[Air-l] research on factors driving traffic to web sites

[Jim Jansen]

Cristian,
 
The number one factor, far out weighing any other, is --- where the Website is ranked in response to a given query by the major search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and ASK). 
 
With 60% to 80% of searchers never going beyond the first page or so (Jansen & Spink, 2005), a Website being in the top ten is critical to all types of Website traffic.  Directly related to this is -- whether or not the Website has a sponsored link off the front page of the major search engines. 
 
More than 70% of people use search engines as the entry point to the Web (Nielsen Media, 2006) using search engines even for links that they already know.
 
See: 
Jansen, B.J., & Spink, A. (2005). How are we searching the World Wide Web? A comparison of nine search engine transaction logs. Information Processing & Management, 42(1), 248-263.
Nielsen Media. (2006). Search Engines Most Popular Method of Surfing the Web. Retrieved 30 January, 2006, from http://www.commerce.net/news/press/0416.html <http://www.commerce.net/news/press/0416.html> 
 
Best,
Jim  
________________________________

Jim Jansen | College of Information Sciences and Technology | The Pennsylvania State University |
329F Information Sciences and Technology Building | University Park, PA 16802 | Office: 814-865-6459 | Fax: 814-865-6426 | Email: jjansen at acm.org |
URL: http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/ <http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/>  | Blog: http://jimjansen.blogspot.com/ <http://jimjansen.blogspot.com/>  

________________________________

From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org on behalf of Cristian Vaccari
Sent: Tue 5/15/2007 4:20 AM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: [Air-l] research on factors driving traffic to web sites



Hi all,

I am doing research on factors that drive traffic to political (parties' and caniddates') web sites. Can anyone point me to some previous research in this field, e.g., studies that highlight some key variables that can account for a web site's amount of visitors, page views, etc.? Does not have to be about political web sites (though I could not find any kind of this research on political sites and would be curious to discover there is some), but also on commercial, news, social-networking, or other kinds of sites.

Thanks,

Cristian Vaccari
www.cristianvaccari.it
www.comunicarepolitica.it

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