Friday, January 30, 2009

TGN/Ancestry.com Traffic statistics - Post 1

I like to keep track of the genealogy providers web site traffic statistics every so often (I'm trying to do it every 6 months). I posted charts for The Generations Network (TGN) sites from late March 2008 and late August 2008.

The current data for the TGN properties will be in two posts. In this post, I will show the Daily Reach and Page Views from http://www.alexa.com/ (in rather arcane measurements - we can't figure out exact numbers of visitors and page views because the percentages they relate to a percentage of all Internet users). I am showing these because the reader can relate them to the earlier statistics.

The first chart shows the Reach (defined as "the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site") of five TGN properties - http://www.ancestry.com/, http://www.rootsweb.cxom/, http://www.myfamily.com/, www.familytreemaker/com and http://www.genealogy.com/:


The second chart shows the "Page Views (defined as "percentage of all page views on the Internet." That doesn't make sense to me... but that's what Alexa says it is. The relative numbers are what's important):

From these charts, we can clearly see the big dip in http://www.rootsweb.com/ traffic when it was brought into the http://www.ancestry.com/ domain in April 2008. There is a noticeable increase in http://www.ancestry.com/ traffic in December. Ancestry reach was essentially static from April through December, but Page Views (each time a web page opens) steadily increased.

Traffic for www.MyFamily.com and www.Genealogy.com have basically remained static over 2008. www.FamilyTreeMaker.com traffic barely shows on the scale (because Ancestry.com has so much traffic). www.Rootsweb.com traffic is very low now - about 10% of the Reach it had before being taken under the Ancestry domain. This tells me that there are still links on the Internet and Favorites/Bookmarks in user browsers that still call up www.rootsweb.com (mine still do!).

The third chart shows statistics for www.Ancestry.com:



The data is given for 1-day, 1-week average, 1-month average and 3-month average for Reach (% of Internet users), Rank (for all Internet sites) and Page Views (number of views per visit). For the last week, Reach was 0.068%, Rank was 960, and Page Views were 13.6.

Below the Page Views are the percentage of users from the top five countries (USA is 67.1%) and the Traffic rank in the top five countries (291 in USA).

The last chart is the list of sub-domains visited by users to www.ancestry.com:


The percentage of page views for the top 5 sub-domains are:

* search.ancestry.com - 32.7%
* trees.ancestry.com - 31.7%
* rootsweb.ancestry.com - 17.0%
* ancestry.com - 9.2%
* content.ancestry.com - 5.7%

The remainder of the sub-domains are less than 1.1%. As you can see, the traffic percentage for Boards, Learn, Community, DNA, MyCanvas, Store, etc. on www.ancestry.com is really small.

What all of this says is that Ancestry.com has maintained their Reach and increased their Page Views over the past year. Family trees are a big part of the page views, and Content is relatively smal. That reflects the need to click several times before you see the actual record summary and image.

The next post will show some of the www.Quantcast.com data for Ancestry.com.

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