Evidence of type-in traffic

[rhys]

Many of my developed japanese portfolio gets ghost levels of type-in traffic when viewed on analytics. I do have exactly one site where I am certain the traffic is really direct traffic from honest to goodness websurfers.

It is a tax domain. It is short 3 character domain and it is a .com. The .jp is held in reserve by JPRS. The people who type in are no doubt looking for the tax agency to which it refers. In the past 30 days - it has received 21 visits and 12 of those are from direct navigation. Those 12 visits came from 10 different japanese cities and 6 of them were macintosh users. Of the rest, 5 used firefox and one used IE (version not specified).

[blastfromthepast]

Yes, can confirm that Mac Safari traffic has been there at low levels all along.

[rhys]

Guys this is the key lynchpin of all future Japanese IDN value. No one has more anecdotal evidence?

RD - could you PM me your traffic on the kana domains you have for Dec 2007 to present if you want me to check for you. Obviously, I cannot do anything today to ascertain whether you were indexed or not to a SE in Feb 2006.

Anyone else?

[touchring]

I get between 50 to 90 type-ins a month for three quarters of my non-adult japanese dot coms. December seems to be a bad mth for japanese with both yahoo and google referrals down.

[markits]

I had always believed that a few of my Japanese domains receive nice type-ins, although I don't have evidence from analytics log. eg, カレンダー.com, last three month stats:

US$ 7.48 227 76 % 33.48 US$ 0.10 US$ 32.94

[Rubber Duck]

Clipboard Image Link sent.

I have always assumed that this traffic is due to parking, but I don't have any firm evidence to support it, just no sensible explanation of where else it might have come from.

Hope that helps.

Guys this is the key lynchpin of all future Japanese IDN value. No one has more anecdotal evidence?

RD - could you PM me your traffic on the kana domains you have for Dec 2007 to present if you want me to check for you. Obviously, I cannot do anything today to ascertain whether you were indexed or not to a SE in Feb 2006.

Anyone else?

[touchring]

You have to use analytics to filter out the direct traffic. The ND figures are no use to ascertain type-in. To take example, you can have like 10,000 views 500 clicks, but only 50 is direct traffic. I often unpark my name and hook up to analytics for 2-3 days just to check type-in.

[Rubber Duck]

What is this "direct" traffic that needs filtering out?

[jacksonm]

You have to use analytics to filter out the direct traffic. The ND figures are no use to ascertain type-in. To take example, you can have like 10,000 views 500 clicks, but only 50 is direct traffic.

I suggested building a full-fledged parking statistics service, but nobody was interested. Actually, I am still building it - about half-way through - but I won't provide this service cheaply, the information is extremely valuable to portfolio holders.

.

[rhys]

What is this "direct" traffic that needs filtering out?

Touch's approach is correct, you need to be able to identify traffic by source. Analytics does that well. "Direct" traffic is type-in traffic (although it can also be traffic from bookmarks but we will ignore that for the moment). Everything else comes from referrals from another website or a search engine.

If you look at this most of you may find yourself surprised at how much google or yahoo traffic you actually have.

[touchring]

I suggested building a full-fledged parking statistics service, but nobody was interested. Actually, I am still building it - about half-way through - but I won't provide this service cheaply, the information is extremely valuable to portfolio holders.

.


Information is always valuable and sometimes a trade secret.

I've been data mining info and spent more time analyzing type-in, traffic patterns than registering names.

There are many reasons why people don't want to know too much of this information. Buyers may fear to see the real info, sellers may fear that the real info will scare the buyers.

[rhys]

I get between 50 to 90 type-ins a month for three quarters of my non-adult japanese dot coms. December seems to be a bad mth for japanese with both yahoo and google referrals down.

Touch could you PM me a representative screenshot so I can validate your claim that this is all type-in traffic. It's ok if you don't want to but I just find that number unbelievably high. I really really want that to be true but need to see it for myself. Thanks.

I suggested building a full-fledged parking statistics service, but nobody was interested. Actually, I am still building it - about half-way through - but I won't provide this service cheaply, the information is extremely valuable to portfolio holders.

.

It is clearly a very good idea, but at this point in parking traffic it may be hard for me to justify the cost.

[jacksonm]

Information is always valuable and sometimes a trade secret.

I've been data mining info and spent more time analyzing type-in, traffic patterns than registering names.

There are many reasons why people don't want to know too much of this information. Buyers may fear to see the real info, sellers may fear that the real info will scare the buyers.

The service I am building will naturally have isolated and confidential reporting, except that I would obviously have access to all of it (that's probably what people don't like).

Refusing to use a service which is this useful that somebody else builds when you are not capable of doing it yourself is called cutting off your nose to spite your face.

.

[Rubber Duck]

Rhys,

I guess most of my assumption are just being transferred on to rather flaky Japanese Traffic from increasing robust Cyrillic Traffic. If the growth in Russian Traffic is explained by Google Referrals then, Yandex and Rambler are in serious trouble, as will be Yahoo and MS because that would mean they are achieving credibility globally. I, however, rather prefer to believe that increase in traffic is due to intense browser competition in the Russian Market which could break out in the Far East very soon!

[jacksonm]

If the growth in Russian Traffic is explained by Google Referrals then, Yandex and Rambler are in serious trouble, as will be Yahoo and MS because that would mean they are achieving credibility globally. I, however, rather prefer to believe that increase in traffic is due to intense browser competition in the Russian Market which could break out in the Far East very soon!

Or it could be so simple as this: Opera is strong in Russia and Opera still defaults to dot com for keyword + enter. More Russians are coming online every day. Only 11% of the population is currently online. With the prices of oil being what they are, there is a growing middle class in Russia.

.

[touchring]

Sure, here:

language: ja-jp (safari?)

http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/8185/51393169wm0.th.jpg (http://img120.imageshack.us/my.php?image=51393169wm0.jpg)

language: ja

http://img114.imageshack.us/img114/6401/41936086ho4.th.jpg (http://img114.imageshack.us/my.php?image=41936086ho4.jpg)

[Rubber Duck]

Or it could be so simple as this: Opera is strong in Russia and Opera still defaults to dot com for keyword + enter. More Russians are coming online every day. Only 11% of the population is currently online. With the prices of oil being what they are, there is a growing middle class in Russia.

.

Well if that is what it takes to get Ivan to understand that Cyrillic.com is alive and kicking, that is fine by me!

[rhys]

Rhys,

I guess most of my assumption are just being transferred on to rather flaky Japanese Traffic from increasing robust Cyrillic Traffic. If the growth in Russian Traffic is explained by Google Referrals then, Yandex and Rambler are in serious trouble, as will be Yahoo and MS because that would mean they are achieving credibility globally. I, however, rather prefer to believe that increase in traffic is due to intense browser competition in the Russian Market which could break out in the Far East very soon!

I honestly cannot comment on cyrillic type-in although in that market due to the popularity of firefox it stands to reason that there is much more day 1 type-in traffic.

The chief question in Japan in my mind is not 1. "Will Advertisers jump aboard an IDN bandwagon" because they will once this makes sense to do so. It is not, 2. "Are Japanese people able to type in Japanese?" because they can. Rather, the important question is 3. "Will Japanese people type in URLs if they have the browsers to do so?" This is the question that keeps me up at night.

My hypothesis is that - Mac users are a good proxy for Windows users and what Mac users are doing today online, Windows users will be doing tomorrow when IE7 rules the roost. Therefore, I am specifically looking for proof of type-in traffic to Japanese IDNs and then underneath that looking at type-in user characteristics like their browser and operating system.

My tax domain got me all excited because the evidence from it validates my hypothesis. But this by itself is thin, I want more evidence. As Japan is a market where the vast majority of browsers are not yet IDN enabled, even very low levels of type-in traffic coming from macintosh users should help us all sleep easier at night. The mac users can be a great proxy for the kind of behavior windows users will exhibit once the means to do so are in their hands.

[555]

Only 11% of the population is currently online.

Source pls?
And is this news that idn's get type-ins?

[Rubber Duck]

Source pls?
And is this news that idn's get type-ins?

It might be if you have a predominantly Japanese portfolio. I am only really convinced of what I am seeing in Japan, because of what I am seeing in Russia.

[thefabfive]

I agree that Russian type-in traffic does indeed come mainly from Opera.

[jacksonm]

Source pls?

I read it just the other day that the number is currently approx 11%, but didn't find that link asap. Still looking.

It has come to the point now that Yandex has started subsidizing uplinks from smaller cities just to try to get more people online.

Actually, it was on Yandex english pages where I read this info. I'll try to find a link.

.

[rhys]

Sure, here:

language: ja-jp (safari?)

http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/8185/51393169wm0.th.jpg (http://img120.imageshack.us/my.php?image=51393169wm0.jpg)

language: ja

http://img114.imageshack.us/img114/6401/41936086ho4.th.jpg (http://img114.imageshack.us/my.php?image=41936086ho4.jpg)

That is truly impressive touch. One question, are either of these sites functional sites that would be useful enough for a user to bookmark?

[touchring]

That is truly impressive touch. One question, are either of these sites functional sites that would be useful enough for a user to bookmark?


Not just one site, but a few dozen sites. I put all them into 1 analytics account. As you can see from the chart, i've not got much success with yahoo. Probably due to adsense. Most names get very few type-ins, maybe 1 or 2 within the entire period.

[rhys]

Not just one site, but a few dozen sites. I put all them into 1 analytics account. As you can see from the chart, i've not got much success with yahoo. Probably due to adsense.

Sorry, sloppy question. My question is are any of your sites included here content or feature rich enough as to warrant users bookmarking your site and navigating directly to it again and again? Direct includes both bookmarking and type-in and it would be useful to tell the two apart. One way you can do that indirectly may be by looking at the % of repeat visitors by traffic source if you can do that.

[markits]

Touch, why the two images show such a different results? The first one shows 21% type-ins while the second one 2.7%. That's a big difference.

[Rubber Duck]

My question is that if a developed site can achieve 21%, why is unreasonable to assume that an undeveloped site cannot achieve a much higher percentage such as 100%, or do we assume that you are getting 21% returning visitors typing in? If that where the case then browser support must be much higher than 21%, n'est pas! Yes, I suppose that support could be IE6 with bookmarks! Silly me.

[touchring]

Sorry, sloppy question. My question is are any of your sites included here content or feature rich enough as to warrant users bookmarking your site and navigating directly to it again and again? Direct includes both bookmarking and type-in and it would be useful to tell the two apart. One way you can do that indirectly may be by looking at the % of repeat visitors by traffic source if you can do that.


Not really feature rich, but they spent only 40 seconds, so i guess you can gauge from there. The repeat visitor stats is also on the screen capture. Some of the repeat visit might be by accident. From my comparison with my other sites, 90% new doesn't say much. If it were 85% new or less, than it will mean repeat for sure.

Touch, why the two images show such a different results? The first one shows 21% type-ins while the second one 2.7%. That's a big difference.


The other one is safari. The fact that safari gets just a bit less than half as much type-in as firefox and ie just shows how pathetic the two's marketshare.

[markits]

The other one is safari. The fact that safari gets just a bit less than half as much type-in as firefox and ie just shows how pathetic the two's marketshare.

What I am getting here is that the type-in pie is actually quite big if browser support is available, right?

[touchring]

Depends on the indexing part also, if you rank well, you'll get more search engine traffic, and less direct in comparison.

[Rubber Duck]

The chief question in Japan in my mind is not 1. "Will Advertisers jump aboard an IDN bandwagon" because they will once this makes sense to do so. It is not, 2. "Are Japanese people able to type in Japanese?" because they can. Rather, the important question is 3. "Will Japanese people type in URLs if they have the browsers to do so?" This is the question that keeps me up at night.

Well, I can't say it keeps me up at night, but yes the question of whether they can or will transfer those typing skills to the Address Bar is a key one. I cannot say I am unduly worried, because if there are technical issues around being able to type into the address bar they will get resolved and I am sure the Japanese will do it even if it takes a while for them to change their browsing behaviour.

I don't believe that under any given scenario, Japanese is going to be catching Russian up fast, but of course anything we get from Japan will be a bonus.

[jacksonm]

I don't believe that under any given scenario, Japanese is going to be catching Russian up fast, but of course anything we get from Japan will be a bonus.

Russia is like Finland, nothing but polar bears and wooden 4-way stop signs. Divert your interests elsewhere.

.

[websjapan]

Well, I can't say it keeps me up at night, but yes the question of whether they can or will transfer those typing skills to the Address Bar is a key one. I cannot say I am unduly worried, because if there are technical issues around being able to type into the address bar they will get resolved and I am sure the Japanese will do it even if it takes a while for them to change their browsing behaviour.


what i've noticed is that a) who uses the internet from a pc in japan anyways so the most important question is will there be enough IDN enabled cell phones

b) yahoo = internet in japan. just as a while ago in the uk many people thought they had to type the domain into google to find the page, the same applies here. its gonna be a while before the japanese get into direct navigation i think. but once they get it it will be awesome :)

[Rubber Duck]

what i've noticed is that a) who uses the internet from a pc in japan anyways so the most important question is will there be enough IDN enabled cell phones

b) yahoo = internet in japan. just as a while ago in the uk many people thought they had to type the domain into google to find the page, the same applies here. its gonna be a while before the japanese get into direct navigation i think. but once they get it it will be awesome :)

I don't think you have to worry about mobiles being IDN capable. The only browser that has ever been conceived to not cope with Punycode, but instead to talk to some imaginary Unicode ready DNS is IE6. It was obsolete when it was written. It sure as hell is obsolete now. I can't see the Japanese going for that in a big way on the mobile phone.

[rhys]

what i've noticed is that a) who uses the internet from a pc in japan anyways so the most important question is will there be enough IDN enabled cell phones

b) yahoo = internet in japan. just as a while ago in the uk many people thought they had to type the domain into google to find the page, the same applies here. its gonna be a while before the japanese get into direct navigation i think. but once they get it it will be awesome :)


My understanding is that there is no shortage of IDN supporting mobile browsers in Japan but please correct us if we are wrong on that. Based on that idea, it really isn't a question.

The question I think you are asking in "B" - is the exact same question I am asking when I started this thread which is, "what evidence do we have that Japanese users will eventually type-in once their browser is IDN capable?"

If you have some evidence of type-in traffic from mac users or otherwise, it would be valuable. Touch gave us some good evidence. I have a nice domain that supports my hypothesis that Japanese will indeed type-in someday. Anybody else have data from google analytics or another stat package?

[burnsinternet]

For what it is worth, I see type in from Cyrillic (probably accidental, nothing is indexed in Rambler or Yandex). I also see Yahoo and/or Google referrals to Greek & Japanese when the site is indexed (parked or not) versus type-in. Virtually no Japanese type-in from Asia.

I haven't checked Arabic, but the traffic is actually starting to flow consistently for my Arabic domains. I don't seem to be indexed anywhere, but I am not sure of the traffic source.

[websjapan]

over xmas a (the) xmas related .jp idn i have got 8 hits and 1 click (33c :) after that nothing. i could only imagine that it was direct navigation. also, a couple of mine are ranking on keyword strength alone in the google serps and sometimes get a couple of hits and clicks (often $1+ :) but its not as frequent as i'd like!

i asked a q about the idn enabled phones a while ago and some kind soul posted a list - about 15-20 if i remember rightly. not so impressive considering the 100+ phones i can see in my local electrical store

however things change and i dont keep up with this so if anyone else has some better data it would be great to hear it

[jacksonm]

It might be if you have a predominantly Japanese portfolio. I am only really convinced of what I am seeing in Japan, because of what I am seeing in Russia.

Are any of your Russians indexed in Yandex?

.

[Rubber Duck]

Are any of your Russians indexed in Yandex?

.

As far as I know Yandex is not indexing IDN, but we are always willing to be advised otherwise. If it were it might be looking into doing web development in Russian.

[mgrohan]

Yandex is indexing IDNs fine. Still only displaying punycode in the results though.

[jacksonm]

Yandex is indexing IDNs fine. Still only displaying punycode in the results though.

Can you give the search link for one so we can all see it?

Thanks

.

[Rubber Duck]

Can't find mine amongst the dozen of others that think they own my domain name!

http://www.yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%B3%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B7%D0%BA%D0%B0.com

[mgrohan]

Can you give the search link for one so we can all see it?

http://www.yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%88%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0.com

Think the requirements to get indexed are that you are either hosted in Russia, or that your site is written totally in Russian (therefore no parked sites).

Also needs to be either manually submitted to Yandex, or have a backlink contained on a site that is already crawled by Yandex (i.e. any Russian directory)

[jacksonm]

http://www.yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%88%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0.com

Think the requirements to get indexed are that you are either hosted in Russia, or that your site is written totally in Russian (therefore no parked sites).

Also needs to be either manually submitted to Yandex, or have a backlink contained on a site that is already crawled by Yandex (i.e. any Russian directory)

So are you hosted in Russia?

Did you submit manually to Yandex or did you get a backlink?

Thanks!

.

[mgrohan]

So are you hosted in Russia?

Did you submit manually to Yandex or did you get a backlink?

No, they're not hosted in Russia. Just got a few backlinks from Russian directories listed in Yandex (search Yandex for каталог - think that is directory in Russian). I think one directory i used was this one - http://www.optime.ru/form.pl

Once you have a few backlinks, manual submit to yandex here: http://webmaster.yandex.ru/

Got about 2/3 of my submitted sites indexed really quickly, with only 1-3 backlinks.

[rhys]

Many of my developed japanese portfolio gets ghost levels of type-in traffic when viewed on analytics. I do have exactly one site where I am certain the traffic is really direct traffic from honest to goodness websurfers.

It is a tax domain. It is short 3 character domain and it is a .com. The .jp is held in reserve by JPRS. The people who type in are no doubt looking for the tax agency to which it refers. In the past 30 days - it has received 21 visits and 12 of those are from direct navigation. Those 12 visits came from 10 different japanese cities and 6 of them were macintosh users. Of the rest, 5 used firefox and one used IE (version not specified).

An update on this domain. Well it is clearly tax season again. Here are the stats for the same domain name for the past 30 days according to Google Analytics.

75 visits of which 43 (57%) came from direct traffic, the rest were from yahoo or google or referral. Of these 43 type-in visits 32 were from users on a Safari browser (confirmed Mac users), 7 on firefox, and 3 on IE, 1 on Mozilla. All visits were from Japan and with only a couple of exceptions all users came from different cities. What do I take away from this? Windows users will indeed start to type-in when they have the means just like my Mac users clearly already have even without advertising to encourage them to do so.

And as a matter of faith I also believe that when this behavior begins to be encouraged with Advertising all users regardless of operating system will step up the rates of their type-in.

[mkellerman]

We are still talking about low levels of traffic for Japanese domains

Do Japanese people really type in domain names on spec -- perhaps they almost invariably use search engines.

[bwhhisc]

We are still talking about low levels of traffic for Japanese domains. Do Japanese people really type in domain names on spec -- perhaps they almost invariably use search engines.

It has been said here many times that the Japanese are not accustomed to "type ins", but rather bookmark sites they like to return to. Be interesting to see what happens with the mass population when they can search for domains in languages they recognize and can type in easily. My guess is we will see some type in when things get on full gallop.

[rhys]

We are still talking about low levels of traffic for Japanese domains

Do Japanese people really type in domain names on spec -- perhaps they almost invariably use search engines.


I think you should reread my post, that is not my assertion. My assertion is that they will type in someday not that they do. Clearly today they primarily use search engines because that is all they can do.

[Ryu]

My guess is we will see some type in when things get on full gallop.

My guess is we will see some fairly noticeable amount of type-in when things go just trotting. :)

And just like rhys said it seems that there already are some type-ins despite very very small amount.

[Drewbert]

People don't "type in" because they tried it once when they first got on the Internet, and it didn't work.

Now (well, soon - once Microsoft are told by the Commerce Dept or FBI to force-upgrade IE6) when new users get on the Internet and try to "type in", it WILL work, and they will be an early source of traffic. Then they'll be talking to "older" Internet users and will mention that "type in" works. The older user will say "no it doesn't" and will be proved wrong.