Found some interesting nuggets when I decided to narrow in on Google referrer data (as reported by Omniture) from one particular high volume keyword.
The word was “lasagna” and when I dug into the Google data, I noticed some interesting things. Google shares the following data in the referrer URL. I compare each search type to the standard “lasagna” search in google (without quotes) to protect the actual traffic volume for the high-ranked website.
Google Searcher Keyword Variations:
Standard lasagna search: 100%
(this is the search I base the rest of the data on)
lasagna misspelled & clicked on google did you mean link: 74%
(this was much higher than I anticipated – people probably ignored the “g” in lasagna).
Lasagna search: 8%
(I guess some people figure capitalizing the first letter will get them better results)
lasagna_ : 4%
(the underscore denotes a space after the search term – I guess some people can’t help but drop their thumbs down on that nice big spacebar)
Google Searcher Behaviors and Platforms:
lasagna search, but clicked search button: 40%
(looks like most people hit enter, but some take the time to click the search button)
standard lasagna search via Firefox: 19%
(firefox users continue to grow and Google likes tracking them)
standard lasagna search via iGoogle: 6%
(looks like some people are using iGoogle as their homepage)
Google Non-U.S. Data
UK standard lasagna search: 9.5%
Google UK misspelled did you mean correction: 34.4%
Google UK lasagna search, but clicked search button: 2.5%
Looks like our friends from the UK need to work on spelling. Misspelled version is 4 times more common than the correct spelling!
Google Canada standard lasagna search: 23.6%
Google Canada misspelled did you mean correction: 15.1%
Google Canada lasagna search, but clicked search button: 8.2%
Our friends from Canada are a little less mousey (hit enter instead) and slightly better spellers than Americans.
We can’t draw too many conclusions from this data, but it does highlight some of the data you can get from looking at your referrer data more closely. I invite you to spot check a couple terms that you rank for and share your findings in the comments.