In this final part of looking at measurement and using C3's own site as an example, I thought it would be prudent to look at where viewers came from as well. The first post noted the 10 most viewed posts in the site's history since measuring traffic through Google Analytics starting last Halloween. While two posts (about Scarred and Weeds) were driven primarily by search engines, most of the others were either driven by significant fan discussion board traffic (the soaps boards) or by being linked from a variety of blogs (the posts on Turner Super Deluxe and the Cartoon Network host, as well as about teens in social networks).
However, according to Google Analytics, while 15 percent of the traffic is made up of direct clicks to the site and 29 percent is through links/referrals, 56 percent come from search engines, with 49 percent of C3's traffic coming from Google and almost 4 percent from Yahoo!'s search function.
From Google, the most popular searches that led to this site include "convergence culture" (534 visits), "mtv scarred" (307 visits) "convergence culture consortium" (219 visits), "general hospital night shift" (160 visits), "cartoon network boston" (159 visits), "weeds season two dvd" (116 visits), "lynn liccardo" (103 visits), "caveman's crib" (102 visits), "weeds season two" (99 visits), "volvo advertisement" (91 visits), "scarred mtv" (80 visits), "watch tnt online" (77 visits), "weeds season 2 itunes" (66 visits), "fanlib" (60 visits), "tnt online tv" (59 visits), "futures of entertainment (55 visits), "convergence" (54 visits), "kay alden" (54 visits), "sam ford" (52 visits), and "cavemans crib" (52 visits).
From Yahoo!, the most popular searches that led to C3's site were "convergence consortium" (181 visits), "mtv's scarred" (130 visits), "mtv scarred" (80 visits), and "fox on demand myspace" (79 visits).
The 10 most popular posts, then, from search engine traffic, then, are as follows:
Weeds Season Two Premiere on MSN Video, 748 visits.
General Hospital: Night Shift Could Be Fascinating Case Study in Cross-Show Storytelling, 427 visits.
Cartoon Network/Boston Fiasco and the Connotations of Labeling It a "Hoax", 313 visits.
Turner Super Deluxe a Promising Upcoming Venture for a Variety of Comedy Material, 269 visits.
Caveman's Crib: Developing Branded Entertainment for an Insurance Company. 267 visits.
The Cereal Serial, Part II: In-Store Display, 241 visits.
Veoh/TNT Online TV Deal, 237 visits.
Media Effects Study Links WWE with Date Fighting--Seven Years Ago, 179 visits.
Video Sharing Sites Filling In Niches Around YouTube Censorship, 171 visits.
As you can see, there is a strong correlation in traffic between the search engines and page clicks, save for some pages (particularly most of the soaps content) that was directly driven by posts on fan discussion boards. However, again, the pages that people are most apt to land on from search engines does not correlate with content viewed from RSS feeds.
I hope some of the data might be of interest to folks who are interested in questions of measurement, or else just people who are nosey in general.
