I did a post a while back here in which I talk about how much traffic search engines are sending me vs how much they are indexing me. It was a fun and interesting stat (to me) but as people commented it really doesn’t meant that much.
Going from the last 5 months data (Jan-April) I took it a bit further I calculated all the bandwidth each bot is using (using webalizer) vs how much organic traffic I am receiving that converts to a sale (using Google analytics). So I averaged this to a daily breakdown. (keep in mind that Google is using gzip and caches now so it should actually perform better over the next 6 months). This site has no contextual ads so only completed shopping carts are conversions.
Now we have a true cost analysis- This is purely organic stats and a true ROI for spiders vs conversion over a 153 day period broken down per day.
Ask COSTS me $7.90 per day.
MSN Gives me $29.85 per day.
Yahoo Gives me $124.23 per day.
Google Gives me $227.44 per day.
Now I like ask.com but cmon… improve your fricking bot already. You are chewing the most bandwidth from me yet you give craptastic returns.
- Comment Likes 
- Comment Dislikes
December 3, 2006 at 2:01 am
Interesting read. I’m learning some new AND interesting things going back and re-reading your topics you posted before I was a reader. I’ve never seen anyone break down bot/cost
May 3, 2006 at 11:03 pm
Hopefully they READ your blog too.
You know what they say….
“Ask and ye shall receive.”
May 3, 2006 at 10:07 pm
You said “This site” above, but I assume you mean something other than http://www.shoemoney.com … unless your blog is making close to $400/day … which would be amazing … but then again, you are ShoeMoney
May 3, 2006 at 9:28 pm
That is some great information and goes to show that google is the big pink elephant in the room. I would be interested in seeing it broken down even further, say month to month stats going back last 12 months to see what kind of seasonal fluctuations there are and whether there is growth or loss per each engine per month.
May 3, 2006 at 8:00 pm
An outstanding analysis. Thanks Shoe.
You do have an interesting brain…
May 3, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Awesome, that is interesting.
-Daniel
May 3, 2006 at 3:36 pm
No I mean they are actually accepting gzip encoded files if the server supports it. Its basically like googlebot asks for a zip (compressed) version of the html page. Usually this is about 1/20th the size for normal txt or html.
May 3, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Cute Statistics.
When you say Google is Caching with Gzip, do you mean they cache the images and just download the html and parse that content?