The answer is: Yes …

… depending on which stats you believe. With a range of 65% on the low side and 80% on the high, there’s a pretty large gap in the numbers. So when clients ask how their monthly search engine traffic distribution compares to the average, which numbers should we compare them to? The ones that say Google, Yahoo and Bing have 65%, 19% and 9%, respectively, of the market, or the ones that say they have 80%, 9% and 9%?

So we thought we’d try to establish an “Internet Average” of the market. We took market share numbers from six different companies, added in our own numbers based on observations of sites we monitor, and came up with this table.

Granted, each company has a different universe of searches from which it draws, and uses different methods of calculating its numbers. So this certainly is not a scientific process. But we do think it strikes a happy medium from the low to the high across Internet statistics. And we think it provides a nice baseline to which folks can compare their own traffic numbers.

Here’s where we pulled the data:

• Experian Hitwise
• StatCounter Global Stats
• ComScore (via PC World)
• Nielsen Wire 
• Group 3 Solutions Data
• Enquisite
• iCrossing (via search engine land)

WordPress.com Stats

If you’re already using Google Analytics for WordPress (see our post on Google Analytics for WordPress) then you already have a ton of information about your blog’s traffic. So much information, in fact, that it may be hard to get a bird’s eye view. That’s where WordPress Stats comes in. Simply give it your WordPress.com API Key (see our post on Akismet for detail on this) and in return you’ll get a dashboard item telling you the quick and dirty version of what’s happening on your site, with a wealth of additional information just clicks away. And don’t worry about server load: WordPress Stats is a hosted analytics solution just like Google Analytics. Great stuff.

Check out the WordPress Stats plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself.

Other Great Plugins to Explore

There are lots of great plugins that we’ll be talking about in the coming weeks (FeedBurner Widget, Flickr Feed Gallery and NextGEN Gallery for example). Which ones would you recommend? Post below in the comments or drop us an email and let us know which ones you find most useful. =)

The one gotcha is that the ga.js code can’t be at the bottom of the page, which is non-typical, and could increase page rendering times. The reason Google’s ga.js code goes at the very bottom is to prevent the latency of connecting to Google from adding to the page’s render time. Since the code is now at the top of the page, there’s no way to avoid the (admittedly only potential) latency problem.

But hey, you can track your document downloads! =)

Update: Also works for offsite links.