Ranking the Sailing Sites

by Al Constable on 11 Nov 2006 Sail-World has been the largest sailing news site in Australia for many years and the combination of its eight sites around the world, make it the largest sailing news network.

It has been receiving strong advertising support from the marine sector and this is continuing to expand. Of recent months mainstream advertisers from the Communications, Finance and Automotive sector have signed to join the ranks of Sail-World advertisers.

We have never before published comparative statistics between ourselves and other sailing sites but have been asked by many of our advertisers to provide the source of the independent statistics we use ourselves.

While many users focus just on the daily site reach, (that is the number of visitors) the really important number is the daily page views. That is the measure of the number of people and how many pages they looked at.

The Amazon online research subsidiary www.alexa.com has an online tracking system. If you download the Alexa toolbar you can see the daily, weekly and three monthly statistics on each website you visit.

The Alexa system tracks your site visits too and your anonymous data become part of the tracking statistics. With close to 12 million Alexa toolbars tracking users, it is proving to be a worthwhile website statistical tool.

This data has become a significant business tool, showing just how busy your site is compared to competitors etc.

On a monthly basic its figures remain within 5-10% of some of the most expensive online metrics services. Given the fact that the data is free, the Alexa figures are rapidly becoming the defacto Internet Site Ranking standard tool.

It is important to recognise that the Alexa overall ranking system is based on online pages viewed each day, not just on the daily reach, which is the graph that people commonly download.

Yahoo is the most popular website in the world, so its number one. MSN is number 2, Google 3, EBay 4, Google Australia 95 then there are about seven thousand news sites, job sites, travel sites in English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and of course a rapidly growing number porn sites, in before the top sailing sites in the world.

These numbers bounce around, the daily traffic can vary around 50% even on very popular sites depending on the day of the week and you need to drill down beyond the three monthly figures, to look at the actual daily data and you will see that most sailors check the news, surprise surprise during their working days.

So Sail-World was yesterday 44,418th for the last three months, yesterday 15,294th What about the other guys?

On a different scale, according to Alexa.com. Over the last three months Yachting Australia and State and the associated Club sites combined 443,635th. Boating Oz has averaged 742.500, Modern Boating 1,777,987th, Afloat.com.au has averaged 2,347,262th.

How many websites are being tracked? Who knows, some number more than 5 million now. So if you see a site with an Alexa ranking of 4,243,169th, you can be sure their mother loves them.

After 100,000 the data is not as accurate as the traffic is so small that figures are much less exact, but typically a site of a mid 40,000 ranking would see 200 times the traffic of a site in the 700,000's and 800-1000 times the traffic of a site around 2 million.

Hits versus unique visitors.

Sail-World.com will be visited by more than 500,000 unique visitors this year. Each user is unique; if you go to Sail-World, five days a week, you are still just one of 500,000 annual site visitors.

One sailing website proudly claims it receives more than 3,000 hits a day. It has impressed a few advertisers, but don’t be confused by hits; hits are not visitors. In the early days of the web in the early 1990’s, it was text based and when a visitor opened a file, it was a screen page, so in those days hits meant something.

But in today’s high speed world a graphics rich site can have 30 files on a page; a single visitor might generate 500-2,000 hits.

Sail-World routinely receives seven hundred thousand hits a day, but that may only be eight or nine thousand sailors visiting that day.

Eight or nine thousand sailors a day is a big number, when you look at sailing magazine circulations. So it is not surprising that as the sailing audience moves online, the marine advertisers have followed.

Serious sailors are serious spenders, as they move online major advertisers are following.

This month the mainstream advertisers on Sail-World will include a number of financial institutions, communications companies and luxury car makers. You will know the brands.

If you need details of the Sail-World advertising and promotional program contact Sail-World now! Full contact details are at the bottom of every Sail-World page.

As a side issue, we recently we heard a comment which indicated a misconception that Google search results relate to site traffic.

They in fact about key word relevance, if you do a search on Pineapple Paddlepops, then the site PineapplePaddlepops.com is likely to list ahead of the ABC news story about Pineapple Paddlepops.

That does not mean more people read the Pineapple Paddlepops site, it means that the Google search engine logic believes that site is probably of more immediate interest to searchers than the ABC site.