Sources of Traffic : MSN is so bad!

[Emancipator]

I noticed MSN has been doing some updates and their traffic to me has plummetted on one of my sites. I hate putting all my eggs in the google basket. How bad? Well here are my top referrers

1. google
2. crazymonkeygames.com
3. (direct)
4. yahoo
5. msn

You know its a sad sad day when Westechs site sends me more traffic then yahoo and MSN combined lol. By the way thanks for the link westech :P

[Cutter]

Here is what I've found about MSN:

-Its easy for a brand new site to rank
-You never know when, if, and why you'll lose your ranking
-MSN traffic has a good Adsense clickthrough rate, but not as good as AOL's
-Even if your ranking #1 for a keyword you will get a tiny fraction of the traffic you would get for that rank on Google; I'm guessing under 5%, but I could be wrong.

[r2d2]

-MSN traffic has a good Adsense clickthrough rate, but not as good as AOL's


Can I ask how you are determining this? In Google Analytics somehow?

[KLB]

I just wish MSN and Yahoo did as good of a job of deep crawling that Google does. If Yahoo and MSN deep crawled and indexed my site the way Google does I could see a substantial increase in traffic

One way I could think of tracking referrer click through rates (at least from a few select sites) would be to create specific channels for those referrers and then use server side instructions to swap in the appropriate channel into the AdSense code based on who the referrer is.

[Mike]

I totally agree with everything you say Cutter, that's exactly what's happened with me.

[Kyle]

Right now I make ~70% of my money with MSN. MSN can be hugely profitable. Higher conversion rates overall than Google.

[Selkirk]

Conversion rate for each major search engine (http://www.websidestory.com/news-events/press-releases/view-release.html?id=319).

[John]

Thanks for the link, although I wish they would go into greater detail in the article.

[Kyle]

Wow, thanks Selkirk. My statement was based only on experience. It's nice to see some statistics to back it up.

[KLB]

One note:

People may be talking about two different kinds of conversion in this thread. The first type of conversion is a web publisher turning visits to their site into clicks on their ads and the second conversion is an e-commerce site turning clicks on their ads into sales.
The first type of conversion may not be representative of the second type of conversion.

The link above to webside story is referring to the latter conversion which is clicks on ads turing into sales.

[John]

One note:

People may be talking about two different kinds of conversion in this thread. The first type of conversion is a web publisher turning visits to their site into clicks on their ads and the second conversion is an e-commerce site turning clicks on their ads into sales.
The first type of conversion may not be representative of the second type of conversion.

The link above to webside story is referring to the latter conversion which is clicks on ads turing into sales.

Usually when people talk about conversions thats what I assume they are talking about.

[Kyle]

I was referring to sales.

[KLB]

I was referring to sales.

At first I thought we were talking about click throughs, thus I was talking about channels.

[Cutter]

Here you go for the click tracking, and it is through Google Analytics:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001370.shtml

It isn't perfect but it gives you a good idea.

[nytrokiss]

For me I have MSN ranking on most of the things i want however i never get any clicks!

[Emancipator]

same here nytro, great rankings for good terms, very little traffic.