Typical number of hits

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
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ourinns
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Post by ourinns »

I imagine that Jagger has had something to do with it but you'd think that frenchentree (which originally piqued my interest in the stats) and yourself would be way, way ahead of lil ole me in terms of hits yet for November I'm sitting on 14,000 page views. That figure includes ourinns & ourgites but that should just make it comparable to your figures

Interesting that you mention a redirect URL. I did a redirect on mascamps.com/index.htm pre-September but that page is now the "real" one (part of the September update). I think I read somewhere that they're not keen on redirect pages so I'd say that would have an effect on my figures but then taking it out should have just moved me to a "normal" number of hits ("normal" in the sense of being around the same level as other accommodation sites ie 500-1000 or so hits a month or perhaps twice that if you throw in my listings sites).

I'd say that the adsense clicks are reducing because more and more people have it on their sites. I originally applied several years back but was only accepted this year which I gather co-incided with a big upgrade in capability in google to deal with them.

I'd be moderately happy if/when I get to about 500,000 or so hits which might, just, be enough to let me give up the day job and "retire" on the adsense income. Actually, on a technical point, where does that income arise for tax purposes? Is it American 'cos google is there, the UK 'cos my site is hosted there or France 'cos we live here? I take it that we don't need to do something silly like registering as an artisan or something if/when that income makes up a significant portion of our total income?


Arnold
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Post by ourinns »

Just ran October's figures - 10,000 hits. I can't go back beyond that as we changed the hosting service for the sites over the summer.

It couldn't be down to the new hosting service, could it? Don't think so as we had about 10 days with them pre the update when we were on relatively normal numbers of hits.


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alexia s.
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Post by alexia s. »

"where does that income arise for tax purposes? "
Arnold,
It doesn't even matter where it arises if you live in France : you are taxable on world-wide income.
Tax regulations change each year, so wait until this income justifies commercial registration before you worry about it. Only your local tax office can tell you at what point you should register!
Best,
Alexia.
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Post by alexia s. »

To a complete outsider - and a totally ignorant one - it looks as if you are all playing a game but you don't know what the rules are. In fact, it seems that nearly nobody knows what the rules are. As a principle, does this not bother you? Why are the rules kept secret? The answer to this might be obvious to you but not to a complete outsider. Can anybody share this, or is it a secret too?
I don't know many (or any) cases of secrets which are not connected with power & I don't know many (or any) cases of power which are not abused. There has to be a point to all of this. Is there?????
Best,
Alexia.
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Alan Knighting
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Post by Alan Knighting »

Alexia,

We have agreed before, I think we are agreeing now and, with a little bit of luck, we will agree again in the future.

I’m trying to be realistic, not provocative. I am not arguing with anyone, I am only expressing my own views.

Income tax is not an issue! One has an income, one declares an income and one pays tax on that income.

If one has a letting property one wants a reasonable level of bookings. That's the bottom line in having letting properties. Achieving a reasonable level of bookings achieves the target.

If one is a letting property owner and has a personal website one wants lots of visitors to the website which lead to lots of bookings. Otherwise, why have it? What is the bottom line? Without lots of booking what is achieved by lots of hits? Self-satisfaction? Maybe, but for a property owner the bottom line is bookings not hits on a Website.
For some people, statistics in isolation are wonderful. For others, numbers have to achieve something otherwise they are just numbers - something to be talked about in the pub but not something which generate an income and which have to be declared to the tax authorities.

Why do I think that someone will shout at me about this?

Alan
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Post by mpprh »

Hi

these stats are pretty confusing.

My understanding is :

Total visitors - No of visitors including repeat visitors

Unique visitors - No of visitors that day excluding repeat visitors

Page views - what it says (in my case about 5 times unique visitors)

Hits & files - largely meaningless figure representing No of calls on the server. If you have loads of graphics, you get loads of hits for each page. It must be meaningless because I'm tracking at over 7m hits this year.

Peter
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Post by mpprh »

For Alexia :

the reason that this is important is that, ultimately, every visitor has a greater or lesser interest in the content of the websites they visit.

Arnolds interest is in how cost effectively, he can use (and sustain, or even grow) his new found popularity.

The funnel model is very old, but relevant. In this case the layers are probably :

Population of the world
Population of the world with access to internet
Population of the world with access to internet and using it to book holidays
etc
etc
etc
etc
etc
etc
etc
etc
Arnolds friends
Arnold

Arnold probably can not substantially increase the population of the world (although he may have his moments !) or impact world internet access. However, if he can isolate the particular keywords, links, or other sources of visitors, he can work to develop that.

Finding high scoring links inward, and search engine high scoring keywords is fairly straightforward. But, you are right there is a grey area that we can't easily analyse.

My largest source of visitors are people who click on favourites. How can I get more people to add me to my favourites ?

And if Arnold could solve his grey area, he could focus on that opportunity.

Peter
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Post by alexia s. »

Now I've confused everyone - sorry. What I meant was that Google has you all running around in circles trying to figure out how the google system works. Or is there no system? If there is, why don't you know how it works?
Peter & Alan,
Thank you both for long replies. I'm sorry my question wasn't clearer.
Best,
Alexia.
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Post by Alan Knighting »

Peter,
...the reason that this is important is that, ultimately, every visitor has a greater or lesser interest in the content of the websites they visit.
I'm not so sure that's right.

Most of the people on this forum are selling self-catering properties, not personal websites. The interest of guests is focused on the contents of a property, not of a website.

For most of us, these things are inter-linked but for some they appear to be mutually exclusive. In the extreme which do we want? Lots of hits and no bookings or no hits and lots of bookings? They are separable because some of us don’t have personal websites and we are still getting the bookings.

Alexia,

I haven't the first idea how Google googles the world or it's cousin, not do I care. I am terribly easily confused by statistics. What doesn't confuse me is how many bookings do I get, and how do I get them, compared with how many bookings do I want/need? If I got 7 million hits in a year I would have serious bruising but would I have bookings? Christ! if I got 7 million hits a year I might have to buy an Audi TT instead of a motorcar.

Alan
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Post by paolo »

alexia s. wrote:it looks as if you are all playing a game but you don't know what the rules are. In fact, it seems that nearly nobody knows what the rules are. As a principle, does this not bother you? Why are the rules kept secret?
That's exactly right - an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time trying to influence a site's ranking on Google. Nobody knows the exact rules that Google uses to rank sites - there are hundreds or thousands of variables, and they tweak their 'algorithm' frequently, maybe daily.

If you knew the exact rules, you could cheat to get your site ranked higher than it should be, and for a commercial site that means more income. A lot of people do try cheating, some successfully, others get downgraded by Google. It is a commonly held belief that if you 'cheat' you will get punished, maybe not this month, but eventually.

In general terms it is known that Google likes inbound links from relevant sites, and lots of juicy content. That is all we need to know really because if you focus on those not only will Google love you for it but so will the human visitors to your site.
Paolo
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Post by ourinns »

Goodness I've started a monster. I just nip out for the afternoon and you guys have written a book in my absence :)

Alexia: It bothers the daylights out of me that we're playing a game and don't know the rules. Worse, we're all playing with real money too. I made was seemed to be a relatively minor amendment and all of a sudden I get 10 times the hits on the site a week later; it could easily have gone the other way and landed me with 1/10th of the hits. OK, as we all know, the number of hits/page views/visitors doesn't correlate directly to the number of guests that turn up on our doorsteps but it is worrying, to me at least, that a number of seemingly minor changes can have such a dramatic effect on how many people look at my site. Although there's no direct link between site visitors and guests arriving, I think we all operate to a greater lesser extent, on the belief that site visitors and paying guests are related in some way: certainly in the summer the big jump in site visitors is soon followed by a big jump in guests arriving.

Alan: I'm not disputing that tax has to be paid, but I wonder where it would be declared. On a UK tax return, you have to declare where the money was earned and that in turn can affect how much tax needs to be paid. I'm wondering what "box" to put the google income in.

Peter: I've been a bit slack on terminology through being lazy with the typing. When I've said "hits", read "page views". Haven't worked out how to separate out unique visitors. Hits as you say are meaningless as they include photos, graphics and even the graphic buttons on pages. Anyway for October my figures were: 10100 page views, 7200 visitors, 3500 unique IPs (surprisingly high: I thought that, say, AOL would count as one IP but perhaps not) and 100,000 hits (ie effectively an average of 10 graphics per page).

Peter: a question - how do you know that you are listed in people's favourites? Are you assuming that these are the "no referrer" hits? If so, they aren't all due to people having you in favourites as you get hits like that from people simply typing in your address and also by them doing right click then "open in new window". One of the small amendments that I did in September was to add a favourite icon to the site which may be worth doing. Also possible is to add a button "click here to add to favourites" which I'd say would be worth your while as you've a page useful enough for people to click on that. I see you've been busy since the last time I looked at your page!

"Most of the people on this forum are selling self-catering properties, not personal websites. The interest of guests is focused on the contents of a property, not of a website."
Very much so Alan. I remember seeing a gite renovation project last year which the people involved were promoting via the internet in every way you could imagine. They had the most facilities on a website that I've yet seen: flash animations, forum, ... you name it, they had it. Can't find it now but they were trying to create interest on the Channel 4 forums too which is where I came across it. They were getting 10000 views a month solely on their property site and getting loads of feedback. The snag is that, without exception, the feedback was along the lines of "fantastic website" with one or two questions about the place they were renovating. No questions about "how do we book". Net effect was that they put the place up for sale that October.

One thing that I think may be driving the rise in hits subsequent to the big jump in September is that I've noticed an increasing number of other sites linking to individual photos on our regional guide (now in it's new home at www.personallychosen.com/pyrenees partly in response to that). I assume that, in time, the inbound links arising from this connection should gradually increase my PR. To increase the hits a bit more directly, I've started putting my little copyright message on the big versions of the photos saying that the source of the image is mascamps.com. Interestingly this has achieved one sucess already in that I'm now effectively listed with a site which refused to list me! Probably something to consider in your southofthedordogne project Marcus.

I've looked at some of the things that google et al count as cheating and they look like too much hard work to me. I suspect you'd need to be a major player for some of them to be viable.

Actually, I was reading last night about one semi-cheating thing that I think I probably do amongst my sites: linking from A to B to C and back to A giving unique inbound links without link exchange. Haven't checked but I'm sure that I must have little rings like that amongst my pages as I'm sure have most people that have more than 3 or 4 domains knocking around.



Arnold
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Post by mpprh »

"Peter: a question - how do you know that you are listed in people's favourites? Are you assuming that these are the "no referrer" hits? If so, they aren't all due to people having you in favourites as you get hits like that from people simply typing in your address and also by them doing right click then "open in new window". One of the small amendments that I did in September was to add a favourite icon to the site which may be worth doing. Also possible is to add a button "click here to add to favourites" which I'd say would be worth your while as you've a page useful enough for people to click on that. I see you've been busy since the last time I looked at your page!
"

You are right : I have assumed that unique views, not included in search engines or referrals, come from favourites. Not sure too many people type in addresses these days ? And opening a new window wouldn't score in unique visitors ? Can't think where else they come from.

I've got an "add to favourites" button. The redirect from the old page landed on a welcome page heavily featuring the importance of adding the new URL to favourites ! I also mailed all contacts with the new address.

Seems Jagger is not quite finished. I've moved up another notch today.


The next problem is monetarising my new found fame.

Peter
Last edited by mpprh on Sun Dec 04, 2005 7:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by ourinns »

Good going on google but you're at the bottom of the second page of MSN search. My rankings seem almost the reverse of that with me in the top 2 or 3 of some searches in MSN yet in the second or third page of google for the same search.

What's the significance of the PR? I know that in broad terms, a higher PR implies a "more important" (however that might be defined) page. That in turn implies that a page with a higher PR would get higher numbers of hits than one with a lower PR.

Now, we have you on PR5 and 20,000 page views yet me on PR3 and 14,000 hits. OK, higher for higher PR, but it doesn't seem a whole lot higher, particularly since I went from 10,000 in October, to 14,000 in November and, if the current page views keep up, to 17,000+ in December. I also wonder if something that I've done (purely by accident!) has taken my current PR to 4 or perhaps 5? (I assume in this that they update PR a few months in arrears)



Arnold
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Post by ourinns »

I was reading about the "no referrers" a few weeks back.

It seems that most people get very significant hits from that source and nobody really knows why it should be.

I could understand your page being listed in people's favourites but, realistically, people aren't going to use that link every day ie being in a favourite list wouldn't necessarily create a massive following per se. I suspect that a lot of people type in addresses these days as courtesy of the autocomplete feature in explorer it's generally simpler than using favourites - I just type www.l usually and aymyhat.com is filled in for instance so I don't put laymyhat in favourites. I've also got a terrible (for other people's stats) habit of right click, open in new window.

All three would appear as a unique visitor (assuming that it was a "new" hit outside whatever time limit you've set to determine uniqueness of the visit).

Also, I've noticed an increasing number of sites not passing on the referrer. I first noticed this with visitfrance which never ever appears in my stats yet I know for a fact that I get a reasonable number of hits from it (going by the stats they save). I've tried clicking through to my page from my entry with them and no matter what way I do it, I don't turn up in the stats. I don't know how they do it but I suspect, in their case, it's not a good move as I know others have cancelled their subscription on the basis that they don't get any hits in the stats (which, most of the time, are the only indication that you've got a booking from them).

Oh, and don't forget the anti-spyware software that more and more people have which would also remove the referrer information.

Snag is, for the likes of ourselves, it means that the stats are less and less useful as time goes on. Presumably at some point Microsoft will add the anti-spyware into Windows and from then on we'll only get "no referrer" hits.



Arnold
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Post by Alan Knighting »

Wow! What a furore! But, what’s it all about?

I’m quietly sitting back watching you guys boast about hits and things.

I’m quietly taking a few bookings and thinking there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Am I impressed?.........................No!

Someone's posting has pushed the forum display too wide. I have to scroll horizontally to read this thread. That's much more important than the numbers being shouted about.

Alan
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