The results of the world's largest website traffic survey have been published in a freely downloadable report, which reports some disappointing results about how effective 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 in the UK, 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.

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

      For instance, 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% said 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 50 years of age or older.

      "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," said Intellimon CEO Paul Smithson. "I've been in business online for over 15 years and I certainly wish I'd had access to information like this when I was starting out."

      Despite the prominence of older businesspeople 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. Moreover, 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.

      "We were genuinely shocked by some of the results across several areas," Smithson said. "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."

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