(and Twitter's no better, either)...

The results of the world's largest website traffic survey were published today in a freely downloadable report, revealing some startling facts about how effective the different traffic-building techniques are for driving visitors to businesses' websites.

The survey, conducted earlier this year by website software and training company Intellimon, in partnership with the University of Bradford polled over 4000 online businesses.

The objective of the research was to better understand the nature of challenges facing businesses marketing themselves on the Internet.

Undergraduates from the University of Bradford assisted in the design of the research and the analysis of the responses collected.

Speaking about the new report earlier this week, Intellimon CEO Paul Smithson said "With the generous assistance from the University of Bradford we've completed one of the definitive pieces of research into online traffic and Internet marketing in general. I've been in business online for over fifteen years and I certainly wish I'd had access to information like this when I was starting out".

The report not only proves some popular theories when it comes to what 'works and what doesn't', it also uncovers some unexpected trends.

Some of the findings within the report include:

- While 67% of respondents use social media platform Facebook to promote their business, an average of only 29% find the platform effective in any way for driving traffic to their business website.
- Popular micro-blogging platform Twitter faired equally badly, only 27.2% saying they found it effective for generating website traffic to their business website.
- The typical age of people doing business online is higher than you might have thought. Of the thousands of respondents 62% were fifty years of age or older.

Commenting on the report findings Paul Smithson said "We were genuinely shocked by some of the results across several areas; Social Media, Training, Outsourcing and Demographics sections all threw up some very unexpected results. It's a real eye-opener, even for experienced online marketers".

The report findings also established:

• Despite the prominence of older business-people online, it was actually the youngest age-group (18-43 years of age) who reported the highest success-rate with their traffic marketing. 25.6% of respondents in this group reported their success rate as 'good' or 'excellent' compared with a spread of 9.8% to 16.3% across the remaining age-groups.
• Despite 'Search Engine Traffic' being reported as the most important traffic generation tactic, an alarmingly low 62.8% of respondents perform SEO only monthly or less frequently.
• Less than 10% of traffic generation activities are outsourced or delegated, typically falling to a single business owner/operator to carry out the tasks required.
• Refreshingly, across virtually every measure, training was acknowledged as being crucial to the success of an online business, with businesses training regularly and investing significant sums in different training materials.

An in-depth 120 page analysis of the survey is available for download at www.thetrafficsurvey.com.

Talking about the free report, Smithson said "This is an incredibly detailed report, and we're proud to be offering it for free to anyone interested in doing business on-line. For the first time businesses are going to be able to stop guessing about what works, and start making decisions based on proven facts, and the experiences of thousands of other businesses".

The free Traffic Survey Report is being published by Intellimon ahead of the release of its forthcoming training course 'The Complete Guide to Traffic' which leverages the research findings across more than forty-hours of training material that teaches business owners/operators how to master traffic generation to their websites.

More information about the Complete Guide to Traffic course can be found at http://www.completeguidetotraffic.com