Search Engine ROI – What is ShoeMoney smoking?? You may ask. Well if you break it down each time a bot spiders your page it costs you money. It may be a small amount but it does cost you money. I did some number crunching on one of my larger websites. Kind of a ROI on the bots if you will. Basically what kind of return hits am I getting for each time my page is spidered ?
Here is the data for this month (April 1-22) so far:
Top 20 Bots Visits:
And here is top traffic referals:
So lets see…
Ask.com nailed me 2,055,170 times and sent me a total of 2210 hits. This means I received 0.00107534 hits from ask.com for every-time they indexed a page on my site.
MSN spidered me A total of 1,189,036 and sent me a total of 8533 hits. MSN Search sent me 0.0071764 hits for each time they spidered a page on my site.
Yahoo spidered (slurped!) me a total of 515,306 times and sent me a total of 73,619 hits. Yahoo sent me 0.14286463 for each time they spidered a page on my site.
Google spidered me 229,117 times and has sent me a total of 178,428 hits. This means google sent me 0.77876369 for each time GoogleBot indexed me.
Botscore ROI:
#1 GoogleBot .78 Search referals per spider.
#2 Yahoo Slurp! .14 Search referals per spider.
#3 MSN .01 Search referals per spider.
#4 Ask.com 0.00 Search referals per spider.
So clearly GoogleBot is giving me the best ROI. I would be curious to see what other large site owners are seeing? I was pretty stunned on the ask.com numbers…
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2416 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
Man how do you keep coming up with this stuff? Outstanding writeup shoe!
If you calculate Income per crawl, you may get different rankings and more interesting results. Take Average Income Per Hit (AIPH) multiplied by the hits and divide it by the number of crawls.
It was nice meeting you at PubCon & @ the YPN Party..
Interesting! Thank you for sharing.
What tool did you use to generate these stats? Are you really keeping all your logs since the site went up?
Nice to meet you aswell Justin!
I was originally going to break it down to income per hit then actually show how much of a actual return organic listings were given but… I have to leave for toronto and have only had like one “working day” between boston and Toronto.
I use a bastardized version of webalizer
thanks for the tip!
Well this again proves that google rocks.
In my webstats also i see that google has more Bot visits and same ratio in the number of SE referrars.
That’s pretty wild, Shoemoney. I don’t remember seeing someone compute this before.
My space referrals has good numbers too
I will totally send you a hat
Once I get back from Toronto I am going to setup a better way of fullfilment =P
Here are my stats for my new website i just checked.
Botscore ROI:
#1 GoogleBot [B]3.1608[/B] Search referals per spider.
#2 Yahoo Slurp! [B]0.738[/B] Search referals per spider.
#3 MSN [B]0.2432[/B] Search referals per spider.
Interesting…
What’s up with Gigabot? That little bastard is a hungry hungry hippo. It says on the Gigablast site that the results are used by many sites.
Can anyone verify it’s SEROI?
Yeah I generally see about the same phenonmenon with most sites I manage. Typically I also see that while Googlebot visits less frequently than some other bots, it tends to crawl much deeper when it does visit. Typically the number of pages crawled per visit for Googlebot is much higher than the other spiders, from what I’ve seen.
Had to add one more breakdown.
Gigablast’s spider hit 990543 times. Even with looking http://gigablast.com/clients.html, Gigabot sent approximately 0 users.
Gigablast SE ROI: ERROR (Divide by zero)
I decided to run not only the Referrals per crawl, but went ahead and did the Income per crawl as well. Very interesting results.
Ask: 1.28 Referrals per crawl
Google: 3.21 Referrals per crawl
MSN: 0.07 Referrals per crawl
Yahoo: 0.15 Referrals per crawl
For each spider session, our site is making 21 times more money off Google than Yahoo…but our site tends to rank better on Yahoo. The vast majority of the web world must shop for wedding invitations through Google.
Oh, and Gigablast hit 316,613 times since Jan 1.
Hmm.. not really convinced this is a particularly useful statistic.
What would be better would be a calculation of searches to clicks.
I can’t really think of a good way to get the number of searches though, short of having adwords ads, which sort of defeats the point of being in the natural search results.
Not only that, but when you factor in that Googlebot is pretty much the only spider that uses gzip compression to download stuff (if you have it enabled on your server), that works out to roughly a 5x bandwidth savings with Googlebot.
Pretty much the same for me, gigablast and ask are eating my traffic while only google provides most of the referrers.
Also I’m seeing picsearch a lot on my site, even though I don’t have too many pictures it comes frequently.
This is an interesting set of stats. Would be interesting to consider, though, what this means in terms of potential ROI. Meaning, as of the latest comscore metrics, Google and Ask are the only companies that had positive market share gains. If this trend were to continue, then I suspect you would quickly see that the Ask ROI (and Google, of course) grow quarter over quarter, while you see shrinking ROI from others. Basically, if Ask is increasing in share, and you are getting spidered the most from Ask, then you stand to be in a really good place when their usage increases (i.e. if it continues on the path seen in the past two comscore reports).
Though this is a very intelligent analysis, it may lead to wrong conclusions (specially for the people who are not very careful). It is a well known fact that the last 20 percent of the returns takes 80% of the effort. Google will get you the most reward because they have the most traffic but it does not mean that you can ignore the remaining search engines. You have to be ready for the possibility that traffic might shift away from Google.
No wonder you got that monster humma o’ yoz man…nad i love the S on your headers…eminds me of myself..”Super Sam”…
That means Ask is visiting shoemoney more than others.
Ask bot is visiting more than others but google and yahoo sending more traffic.