How Much of an Average Website's Traffic Comes from Google?

How much of an average website's traffic actually comes from Google? As Comscore and other sources have been reporting, Google's proportion of total search traffic continues to climb, and almost hit 2 out of 3 searches on the web in July 2008. What does this mean for the average website? What proportion of its total traffic comes from Google?

The 21 Site Sample

To answer this question, we looked at 21 websites we monitor here at ISL using Google Analytics, a reliable source of web traffic statistics. The sample includes major media, branding, blog, health and educational websites, each with at least 100 visits a day on average and some with many thousands each day. Most of the sites have been around for a long time, some for more than 10 years (we excluded sites that get a significant amount of traffic from other corporate or branding sister sites). We looked at a 30 day period between July and August 2008.

The Results

Search in general drove an average of 61% of all visits to these sites. This includes paid search advertising (Google AdWords in most cases). Google organic search alone drove an average of 41% of all traffic to the sampled websites. All other search engines and paid search advertising amounted to barely half of the traffic driven by Google organic search. In short, Google search is by far the single most important driver of traffic to the average website, twice as large as any other source. If anything this dominance has been growing over time, as Comscore data also shows. For most websites then, the single most important thing to do to increase traffic is to optimize for Google's organic search algorithms and create content that speaks to relevant search.

Among the basket of sites sampled, Google organic traffic varied from about 12% to 84%, with a number of sites in the 20%+ range and many in the 50%+ range. Yahoo! search traffic, by comparison, has been steadily declining, while MSN remains stuck in the single digits for most sites.

Other Traffic Sources

What else does this sample website analysis show? Direct traffic (someone typing in the URL, for example) accounts for 20% of the average site's visits. Referring sites are almost as close, with some 17% of all site visits. Clearly getting your brand and URL out there, as well as links to your site, is critical to bringing in traffic. Indeed, for many sites, one of the top search terms in Google is its own URL, further showing how dominant Google is as the entry point to the internet.

Some of our clients use regular newsletters to drive traffic as well, but the traffic driven by these, on average is but a few percent. On the other hand, this kind of traffic often is goal-oriented toward tasks like purchase or content contribution.

Average Pages per Visit and Time on Site

Clients also often ask ISL what the standard average page views per visit to a site is, and the typical time spent on site, two numbers that the Google Analytics Dashboard highlights. Among our sample, the average page views per visit is almost 4, with time on site approaching 3 minutes. Specific sites vary from between 2 and 10 pages per visit, with the latter more likely for content heavy sites. Time on site in our sample varied from 1 to nearly 9 minutes. These ranges and differences are broader and greater proportionally than the traffic share numbers. Time on site is also notoriously difficult to measure (although Google Analytics seems better at it than earlier solutions). Given how the web is evolving, pages per visit and time on site may be measures with diminishing value, but they do give some indication of how engaged visitors might be with your content.

Google's organic search traffic, in general, is pretty similar to the averages for each site - which makes sense given that it is the highest proportion of this average! Direct traffic often shows slightly higher engagement statistics; this type of user likely already knows the site and may have something specific to find or transact. Nonetheless, these numbers show that Google organic search traffic is generally not superficial traffic.

If Google continues to grow its share as it has over the past couple of years, the day when 1 out of 2 visitors to the average website comes from Google search is not far away. This shows not only how important a single company has become, but also the growing universality of search as the interface to information of all kinds, an interface that was hardly known to us 15 years ago.