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same manner, all with similar engagement factors of conversion, time on site, and pages viewed. The realization came when going back to the source of the visit. The search visitor defines the subject matter by their search term. The results that are shown are based on search term. If they do not see what they need after clicking any of the results, search visitors know that all they have to do is click the Back button, and they will see 10 to 15 more options for their need. As a result, they are significantly less engaged than link visitors. They are not reading a trusted source that is recommending another website; they are only being presented with a list of options as their starting point.

The last engagement set consisted of visitors from social-news websites, including Twitter and Facebook. The engagement showed a very significant trend among social-news referrals. Even though most of the visitors in this time frame were generated by the site receiving tens of thousands of visits from a very popular article, the visitors did not stay long. In fact, there was a conversion rate of 0 percent, the average page view was a single page view, and the average time on site from these tens of thousands of visitors was 0.03 minutes, which is about 2 seconds. There is not a whole lot of engagement that can happen in 2 seconds. So, even though this was the primary source of visitors, it was also the least engaging and least valuable source of immediate benefit to the business.

Visitors who clicked these links seemed to only have the slightest degree of interest, and it did not last long. In fact, less than 1 percent of social-news visitors in this evaluation moved on to read additional articles or information. This is typical behavior of those visitors and the engagement level they are presenting. When contrasting with other sources, the social-news visitor finds links to various stories in a feed or presented on a page with many other stories. In both cases, there is very little context to the presentation. All of the articles and information on social news sites tend to be very random, even within categories. As a result, the social news reader is clicking an article link with a mild level of interest. They also tend to go immediately back to the site and look for the next link, because there are hundreds of other articles competing for their time and attention.

The result of this analysis was that not all links will produce the same value to a business in terms of providing engaged and profitable visits. Another benefit of this analysis provided for future marketing decisions. By seeing the results of different marketing campaigns and their effectiveness, better decisions could be made in marketing the website, because the expectations of results could be better managed and predicted. After you analyze the sources of visits to your own site, you will see which sources of visitors are more effective and profitable compared to others. You can then maximize your effective channels of visitors and troubleshoot the less effective channels. You may need to reevaluate the focus of your link marketing, when you see all of the sources in context. The reason becomes clearer when you take a step backward in the process and evaluate the sources of those links.

A Case Study: The Benefits of Links

Linking provides many benefits to the site owner or manager. First and most obvious is the rankings aspect. The rankings tend to be the primary driver for many SEOs. However, by focusing only on rankings, the other benefits may be lost. Using a typical report that almost any analytics program can generate, I can see how visitors found an article on my website. But even better is knowing the value of each of those sources, which shows the different benefits of links.

Rankings

The article was linked from Clicked, a blog on the MSN Network. Within days, a noticeable increase in rankings occurred. Gaining a link on this prominent blog was a significant factor in increasing the rankings of this article.

Branding

The top source of visitors