Website Traffic. What Some Motorcycle Website Owners Don’t Want You To Know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Web usage statistics are used as a tool for assessing a Website. But, few website owners and advertisers of the motorcycle industry understand website traffic. All website owners are offered free “website traffic programs” (like “Webalizer” or “Webtrends”) providing a bunch of over-inflated and unreliable traffic data.  Why? Because these programs are unable to filter and distinguish human visits from web robot visits (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers or Spiders).  Web Robots are computer programs that traverse the web automatically all day long to help all search engines index sites content, spammers to scan for email addresses, and many other uses. These Robots hit the website servers 24/7, don’t load pages and are wrongly counted as visits.

Beware of any website owners who give you statistics without telling you from where they come and if they are real human visits. A program like “Webalizer” even states clearly its drawbacks and write that “Their products are not designed to publicly report a site in comparison to others”.  It is our experience that Robot Visits can represent up to 95% of a website traffic for small traffic websites.  Robot Visitors don’t read, click your ads or buy your products. Their scripts just hit servers all day long. For this reason, the statistics we use are the ones of “Google Analytics” aggregating data of real visitors loading a page. In January 2008,  Cyril Huze Blog received 135,484 visits, making it the #1 Custom Motorcycle Blog in the world dedicated to the V-Twin industry.

For a banner of 120 x 90 pixels in our Blog at $475.00, it is a cost of  0.35 CENT per real visit ($475.00 : 135,484). There is absolutely no better online advertising investment you can make. Our traffic sources are: 1- Search Engines (59.23%), 2- Sites Linking To Us (19.58%), Direct Traffic of people we have put us in their Favorites folder (21.18%). Our visits come from 1- Americas (83.91%). Europe (11.55%), Asia (2.24%), Oceania (2.02%). Since the Blog launch in October 2006, 845 original news were published (no copying & pasting of articles found online, written by others, and reproduced in violation of copyright laws). We have an average of 8.5 comments per post (source WordPress), a statistic showing how much our readers are interested by all the news published, participating and getting involved through their daily comments. In addition 4750 professionals of our V-Twin Industry (Dealers, Manufacturers, Custom Builders, Medias) receive a weekly email update of our most recent posts. All published articles are accessible at all time by the reader and they are all indexed by the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)

For more information about our advertising programs, go to Advertise and contact Pam Proctor at 754-544-1304 or email to: pamproctor@cyrilhuzeblog.com.

And for those who want to know more, there are 2 main methods of tracking activity: cookie-based and IP + User Agent.

1- Cookie-based tracking relies on a browser setting the cookie. If cookies are disabled, cookie-based analytics programs (such as Google Analytics) will not count the visit. This would exclude, for example, hits from a robot or spider.

2- IP + User Agent tracking typically uses log file analysis for its data. This will report much more higher numbers than reported by cookie-based tracking because of dynamically assigned IP addresses and spider and robot visits. IP + User Agent tracking free programs like Webtrends and Webalizer cannot give you the number of humans visiting a website. From this point of view, they are of no value for an advertiser.

You can read testimonials of readers by going HERE.

11 Responses to “Website Traffic. What Some Motorcycle Website Owners Don’t Want You To Know.”


  1. 1 Dan Feb 11th, 2008 at 10:03 am

    Very interesting. Glad that you explained how website traffic should be evaluated.

  2. 2 Greg Brandon Feb 11th, 2008 at 10:06 am

    Not surprised you have such traffic. The best news, every day, all the time.

  3. 3 Ryan Feb 11th, 2008 at 1:12 pm

    Just reconfirming what all of us here already know, Cyril has his hands on the motorcycle industry and his ears to the ground and let’s us know about right away. You look here first and you don’t even have to bother looking anywhere else. Thank you Cyril for a great service.

  4. 4 MCBill Feb 11th, 2008 at 7:23 pm

    Just to clarify, when you say 135,484 visits, are those “unique” visitors, or the total number of visitors for the month of January.

  5. 5 Cyril Feb 11th, 2008 at 7:48 pm

    I clearly mention real “visits”

  6. 6 James Feb 11th, 2008 at 7:49 pm

    I am addicted to your blog.

  7. 7 Ken Glenn (Rat Judge) Feb 12th, 2008 at 10:36 am

    Great food for thought for my own web site. Thanks for the info,

  8. 8 John Feb 12th, 2008 at 11:55 am

    Thanks cyril for that – you are right its hard to monetize websites and a program like analytics helps a lot.

    I see you have on average 5000 people a day strolling through the site – thats a nice number. wonder why that is not translating into private ads being bought on your site.

    I run a big forum and have decent numbers, but I find it hard to get potential advertisers to buy, I guess they just have not realized the power of direct marketing.

    One note .35 cents a click is a little on the hight side of PPC for MC sites – I usually never pay more than .15 cents a click on google adwords setup on targeted MC sites.

  9. 9 Cyril Huze Feb 12th, 2008 at 12:12 pm

    John, thank you for your input. But when you say that 0.35 CENT is on the high end, you compare with a text ad from Google, which can’t be compared with a color banner. In addition, you forget to mention the quality of readership, the quality of website content…and maybe my credibility as a custom builder. I am certain you agree with this.

  10. 10 MCBill Feb 12th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    Cyril…

    Yes, you mention real “visits”, but are these “unique” visitors, ie: 135,484 different people, or is it the total number of visitors, ie: some have visited the site more than once during the period???

    Thanks – enjoy your Blog!

  11. 11 Cyril Huze Feb 12th, 2008 at 12:48 pm

    Evidently, especially on a Blog, they visit more than 1 time. This post is directed to advertisers and as a professional you understand that it is important for an advertiser to know how many times his ad has been exposed.

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Cyril Huze