Sources Analytics: Google vs. Yahoo and Bing

Looking at my Google Analytics numbers for the first half of the year, I noticed something about traffic sources. This shows how much traffic came to my sites from various sources, and there is substantial difference between my sites in how much traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and Bing searches.

First, my law firm website:

Nearly 75% of the traffic comes from "organic" searches on Google. The next highest source is "cpc" (cost per click), my advertising on Google AdWords. Then Bing and Yahoo combine for just over 8% of site visits or about one-ninth of the traffic generated by organic Google searches.

Next, our traffic court website:

We don't use AdWords or other advertising to bring traffic to the site. Google is still dominant, with a 68% share. But Bing and Yahoo are much more prominent, with a combined 22% share, nearly triple their share on the law firm site.

I'm not sure how to explain the difference. One theory has to do with how the different search engines view these two sites. At first I thought maybe Bing and Yahoo were ranking my law firm site lower than Google ranks it. But I did some brief searches using my biggest keywords and they actually seem to rank my law firm site better than Google does.

Then it dawned on my to look at the other side of it. Bing and Yahoo rank my court website much better than Google does on searches for court names. So it's not that my law firm site does poorly on Bing and Yahoo, but that they treat my court site well.

Another theory is that SEO for law firms is far more competitive than for court directory websites. Many law firms are trying to get their websites to rank high on searches. On the other hand, search engines seem to give substantial credibility to government websites (i.e. official pages for the courts), which is the main competition for our court website. While the government doesn't actively compete in the SEO game, the search engines' favoritism is dramatic. Maybe the numbers suggest Google gives more weight to government websites than Yahoo and Bing do.

Just to add more information, my next biggest site is my Albany Lawyer blog:

Google has a 71% share and Bing/Yahoo are at about 12% together. And it's nice to see facebook sneaking in there.

And as a final and upbeat note, Town-Court.com had 1.75 million visits in the first half of the year, up 60% from the first half of last year. The site is roughly 1/100 the size and profit of LinkedIn, which is supposedly worth $8 billion. That would mean our site is worth $80 million. Any buyers? We'd sell at a substantial discount.

Zillow Showcase Ads: Are their numbers fudged?

In putting our house on the market (Guilderland House for Sale), I posted information on a number of real estate websites. My first choice was Zillow, because I like the site myself, including the Zillow iPhone app.

One of the things I decided to try on Zillow is Zillow Showcase Ads. I was reviewing the numbers today and found something disturbing.


Zillow says that my showcase ad has had twenty clicks. But I'm not seeing these results on the other end:


Per Google Analytics, I've only had four visits from Zillow at all, and only two of them came from Zillow ads.

Is Zillow fudging the numbers for its Zillow Showcase Ads? Please post comments. I'm interested to see what others have experienced.

Traffic Court - New Records

Google Analytics defaults to the last 31 days. We just hit new records for town-court.com - over 190,000 visits and over 400,000 pageviews in 31 days. To put it another way, we are now on a pace to help over 2 million people a year.

Google Analytics by Day of Week

The two images below show web traffic to our county court site and to my Albany restaurant review blog. They come from Google Analytics. Very helpful for monitoring our websites.


What stands out about this is the difference in traffic by day of the week. The usage of our court site has a clear pattern with Monday as the big day, with a gradual decline to Friday, and then significantly lower numbers on the weekend. Sunday is usually slightly higher than Saturday. I see similar patterns on our law firm site's traffic and the traffic to this blog as well.

The restaurant review blog follows a different pattern. The big days are usually either Friday or Saturday. Sundays and Mondays are the slowest. So far Google Analytics does not offer a specific "day of week" tool for analyzing traffic. Would be a nice feature.

Google Analytics Quirk

Maybe I'm not as good at math as I thought. How can I get only 7000 visits from over 10,000 keywords? See image below from Google Analytics.

Okay, so after I started posting this, I figured out what happened. On the above image, I had it set to compare to a previous period. I think it counted the keywords from both periods. Once I unchecked the "compare to past" box, it came down to 5690 keywords. I still suspect GA is not counting right, but at least it fits better now.

Weird Analytics

Something weird on Google Analytics just now. This blog had nearly 300 visits in the past two days from a single keyword phrase search from Yahoo. The search was for "funny speeding ticket excuses".


Ordinarily I'd figure it was some kind of glitch on one computer somewhere. But I checked and the searches come from 255 different cities. See image below. I also checked operating system -- 273 from Windows and 23 from Mac. Three different browsers too (IE, Firefox and Safari). That would mostly seem to rule out a virus causing this. I can't figure out what prompted 300 people to search for the phrase "funny speeding ticket excuses" on Yahoo only, and then click on my page on speeding ticket excuses, which doesn't even rank #1.

Google Analytics, Dublin and Digiweb

I've noticed through Google Analytics, for some time now, that my sites get unusually heavy traffic from what appears to be one user in Dublin, Ireland. Nearly all visitors from Dublin are using Linux with the Mozilla browser with Digiweb as the network location. I see the same thing on each of my websites that I look at.

So either there's a massive hive of people using one set of identical computers in Dublin, or maybe it's really a bot/spider indexing the web.

Comments appreciated.