You want to look in the journals of interactive marketing, as this topic is of major interest to business. In a very general sense, some traffic will be based on searches, some on recommendations given or sent in person or by email, some loyal readers will use bookmarks and some people will come from links from other websites, and a very little traffic (typically) will come from promotions in other media. You could use link analysis (see some of Mike Thelwall's work) to assess the linkage patterns; there are some other tools that will let you investigate the number of search queries per month (look in the tools for advertisers on the Google website). Assessing promotional activity through other media might be difficult unless the sites in question would tell you what they've been up to. If you have a site with a lot of traffic, Nielsen//NetRatings track referrals from other sites - you could call and ask and they might give you the data for free. But the sites have to be popular or they don't show up on the panel. Or - you could ask the websites in question to let you see their log files. But I doubt they would. Good luck. Elizabeth On 15 May 2007, at 09:20, Cristian Vaccari wrote:

Hi all,

I am doing research on factors that drive traffic to political (parties' and caniddates') web sites. Can anyone point me to some previous research in this field, e.g., studies that highlight some key variables that can account for a web site's amount of visitors, page views, etc.? Does not have to be about political web sites (though I could not find any kind of this research on political sites and would be curious to discover there is some), but also on commercial, news, social-networking, or other kinds of sites.

Thanks,

Cristian Vaccari www.cristianvaccari.it www.comunicarepolitica.it

_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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Elizabeth Van Couvering PhD Student Department of Media & Communications London School of Economics and Political Science http://personal.lse.ac.uk/vancouve/ e.j.van-couvering@lse.ac.uk Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm

Cristian, The number one factor, far out weighing any other, is --- where the Website is ranked in response to a given query by the major search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and ASK). With 60% to 80% of searchers never going beyond the first page or so (Jansen & Spink, 2005), a Website being in the top ten is critical to all types of Website traffic. Directly related to this is -- whether or not the Website has a sponsored link off the front page of the major search engines. More than 70% of people use search engines as the entry point to the Web (Nielsen Media, 2006) using search engines even for links that they already know. See: Jansen, B.J., & Spink, A. (2005). How are we searching the World Wide Web? A comparison of nine search engine transaction logs. Information Processing & Management, 42(1), 248-263. Nielsen Media. (2006). Search Engines Most Popular Method of Surfing the Web. Retrieved 30 January, 2006, from http://www.commerce.net/news/press/0416.html <http://www.commerce.net/news/press/0416.html> Best, Jim ________________________________ Jim Jansen | College of Information Sciences and Technology | The Pennsylvania State University | 329F Information Sciences and Technology Building | University Park, PA 16802 | Office: 814-865-6459 | Fax: 814-865-6426 | Email: jjansen@acm.org | URL: http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/ <http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/> | Blog: http://jimjansen.blogspot.com/ <http://jimjansen.blogspot.com/> ________________________________ From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org on behalf of Cristian Vaccari Sent: Tue 5/15/2007 4:20 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] research on factors driving traffic to web sites Hi all, I am doing research on factors that drive traffic to political (parties' and caniddates') web sites. Can anyone point me to some previous research in this field, e.g., studies that highlight some key variables that can account for a web site's amount of visitors, page views, etc.? Does not have to be about political web sites (though I could not find any kind of this research on political sites and would be curious to discover there is some), but also on commercial, news, social-networking, or other kinds of sites. Thanks, Cristian Vaccari www.cristianvaccari.it www.comunicarepolitica.it _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org <http://aoir.org/> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/