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Do you really know where your search traffic is coming from?

On the Woopra Dashboard > My Searches panel section, Woopra shows you live the search terms people are using to arrive on your site from search engines as well as what users are searching for on your site.

In the Analytics > Referrers > Search Engine panel, there is a breakdown of your referral traffic from search engines. In the upper right corner of that panel section is a pie chart button. Click it to get another view of your search engine traffic in the form of a pie chart.

There is an overwhelming myth that the majority of search engine traffic comes from Google. Does it? Have you checked lately? Does the majority of your search traffic really come from Google or somewhere else?

To get a better feel of where your traffic is coming from, change the calendar overview. Click on the date range on the Calendar feature to look at the numbers over time.

It’s easy to say all your traffic is coming from Google, but where specifically? Google offers a variety of search systems. Is your traffic coming directly from Google the search engine, Google the image search, Google the Blog Search. or Google the news search?

Is a good portion of your traffic not coming from Google.com but Google.co.nz or Google.co.il? Do you know what those are? They are the various language and country specific Google search engines. NZ is New Zealand and IL is Israel.

Knowing which Google search engine people are using can change your perception of your blog audience.

In the Search panel, run a search filter using images.google in the Referrer/Keywords form and compare that number with the total you have in the search engine referrers? What percentage is it? Do the same with blogsearch.google to see where people are actually coming from within the Google empire.

Don’t forget that images.google.com restricts your search to only those using the dot com. By removing the domain extension, you can pick up international versions of Google, which end in co.uk, co.jp, and so on, such as images.google.co.uk.

Any surprises? Is Google not the king of search referrers for your site? Or does Google still rule your site? Does knowing which search engines bring traffic to your site change things? What will you do differently?