• by Dale Chaney , June 14, 2002

Banners, other paid links drive big share of site traffic.
As the dominant purpose of online advertising has shifted from sale generation to building site traffic and brand awareness, according to industry organizations such as the Internet Advertising Bureau, the industry is taking a keener interest in what produces site traffic.

Recent data from WebSideStory’s StatMarket show that Internet links such as banner advertising and other paid links, sponsorships and affiliates are a “very viable way” to generate site traffic. This information, says StatMarket’s vice president of marketing Geoff Johnston, should cause media buyers and planners to rethink the value of online advertising versus, say, search engines.

The San Diego-based Internet intelligence service reports that links accounted for about 46 percent of global site referrals compared to less than 7 percent for search sites. Direct navigation and bookmarks—sites that are typed directly into the address bar and sites that are bookmarked on a user’s browser—account for about 47 percent of site referrals.

The conclusion, Johnston says, is that most people already know where they want to go on the web, and when they don’t, they would appear to be moving from one site to another.

This site-to-site movement indicates that the “community” nature of the web is something that media buyers should factor into their thinking. “We’re talking about networking, associations, a trusted source of information,” he says. “Are people looking for points of reference they can trust? I can see, psychologically, how people will trust another site. On the other hand, a search engine is like the yellow pages—it’s impersonal and unknown.”

If media buyers take out the ability to link one site to another, they could lose substantially half of their site traffic. And, even though site traffic may be seen only as the goose, it is still the goose that lays the golden egg—sales or other desired transactions. The question StatMarket can’t answer—at this time—is whether or not the search engines account for the first time contact.

StatMarket (www.statmarket.com) publishes data gathered from more than 50 million Internet surfers a day to nearly 200,000 sites worldwide using WebSideStory’s HitBox Enterprise analysis services. The types of sites monitored vary from grass roots “my cat Fluffy” to the largest enterprise sites. So, Johnstone says, StatMarket’s numbers reflect a real cross-section of sites.

The data is collected in real-time and reported daily. The technology also shows where the visit comes from, what paths were taken to get to the site, whether it is a unique visit or another page view to the site, and what equipment and browser systems were used to get there.

Freelance writer Dale Chaney can be reached at dale_chaney@msn.com.