Traffic origins

bb99 · May 19, 2007

One of the disadvantages of parking is that it's hard for the domain owner to see where the traffic is coming from. Is it existing backlinks or typeins? If it's backlinks, is there one very popular one or are there zillions?

All useful information when considering whether to develop or sell, and also useful when selling.

My egg headed friends are always going on about how good Google Analytics is, and how it tells you "everything you'd ever want to know... and more". And, to boot, they've just launched a new version of it and it's now even better.

Now I've never used it personally, so I may be making a fundamental error here, but I'm led to believe that it's all based on putting a wee line of html in your webpage. This html includes your Google Analytics account code so that Mr Google knows it's you.

If we join the dots, is it not possible for Namedrive (and the other parking companies) to allow you to enter your Google Analytics code in your account details and for this to then be used whenever your parked pages are viewed?

Please shoot me down in flames if I'm over simplifying it...

The only downside I can see is that it may stir up trouble if there's conflicting statistical information between the parking company's stats and Google's. But a small price to pay, surely.

Over to you...

olebean · Jun 30, 2007

Interesting you bring this issue to light. I've been monitoring traffic and notice what I term as annomolies in the traffic stated and the traffic actual on a daily basis over a sustained period.

Admittedly, Namdrive/Ed has discussed the issue of discluding some bots and they have suggested AOL ip's are not allowed. What I found is other traffic seems to disappear.

I would like to know whether anyone else is monitoring this situation?

NameDriver · Jul 2, 2007

Hi guys,

We have been looking at things like Google Analytics and when we ask whether we can use them, they are typically non-committal.
As far as traffic counting etc is concerned, we try to mimic exactly what Google shows us with their reporting. At the end of the day, for a Google parking program, this is essentially all that matters. The fact is that we send the traffic to G and they send us a daily report saying what each of these domains earns. We then plug that number into the system. So, even if we show 1 view or 100 views, the earnings would be the same. Obviously, we try to present the most accurate picture of the traffic on your domains, but there are bound to be anomalies between any methods of traffic counting.
I hope this goes towards clearing up the issue.

Ed

olebean · Jul 2, 2007

Ed

Cheers for the reply

Playing devils advocate, are you saying google could disclude traffic, whether that is legitimate traffic or other and without recourse?

NameDriver · Jul 2, 2007

Umm. That's not really what I was saying. I'm not ruling it out because Google are Google, but we see fairly natural traffic patterns from the views which we count. We certainly err on the side of caution, as I'm sure Goog do to try and keep any fraud to a minimum. I think that they are in general accurate with their traffic count. Some people sometimes raise concerns about lower traffic but, as I said, there is little point in us displaying traffic just for the sake of traffic when we know it's traffic which wouldn't convert to any clicks.

Ed

retired_member9 · Jul 2, 2007

Some of domains I have parked were getting thousands hits per day but very low CTR (5%). After doing traffic analysis I found that most of those hits are picture, flash or even .xml requests.

rob · Jul 2, 2007

vizzy said:
Some of domains I have parked were getting thousands hits per day but very low CTR (5%). After doing traffic analysis I found that most of those hits are picture, flash or even .xml requests.

I have one name that gets several tens of thousands of hits a day and it is a single file being requested from inside a windows media player for a single image file.

It is a common letter set think site.uk.com / site.com.uk style and hard to block IP's as it is individual clients requesting rather than via a single server.

Zero worth but 'big traffic'.