What's a typical number of "hits" (or rather, page views or visitors) for an accommodation website?
Some listings places have recently been boasting that they get 2500 page views per month and another that they expect to get 8000 a month. That sounded like quite a lot to me so I thought I'd have a look at our own stats and we're getting just under 8000 visitors a month ourselves (about 15000 page views).
I'm assuming that the listings places are quoting average figures for the year and mine are just for November so presumably my own averages will be considerably higher over a 12 month period (can't calculate them due to a change in ISP midyear); our page views have been growing too from about 300 a day a month ago to 500 a day now (don't know if this is a seasonal thing or better marketing).
Anyway, I was wondering if our figures are unusually high. So far it looks like they are as another owner I spoke to was quoting 500 views a month for their site but then perhaps theirs is unusually low.
Arnold
Typical number of hits
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marcus
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If you are getting 8000 unique visitors a month I think that is a very high number for a private site.
To the point that I would be inclined to doubt the figures, I think, unless you spend a great deal on AdWords or have some other way of enticing in unnatural numbers of visitors. Of course it could be that I'm wrong and our figures are low.
After 2 years we now get 500-1000 unique visitors a month (more like 3500 page views because we have a lot of pages!) but thats taken a long time to reach that level and I don't think we'll ever have a further 10 fold increase to 8000 unique visitors per month.
I just had a look at HolidayLets as an example, because they report 'total property views for site' and they say 6.1 million, but don't say over what period. This is the kind of figure I'd expect. If a listing agency is spending money on marketing they should be getting way more than 2500 page views per month, certainly in the hundreds of thousands usually I would think.
Are these 'free ad' sites quoting such low figures? I don't think they're going to bring the bookings rolling in. Again according to HolidayLets stats, it is about 1% of people looking at our property who send an enquiry, and maybe 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 who then actually book. So 250 views per booking. And that's views of our property not the site as a whole. So 2500 views for a whole site? No chance.
Cheers
Marcus
To the point that I would be inclined to doubt the figures, I think, unless you spend a great deal on AdWords or have some other way of enticing in unnatural numbers of visitors. Of course it could be that I'm wrong and our figures are low.
After 2 years we now get 500-1000 unique visitors a month (more like 3500 page views because we have a lot of pages!) but thats taken a long time to reach that level and I don't think we'll ever have a further 10 fold increase to 8000 unique visitors per month.
I just had a look at HolidayLets as an example, because they report 'total property views for site' and they say 6.1 million, but don't say over what period. This is the kind of figure I'd expect. If a listing agency is spending money on marketing they should be getting way more than 2500 page views per month, certainly in the hundreds of thousands usually I would think.
Are these 'free ad' sites quoting such low figures? I don't think they're going to bring the bookings rolling in. Again according to HolidayLets stats, it is about 1% of people looking at our property who send an enquiry, and maybe 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 who then actually book. So 250 views per booking. And that's views of our property not the site as a whole. So 2500 views for a whole site? No chance.
Cheers
Marcus
I stripped out the non mascamps.com hits and the figures are 5000 visitors and 10400 page views per month (scaling up from 169 and 346 per day over the last week: those figures have been growing quite strongly over the last two months).
Those are taken directly from the host server so I'm assuming that they're correct and they do correlate well with the figures that we had from a hit counter on the site and indeed from the google adsense ads (neither the hit counters nor the ads are on every page so they undercount the total hits). I assume that the google figures are accurate in that they're paying out cash on the basis of them.
One thing we did notice was a 10 fold increase in hits in the latter half of September (as recorded by the host, counters and google) after we did what appeared to be a relatively small upgrade on our site. In hindsight, perhaps we should have taken a few days out to do it before the summer kicked in
We have a small adwords spend but not on the mascamps.com site and the 10 fold increase was largely confined to mascamps.com as we've not fully rolled out the upgrade on our other sites.
We're two years down the line too and on effectively version 3 of the website (version 1 being incredibly naff of course). Our page views are relatively low as we have quite large pages on the whole.
I'm not sure if the 2500 figure was per month; it might have been per day. The 8000 visitor figures is from FrenchEntree (a paid site) and it's the one that made me curious. Even taking your own figure of 1000 it seems very low for them.
Should be an "interesting" time for us once the booking season kicks in. Our view to book ratio was about 5% last year which would imply something like 20 bookings a day even with the current hits (sadly they're not forthcoming but then this isn't a booking season for us).
Arnold
Those are taken directly from the host server so I'm assuming that they're correct and they do correlate well with the figures that we had from a hit counter on the site and indeed from the google adsense ads (neither the hit counters nor the ads are on every page so they undercount the total hits). I assume that the google figures are accurate in that they're paying out cash on the basis of them.
One thing we did notice was a 10 fold increase in hits in the latter half of September (as recorded by the host, counters and google) after we did what appeared to be a relatively small upgrade on our site. In hindsight, perhaps we should have taken a few days out to do it before the summer kicked in
We have a small adwords spend but not on the mascamps.com site and the 10 fold increase was largely confined to mascamps.com as we've not fully rolled out the upgrade on our other sites.
We're two years down the line too and on effectively version 3 of the website (version 1 being incredibly naff of course). Our page views are relatively low as we have quite large pages on the whole.
I'm not sure if the 2500 figure was per month; it might have been per day. The 8000 visitor figures is from FrenchEntree (a paid site) and it's the one that made me curious. Even taking your own figure of 1000 it seems very low for them.
Should be an "interesting" time for us once the booking season kicks in. Our view to book ratio was about 5% last year which would imply something like 20 bookings a day even with the current hits (sadly they're not forthcoming but then this isn't a booking season for us).
Arnold
"This vast amount of traffic is no doubt due to the link in your signature."
Don't laugh - I used to get quite a significant uplift in hits from LivingFrance. I only put ourinns.org in the signature there now as the hits were, as you'd expect, not booking type ones. Actually, I don't tend to get identifiable hits from laymyhat but presumably there are hits from the links here.
Yes, just for mascamps.com; I edited out all the other sites from the log to get the 5000/10000 figures. Pre-upgrade the split was roughly 70% english, 20% french and 10% mainly spanish. The other languages are very much "also rans" because the pages translated are smaller and there are less of them. Assuming that the split post-upgrade is the same that would equate to about 3500 english, 1000 french and 500 spanish visitors per month but my guess is that the english hits are higher as my english is (hopefully!) better than my french or spanish.
The trend is still heading upwards which, assuming that it doesn't actually drop, looks like it'll force me into upping the bandwidth with the ISP come the booking season as presumably we'll get a jump upwards similar to that of last year (although from 500 to maybe 2000 hits per day this time around).
I lay the blame for this high traffic squarely on your shoulders Paolo. I think that the 10 fold increase resulted from my working through of the means of upping traffic that you run though on one or two FAQs on this site. But then, that still leaves the question: how come your site isn't way up there in terms of hits?
Arnold
Don't laugh - I used to get quite a significant uplift in hits from LivingFrance. I only put ourinns.org in the signature there now as the hits were, as you'd expect, not booking type ones. Actually, I don't tend to get identifiable hits from laymyhat but presumably there are hits from the links here.
Yes, just for mascamps.com; I edited out all the other sites from the log to get the 5000/10000 figures. Pre-upgrade the split was roughly 70% english, 20% french and 10% mainly spanish. The other languages are very much "also rans" because the pages translated are smaller and there are less of them. Assuming that the split post-upgrade is the same that would equate to about 3500 english, 1000 french and 500 spanish visitors per month but my guess is that the english hits are higher as my english is (hopefully!) better than my french or spanish.
The trend is still heading upwards which, assuming that it doesn't actually drop, looks like it'll force me into upping the bandwidth with the ISP come the booking season as presumably we'll get a jump upwards similar to that of last year (although from 500 to maybe 2000 hits per day this time around).
I lay the blame for this high traffic squarely on your shoulders Paolo. I think that the 10 fold increase resulted from my working through of the means of upping traffic that you run though on one or two FAQs on this site. But then, that still leaves the question: how come your site isn't way up there in terms of hits?
Arnold
That will increase your hits alright but my guess is that, for the most part, it will just be us forum members being nosey rather than potential guests.
When I used mascamps.com as the signature on the LF forums, there was always quite a jump in hits from them when I replied to something in the forum but they were mainly (exclusively perhaps) from fellow owners ie not really useful hits. Now that I use ourinns.org there I still get the jump in hits but they're effectively more relevant as I get a steady trickle of new entrants to ourinns from them.
Arnold
When I used mascamps.com as the signature on the LF forums, there was always quite a jump in hits from them when I replied to something in the forum but they were mainly (exclusively perhaps) from fellow owners ie not really useful hits. Now that I use ourinns.org there I still get the jump in hits but they're effectively more relevant as I get a steady trickle of new entrants to ourinns from them.
Arnold
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marcus
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Mascamps,
Point is, I think, to have an inbound link to your site from a highly rated site on a related subject matter, because of the positive effect that has on your own rating. So it doesn't matter if the people visiting from the forum are going to book your gite etc or not, it's the existence of the link that is important.
Cheers
Point is, I think, to have an inbound link to your site from a highly rated site on a related subject matter, because of the positive effect that has on your own rating. So it doesn't matter if the people visiting from the forum are going to book your gite etc or not, it's the existence of the link that is important.
Cheers
True enough Marcus, I forgot about that.
Seeing as laymyhat has PR5, does that mean that those of us contributing to the forum are getting a bit of a lift for our own sites vs people who don't contribute to this and similar forums? I see that the pages for individual threads have PR0 though(presumably since they're too new) so perhaps not.
Arnold
Seeing as laymyhat has PR5, does that mean that those of us contributing to the forum are getting a bit of a lift for our own sites vs people who don't contribute to this and similar forums? I see that the pages for individual threads have PR0 though(presumably since they're too new) so perhaps not.
Arnold
I have laughably got to the point where the daily log file is now over 1MB!
Taking Marcus' point that links from the forum will have a bit of an effect on my own ranking, I notice today that the total page views are up from the usual 500 to 730 and the visitors up to 400 (although the mascamps.com figures from that are "only" 420 and 240). OK, some folk have looked at the site as a result of this thread, but only a handful.
But surely it couldn't kick in that fast?
Arnold
Taking Marcus' point that links from the forum will have a bit of an effect on my own ranking, I notice today that the total page views are up from the usual 500 to 730 and the visitors up to 400 (although the mascamps.com figures from that are "only" 420 and 240). OK, some folk have looked at the site as a result of this thread, but only a handful.
But surely it couldn't kick in that fast?
Arnold
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marcus
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Mascamps,
Do you have detailed stats so that you can see whether these are genuine visitors, where they are coming from etc
You can register with statcounter.com, for example, get some code to add to each page and then get very detailed stats. Instead of just 'visitor numbers' this will also tell you how many from which search engine, what they were searching on, what pages they followed through in your site, what browser they used etc etc all good stuff
It would be very interesting to know what you are doing to attract so many visitors!
Marcus
Do you have detailed stats so that you can see whether these are genuine visitors, where they are coming from etc
You can register with statcounter.com, for example, get some code to add to each page and then get very detailed stats. Instead of just 'visitor numbers' this will also tell you how many from which search engine, what they were searching on, what pages they followed through in your site, what browser they used etc etc all good stuff
It would be very interesting to know what you are doing to attract so many visitors!
Marcus
I have access to the full logfile which I run through weblog expert lite to do the analysis so I can see where people are coming from etc. (one of the reasons for the earlier change in ISP). Previously I was using the nedstatbasic counters on the pages but they were undercounting the hits (in comparison to the google adsense figures).
They do appear to be genuine visitors in that the google adsense logs are similarly moving up at a fair pace too. For instance, adsense for November to date is recording 4270 page impressions which is in accord with the raw stats (13900 page views, 9100 visitors) as I don't have adsense on all the pages, in particular it's not on the mascamps.com homepage which receives a fair proportion of the total hits. Whilst, sadly, I can't give up the day job yet the adsense income also went up about 10 fold (from a very low level).
Up 'til September I was ticking along at around 30 or 40 hits a day (ie about 1000 a month). What I did then was what appeared to be a relatively small change on the mascamps.com homepage, along the lines of the advice given in the FAQs on this forum ie I updated the title, description and keywords tags to their present (somewhat over the top) versions and updated the text of that page too to fully incorporate the key phrases. Also new is the section of tags on site rating, author etc. Finally, I added us into one or two new directories (but then I'm always doing that). I'm about half-way through this update on ourinn/ourgites too.
Our google entries are refreshed quite frequently courtesy of the steady trickle of additions to ourinns/ourgites so about a week after making the amendments all of a sudden we were getting over 300 hits per day. What I've noticed too is that the hits have increased right across the board. For instance, I've a personal page at arnoldstewart.com which normally ticks along at one hit a month and even that is up to three or four a day. I'm pretty sure that there are links connecting all my pages so perhaps the uplift in arnoldstewart.com is a side-effect of the uplift on mascamps.com along the lines of links from a high PR site that you mentioned Marcus.
By far the bulk of the visitors are going to the mascamps.com homepage (1800 visitors) but the regional guide pages aren't too far behind at 1300 visitors (900 english, 300 spanish, 100 french).
Even this morning so far, I've had 260 visitors.
Courtesy of our regional guide, I get a lot of hits via image searches but even when I exclude those and just look at mascamps.com pages, the page views are into the hundreds per day.
I'm pretty sure that the high hit counts are largely due to the amendments in September as I got a similar uplift when I applied the equivalent changes to the french and spanish versions of mascamps.com .
But how come you guys aren't getting similar levels of hits? The gite owners almost always have brilliant websites with every bit of optimisation that it's possible to have so I was expecting you guys to have loads and loads more hits than me. OK, I'm a bit wary of the page hits but even the visitor count is around the 300 a day mark (and growing too).
I don't think that our little upgrade was anything major but something in it seems to have had a considerable impact on search engine ranking. So much so, that it looks like I'm going to have to upgrade the bandwidth on our hosting package before the summer if the growth keeps up.
I'll have to see if I can hunt out the previous version of the page to compare the two.
Arnold
They do appear to be genuine visitors in that the google adsense logs are similarly moving up at a fair pace too. For instance, adsense for November to date is recording 4270 page impressions which is in accord with the raw stats (13900 page views, 9100 visitors) as I don't have adsense on all the pages, in particular it's not on the mascamps.com homepage which receives a fair proportion of the total hits. Whilst, sadly, I can't give up the day job yet the adsense income also went up about 10 fold (from a very low level).
Up 'til September I was ticking along at around 30 or 40 hits a day (ie about 1000 a month). What I did then was what appeared to be a relatively small change on the mascamps.com homepage, along the lines of the advice given in the FAQs on this forum ie I updated the title, description and keywords tags to their present (somewhat over the top) versions and updated the text of that page too to fully incorporate the key phrases. Also new is the section of tags on site rating, author etc. Finally, I added us into one or two new directories (but then I'm always doing that). I'm about half-way through this update on ourinn/ourgites too.
Our google entries are refreshed quite frequently courtesy of the steady trickle of additions to ourinns/ourgites so about a week after making the amendments all of a sudden we were getting over 300 hits per day. What I've noticed too is that the hits have increased right across the board. For instance, I've a personal page at arnoldstewart.com which normally ticks along at one hit a month and even that is up to three or four a day. I'm pretty sure that there are links connecting all my pages so perhaps the uplift in arnoldstewart.com is a side-effect of the uplift on mascamps.com along the lines of links from a high PR site that you mentioned Marcus.
By far the bulk of the visitors are going to the mascamps.com homepage (1800 visitors) but the regional guide pages aren't too far behind at 1300 visitors (900 english, 300 spanish, 100 french).
Even this morning so far, I've had 260 visitors.
Courtesy of our regional guide, I get a lot of hits via image searches but even when I exclude those and just look at mascamps.com pages, the page views are into the hundreds per day.
I'm pretty sure that the high hit counts are largely due to the amendments in September as I got a similar uplift when I applied the equivalent changes to the french and spanish versions of mascamps.com .
But how come you guys aren't getting similar levels of hits? The gite owners almost always have brilliant websites with every bit of optimisation that it's possible to have so I was expecting you guys to have loads and loads more hits than me. OK, I'm a bit wary of the page hits but even the visitor count is around the 300 a day mark (and growing too).
I don't think that our little upgrade was anything major but something in it seems to have had a considerable impact on search engine ranking. So much so, that it looks like I'm going to have to upgrade the bandwidth on our hosting package before the summer if the growth keeps up.
I'll have to see if I can hunt out the previous version of the page to compare the two.
Arnold
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Alan Knighting
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I'm not out to impress, I'm just wondering what I did back in September to make the hits jump so much.
In terms of income, the most obvious difference is that whilst it took me 9 months to get my first payment from google, I will be getting them every other month if the hits keep up. That's about a five times uplift rather than 10 times because I don't run adsense on our homepage which has had the greatest increase in hits.
It's difficult to say with the bookings as we're not really in a season where we'd be expecting a lot of bookings at the moment. However, we did triple our bookings this November compared to the previous November. But then, that might have happened anyway.
I don't think it will be possible to be definitive as to whether the extra hits mean extra bookings 'til we get to April/May next year. However, we do appear to have picked up categories of bookings that we didn't get last November. For instance, we've been pretty much full two weekends running with Spanish (all booked separately) vs relatively few outside the main holiday seasons up to now. The upgrade to the Spanish page was completed in early November and those bookings did follow that but then that could have been a co-incidence.
Separately from that, now that I think of it, we have had a considerable increase in the number of enquiries. In the normal run of events, we get something like an enquiry or two per week in the peak of summer (mainly we get confirmed bookings rather than enquiries) but we've been getting more than that over the last month or so which is a bit unusual now that I think of it. Last year I don't think we had any enquiries from August to February. Possibly just a co-incidence too, of course.
Personally I think that the bookings will be increased once we get into the booking season but we'll not know for sure for several months. Can't honestly see bookings/enquiries jumping 10 fold but my guess is that ownsite bookings will take a fair jump in due course.
So, overall: definite rise in google income, definite rise in enquiries and possible rise in bookings.
Arnold
In terms of income, the most obvious difference is that whilst it took me 9 months to get my first payment from google, I will be getting them every other month if the hits keep up. That's about a five times uplift rather than 10 times because I don't run adsense on our homepage which has had the greatest increase in hits.
It's difficult to say with the bookings as we're not really in a season where we'd be expecting a lot of bookings at the moment. However, we did triple our bookings this November compared to the previous November. But then, that might have happened anyway.
I don't think it will be possible to be definitive as to whether the extra hits mean extra bookings 'til we get to April/May next year. However, we do appear to have picked up categories of bookings that we didn't get last November. For instance, we've been pretty much full two weekends running with Spanish (all booked separately) vs relatively few outside the main holiday seasons up to now. The upgrade to the Spanish page was completed in early November and those bookings did follow that but then that could have been a co-incidence.
Separately from that, now that I think of it, we have had a considerable increase in the number of enquiries. In the normal run of events, we get something like an enquiry or two per week in the peak of summer (mainly we get confirmed bookings rather than enquiries) but we've been getting more than that over the last month or so which is a bit unusual now that I think of it. Last year I don't think we had any enquiries from August to February. Possibly just a co-incidence too, of course.
Personally I think that the bookings will be increased once we get into the booking season but we'll not know for sure for several months. Can't honestly see bookings/enquiries jumping 10 fold but my guess is that ownsite bookings will take a fair jump in due course.
So, overall: definite rise in google income, definite rise in enquiries and possible rise in bookings.
Arnold