Relationship Analysis between Website Traffic,Domain Age and Google Indexed Pages of E-commerce Websites

Abstract

Increasing popularity of online business (e-commerce) has played an important role in the changing business scenario. The success of online business depends to a large extent on the online traffic e-commerce websites can pull in. Discovering the relationship between website traffic, domain age and Google indexed pages can help them to plan their actions to accommodate growth and maintain or increase their share on the web traffic. Though designing the right strategy to capitalize the online market in a specific category is vital, due to increasing competition and the changing trends it becomes challenging. Exploring the trends in strategies for pulling in traffic by different websites can further help the online business firms to understand the segment tactics for their business. In this article, we have carried out Multiple Linear Regression Analysis to identify the effect of domain age and Google indexed pages on total monthly page views. We used the data gathered through web analysis tools such as SimilarWeb, SmallSeoTools and Pingler on 60 websites from India accessible to us. We deployed ANOVA to explore the differences in average paid search traffic, social media traffic, mail traffic, referrals traffic and display traffic with respect to different website categories. The results thus obtained clearly demonstrate that domain age and Google indexed pages have a weak impact on website traffic but there is a significant difference in average organic search traffic, paid search traffic, social media traffic and referrals traffic with respect to those website categories.

Keywords

Website traffic Google indexed pages domain age organic traffic paid traffic multiple linear regression analysis

Introduction and Background

The World Wide Web (WWW) and its usage are constantly growing. Business firms have to take into account the considerable rise in the number of Internet users, increasing switchover to online payments, the proliferation of Internet-enabled devices and favourable demographics are the key factors driving the growth story of e-commerce (Upasna & Rebello, 2014) in India. As online business grew more, the competition increased on the Internet (Tilahun, 2013) with diverse net warfare techniques (Demetew & Ayalew, 2011). With World Wide Web, business enlarged their growth possibilities and sought new opportunities. There is no doubt that Internet and e-commerce have become major tools to gain competitive advantage (Esichaikul & Chavananon, 2001).

As noted by Huff, Wade, Parent, Schneberger and Newson (1999) that an increase in web traffic on a website popularizes e-commerce operations. Studies on web activities have enumerated proven methods of diverting web traffic to a website. Search engine marketing is a popular method today for promoting websites to increase their web traffic (Al-Badi, Al Majeeni, Mayhew, & Al-Rashdi, 2011). There is a popular belief among the bloggers and web marketers that older domains return better search results and are favoured due to their age (RapidWebSeo, 2014). Some also believe that the number of Google indexed pages can also affect the flow of visitors to a website. The role of indexed pages (Getahun, 2014) in bringing in new traffic cannot be undermined (Tilahun, 2013). Search engine marketing cannot be complete if one undermines the importance of Google indexed pages.

However, domain age and Google indexed pages, and their effect on website traffic need to be analyzed in Indian context. When some of the scholars argue that a large number of indexed pages can bring more traffic to a website, others argue that there exist no direct relationship between the number of indexed pages and the amount of the received traffic (XDRange, 2013). If it is neither the domain age nor the number of indexed pages, it could be the paid promotions (Demetew & Ayalew, 2011). Any traffic that is obtained through some payment (Elder, 2015) can be considered as paid traffic. Though the major share of website traffic through search engines originates from the organic (natural) rather than sponsored (paid) links (Baye, Santos, & Wildenbeest, 2014), we cannot underestimate the role of referrals, paid searches, social media ads and display ads.

Our study is aimed to understand the relationship between total monthly page views, domain age and Google indexed pages. We also devised methods to analyze and identify the difference in search traffic, social media traffic, mail traffic, referrals traffic, display traffic and direct traffic.

Domain Age

Domain age is almost synonymous with website age, though they are not the same. According to Brick Marketing (2014), domain age refers to the period a website has been registered for and has remained active. Smarty (2008) opines that only how long a website has been registered matters and not the period it has been active. It has been noted that old domains do have importance but when an established domain is resold, the sell changes the domain’s value as the content and style of the operations change. Yet again, it has to be noted that Google records the date on which a domain was registered and uses domain name data for improving search algorithms, and this surely indicates that the search results can be influenced by the domain age.

Google Indexed Pages

A website’s contents to be a part of search returns have to be included in the search engine’s page index. The page index is similar to an index in a library, which lists information about all books in the library (Google, 2009a). As a visitor searches for some information in a search engine, the search is performed on the index and not on the World Wide Web. Search engines and other indexing programs facilitating online search use special algorithms and procedures that concentrate on the page content and return the most relevant results to the user (Browne & Jermey, 2004). This means that to get a website rank within a search engine, one must make sure that the site is included in its index (Cashman, 2013).

According to Hines (2012), during indexing, the information provided on a website is gathered by Googlebot, which constantly crawls the Internet. Googlebot is Google’s web crawling (ro)bot and crawling is the process by which the bot discovers new and modified pages to update the Google Index (Google, 2009b). Google also offers an index status report that provides data about the URLs that Google tried to index (Google, 2009c). However, there are different ways to make a website noticed by Googlebot. Creating sitemaps and submitting it to search engine’s webmaster tools is one of the most significant techniques.

Total Monthly Page Views

A page view or a page impression is an instance when an Internet user visits a specific page on a website (Johnson, 2015). A website can have many visitors and the total number of unique visitors to a website during a specific period is called ‘total visits’. Every visitor may view one or more pages on the website. Page views divided by visits over a period that gives average page views per visit over that period (Johnson, 2015). Finding the total visits during a month and average page views during that month can give us total monthly page views. There are many factors that can influence a website’s total monthly page views (Tilahun, 2013) like Google indexed pages, domain age, paid promotions, etc.

Traffic from Search Engines

Traffic is the key to the success of most websites (Information Resource Management Association, 2012). Visitors from search engines account for a major share of any website’s traffic. Search engine traffic or search traffic implies the visitors who reach a particular website by clicking a particular result of their search. When a website shows a high volume of search traffic, it is generally a positive thing for that website (Technopedia, 2012). A website’s search traffic includes both organic search traffic and paid search traffic. Organic, or natural search results are links listed by a search engine that most closely match the user’s search query based on relevance (Dummies, 2011). Organic traffic or organic search traffic is the flow of visitors from search engines to a website which has not paid for the traffic through advertisements. Organic traffic deals directly with search engine optimization (Macey, 2016). A major share of website traffic through search engines originates from organic (natural) rather than the paid links (Baye et al., 2014).

Another way of obtaining traffic is through the paid links that appear in top or side ads (Baye et al., 2014). The website owners cannot influence the position of links and style of links when it comes to the organic search results. However, they can decide the position at which the links are displayed in case of paid listings. The traffic originating from search engines after paying for it is called paid search results of paid search traffic.

According to Brecht (2014), both organic search results and paid search results offer unique advantages and disadvantages. Organic search’s benefits include trust and credibility, ranking and economic benefits. On the other hand, paid traffic is quicker and can be focused on a target group of viewers. Selection between organic and paid depends upon the organization. The types of web business can also influence the choice between organic and paid (Demetew & Ayalew, 2011) traffic.

Direct, Referral, Social, Mail and Display Traffic

When we think of other than search engine traffic, websites can have traffic coming in after a user watched a TV commercial or after saw a print ad. Traffic also comes from referral links on other websites. Though search engine traffic accounts for a major share in most cases, direct traffic to a website cannot be underestimated. This is the traffic that is generated without any mediation by referring sites and when visitors manually enter the URL of the website or have it bookmarked (Macey, 2016). Though direct traffic does not use a referral site, it cannot be assured that the traffic so caused is completely free from paid sources (Getahun, 2014). Direct traffic can be obtained through paid promotions such as advertisements other than online advertisements, existing customers, employees, bouncing back visitors, etc.

Referral traffic is different from the direct traffic such that the referrals are recommendations from a different site other than search engines for a specific website. As a visitor clicks on a hyperlink in one website to go to a new page on a different website, it is considered as a referral visit (Bashara, 2012). Many websites such as amazon.com use the tactic of deploying referrals to bring in their visitors. As said by Demetew and Ayalew (2011), the utilization of referral sources can also be based on the category of website.

When websites use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other similar sources to pull in traffic, the traffic generated is regarded as social traffic. According to Snyman and Snyman (2013), almost 26 per cent of traffic is generated from social sources. Interestingly, those who jump to a website from social sources may or may not know what site they are landing on (Snyman and Snyman).

The direct marketers’ most favourite tool is email marketing (Willcocks, 2015), which ultimately brings in mail traffic. According Wainwright (2013), when a site campaigns through e-mail marketing, the campaign includes a link in the email which leads the recipients to a specific website. The purpose of pulling in traffic could be to read more content, or to convert a reader to a buyer, or to take an action.

Display traffic or traffic through display of advertisements includes the visitors who reach a particular website from an advertisements displayed online. According to SimilarWeb (https://www.similarweb.com; data from 2014), it is not easy to keep track of different display advertisement campaigns, especially if they are spread across multiple platforms and websites. However, there are analytical tools including SimilarWeb to study the traffic flow from display ads. There are many factors that affect the success of a display ad in generating traffic, including the attractiveness, position and size.

Significance

Many scholars and academicians have studied similar areas like e-retail to explore the factors that can influence the traffic of websites. Some of the researches like that of Al-Badi et al. (2011) have shown the importance of search engine optimization and marketing. However, most of these researches were conducted either from the search engine point of view or from customers’ point of view. In this study, we try to identify any significant relationship, if it exists, between the traffic, domain age and Google indexed pages for a given website. We also evaluate the difference in traffic behaviour between the categories of websites. By emphasizing on Indian websites, we were able to localize the scenario which makes our study relevant for e-marketing professionals and e-commerce firms. Having knowledge about the traffic differences between categories and the relationship between traffic, domain age and Google indexed pages can help practitioners plan and strategize their online presence while for academicians this can offer relevant information to understand the web behaviours and characteristics of traffic.

E-commerce businesses are heavily dependent on the traffic they generate. According to Wainwright (2013), a well-prepared marketing plan earns higher traffic and thus has higher conversion rate. When it comes to e-commerce business, understanding the factors that influence the traffic is key to success. What matters a lot for the practicing e-commerce professionals is to identify key factors that can affect their website traffic. This study is meant to assess the domain age and Google indexed pages, and their relationship with website traffic.

Methodology

There are many users, webmasters, and scholars who believe that domain age and indexed pages do have a greater role in attracting high volume traffic to a website. For this study, we used data related to conveniently select 60 Indian websites to analyze the relationship between total monthly page views, domain age, and Google indexed pages. We describe the differences in traffic flow from both paid and unpaid sources with respect to different categories of websites.

The data was collected from SimilarWeb (https://www.similarweb.com), SmallSeotools (http://smallseotools.com/domain-age-checker) and Pingler (https://pingler.com/seo-tools/tools/google-indexed-pages-checker) with respect to the 60 selected Indian websites from different categories. The websites were categorized into shopping, news, banks, and others to study the differences in traffic behaviour. We have used cross-sectional study design and data analysis.

The data thus collected were analyzed to answer the following questions:

Is there a statistically significant relationship between total monthly page views, domain age, and Google indexed pages?

Based on website categories, is there a statistically significant difference in average organic search traffic, paid search traffic, direct traffic, referrals traffic, mail traffic, social media traffic, or display ads traffic?

Multiple linear regression was used to analyze the relationship while ANOVA was used to perform analysis of variances.

Findings and Results

To enable a common platform, websites with less than a million monthly unique visits were replaced with those websites with one million or more unique visits during the month of July in 2016. The websites that could not provide data for any of the variables were removed and only those websites with complete data availability were included. However, there were no restrictions planted on any other variables other than website traffic.

Relationship between Monthly Page Views, Domain Age and Google Indexed Pages

After analyzing the 60 cases, it was found that the average monthly page views of all the websites were 184.25 million, the average domain age was 13 years and 8 months, and the average Google indexed pages were 2 million 790 thousand pages.

The results obtained from the multiple linear regression shows an R-value of 0.439 at a p value of 0.002. This indicates that the relationship is statistically significant though it is not so strong by nature. The R-square value obtained from the analysis (0.193) indicates that 19.3 per cent of the variability of dependent variable (monthly page views) is accounted by the changes in the independent variables (domain age and Google indexed pages; Table 1).

The correlation matrix (Table 2) shows that the correlation between domain age and monthly page views is insignificant at a p value of 0.409 while the correlation between Google indexed pages and monthly page views is significant (p value of 0.000) with a moderate strength (R = 0.437).

Table 1.

Regression Analysis Model Summary

Model	R	R-square	Adjusted R-square	Std. error of the estimate
1	0.439a	0.193	0.164	252.69305

Source: Compiled by the authors.

Notes: a. Predictors: (Constant) Google indexed pages, domain age

b. Dependent variable: Total views

Table 2.

Correlations Matrix

		Total views	Domain age	Google indexed pages
Pearson correlation	Total views	1.000	–0.030	0.437
	Domain age	–0.030	1.000	–0.154
	Google indexed Pages	0.437	–0.154	1.000
Sig. (1-tailed)	Total views	–	0.409	0.000
	Domain age	0.409	–	0.120
	Google indexed Pages	0.000	0.120	–
N	Total views	60	60	60
	Domain age	60	60	60
	Google indexed Pages	60	60	60

Source: Compiled by the authors.

This indicates that when Google indexed pages have a low to moderate impact on monthly page views, domain age has no significant role in bringing in page views. However, there could be other factors that interfere the relationship between the variables, such as the type of website, quality of content and others.

Traffic Flow Behaviour Based on the Website Categories

After analyzing 60 cases of Indian websites through SimilarWeb, it was found that the average monthly direct traffic accounted for all the websites comes to 34.7 per cent, the average organic search accounted for 34.8 per cent, the average paid search traffic recorded 2.9 per cent, the average social media traffic showed 4.9 per cent, the average mail traffic accounted for 2.3 per cent, the average referrals traffic pulled in 18.1 per cent and the average display ads traffic recorded 2.3 per cent (see Figure 1).

The analysis shows that a major share of traffic is ascribable to organic search and direct traffic. While organic search and direct traffic together accounted for 69.5 per cent of the total traffic. The third major source (referrals traffic) records only 18.1 per cent of the total flow.

Figure 1.

Source: Compiled by the authors.

On performing ANOVA on the variables, it was found that there is no statistically significant difference in the share of the traffic pulled in by direct traffic mail traffic, and display ads traffic at 95 per cent confidence level (p values obtained were 0.648, 0.707 and 0.116, respectively) with respect to the website categories. However, organic search, paid search, social media and referral traffic recorded significant difference (p values 0.041, 0.000, 0.000 and 0.000, respectively) in bringing traffic to the websites based on the categories (see Figure 2). These differences may be due to the online marketing strategies adopted based on the consumer behaviour to tackle competition within a category.

The variation in traffic flow from different sources based on website categories may indicate that the strategies adopted by websites belonging to different categories were used differently to tackle their online marketing environment.

Conclusion

This article analyzed the relationship of monthly page views with domain age and Google indexed pages while assessing the traffic flow behaviour based on website categories. The results show that Google indexed pages have a statistically significant relationship on monthly page views with a low to moderate strength. However, the relationship between domain age and monthly page views was found insignificant. This relationship can also be influenced by extraneous variables such as category of website, quality of content and others.

Figure 2.

Source: Compiled by the authors.

Though the relationship between Google indexed pages and website traffic is significant, it shows only weak to moderate strength. This proves that there could be other factors that may influence website traffic further, deeper, or stronger. Or, the website traffic can be influenced by Google indexed pages when it is combined with other major factors such as backlinks, Bing indexed pages and content quality. Though domain age is found to have an insignificant relationship with website traffic, further studies are required to prove the effect of domain age on the success of e-commerce business.

The categories of websites did show significant influence on the strategies adopted by the websites to select sources of traffic or the nature by which the visits came in for those sites. The possibility of altering between the sources of traffic and choosing the best combination to get the right visitors cannot be neglected by the website owners. Studies such as quality analysis, customer choice, content analysis and location effects can be conducted in continuation to this research to help web professionals in streamlining the online business activities and for students in understanding the web behaviours and characteristics of traffic.

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