces out very quickly LOL

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      Soyaposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      i agree with you spuds on this as i too experienced lots of traffic with no cliks when i submit any of webpages to social bookmarking sites..the bounce rate is so hign for this kind of traffic ..ne ways the only benefit of social bookmarking is the back links..lol..

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    charlemontposted 15 years ago

    I heard many times from 'gurus' and webmasters at DP that MSN traffic is kinda more profitable that that from Google. Probably because Google is more worldwide and MSN mainly used by US surfers (just my guess).
    But certainly Google is better than any autosurfers and bots anyway it's SE which gives targeted traffic.

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       makemoneyonlineposted 15 years agoin reply to this

       Well don't have much MSN traffic but that's interesting to experiment. I think it's possible because Google is so saturated with Marketing's Hype people could be fed up to click

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11. 49

    johnr54posted 15 years ago

    One of the problems with Google traffic is that the primary way these hubs are being monetized is the use of Adsense.  If you think of it from a web searcher's perspective, they search for a term, and on the right hand side you see the ads for the Adwords network.  You then go to the search result (which is your hub) and they get to see many of the very same ads.
    
    I run a couple of other sites and I track the Adsense performance on a few of them using a utility that won't work on HP, and the click through rate is the highest for MSN and Yahoo, lower for Google, and I always assumed it was because the ads were fresh for the MSN and Yahoo searchers, but not the Google ones.

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12. 68

    Hope Alexanderposted 15 years ago

    Also, now that I think about it... isn't having people reading your hub and interacting with it 'meaningfully' really the exact opposite of what you want? After all, if they get everything they want from your hub, won't they just go away without clicking any ads? (Not including EBay or Amazon ads, that is).
    
    The whole AdSense program seems to benefit only sites and pages where the material wasn't really sufficient, or left the reader wanting more. Or do I have the wrong end of the stick here?

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    BassGuruposted 15 years ago

    Yahoo have suddenly lept up in my stats, not that my hub gets that much traffic but I hope the trend continues.
    
    But don't forget that traffic from links (blog entries and comments etc) can be even more valuable than Google!

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