“You can’t optimize what you don’t measure.” – Johns Wu, Former Owner of Bankaholic, which he sold to Bankrate.com for $14.9 Million Dollars!

As we continue to roll out new products & services, it’s become painfully apparent that we *must* help busy business people better understand traffic and what’s happening with their content. If one wishes to further [...and further and further] improve return on investment of their time, effort and money we’re here to support with strategic analysis.

If you don’t feel you can do it; you just don’t have the time or you’d simply rather hire some help we are here to support you! Traffic Analysis Services should be customized to a client’s needs, but at minimum we recommend keeping a close eye on:

Monthly Data Points – Month over Month Comparison

• Bounce Rate – What percentage looked at one page and left?
• Unique Visitors – Do we have new visitor growth?
• Return Visitors – Are we building visitor loyalty?
• Total Page Views – Do we have page view growth?
• Avg Page Views Per Visitor – How is our overall stickiness or brand engagement?
• Subscription – Is direct subscription improving?

General Analysis:

• Referral Websites – Where are we getting traffic from and are Twitter, Facebook, etc. driving traffic?
• Most Popular Pages – what are our most popular subjects and can we expand on them?
• Search Phrases – What do we have, do we not have and can we target similar phrases?

The interpretation aspect of traffic analysis cannot be underestimated – and we’re comitted to doing it with this service. Leveraging what the data shows to identify trends, solve problems and improve performance is crucial! After all, to be a trusted brand these days you really must share every day practical knowledge; however, if you’re not focused on what’s happening as a result of that effort you’re NOT going to to improve traffic, lead flow and new business!

“We’ve adjusted our marketing strategies in response to the data we get from our blogs. The [traffic] analytics are a gold mine!“ - California Olive Ranch DOM Claude Weiller

Related Posts:

Want More Sales? It’s Time We Get Serious And Analyze Traffic Data!
When Does Traffic Analysis Improve Lead Flow And New Business? – Ask California Olive Ranch!

Get Over How Much: Get Into Attracting High Quality Traffic!

Want More Sales? Analyze Your Traffic Data!

If we want to generate business with our blogsites and social media marketing, we’ve got to find the discipline to analyze our traffic data!

California Olive Ranch DOM Claude Weiller, for whom we provide in depth traffic data analysis, has been ecstatic about the effort claiming, “We’ve adjusted our marketing strategies in response to the data we get from our blogs. The [traffic] analytics are a gold mine!“

Marketing Tactics

Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing are tactics. If tactics don’t eventually translate to business then they’re a waste of time! And don’t be misled by those who’d have us believe raw traffic volume is the win. It’s not - lead conversion is!

Performance Indicators

We’ve got to identify the performance indicators that help measure the effectiveness of our tactics. Once we have those  indicators, we can actually begin to translate tactics into more and more new business. Having traffic convert is a process and it’s also about getting the right message across. With Social Network Marketing the message may be more about creating buzz & conversation to get attention because people’s intent for being there isn’t really business; whereas, with search they have very specific intent so that activity can & should be targeted as business. In either case performance indicators might help us to understand that ‘Denver Real Estate’ is a popular target phrase that gets us lots of traffic & visibility, but maybe it’s the phrase ‘Denver Neighborhoods’  that’s really converting.

Conversions

It starts with capturing anyone who’s looking for something specific and that identifies our content [somewhere, anywhere] as potentially useful. If they visit, then we need to be current, knowledgeable and appealing. Are they subscribing, signing up, filling out forms or even buying something? To make it happen, we have to understand what makes them tick. And the answers are in our traffic data!

Data Points

Some of the data you should be analyzing, or at least outsourcing, for valuable interpretation [See Our Traffic Analysis Services ] might include:

Key Data Points:

•Bounce Rate – What percentage looked at one page and left?
•Unique Visitors – Do we have new visitor growth?
•Return Visitors – Are we building visitor loyalty?
•Total Page Views – Do we have page view growth?
•Avg Page Views Per Visitor – How is our overall stickiness or brand engagement?

Interpretive Data Points:

•Most Popular Pages – what are our most popular subjects and can we expand on them?
•Referral Websites – Where are we getting traffic from and are Twitter, Facebook, etc. driving traffic?
•Search Phrases – What do we have traffic from; what do we not have traffic from and what should we target more often?

Key Performance Indicators:

• Percentage of Traffic Subscribing To Our Blogsite
• Percentage of Traffic Driven To Specific Area of Our Blogsite [e.g. Search The MLS]
• Percentage of Traffic Completing Lead Capture Forms
• Percentage of Traffic Converted to Sales

What works for one company may be different for the next, but let’s think bigger than just pure numbers. Personally, I cringe when someone says “so and so has X thousand page views per month.” There are lots of tricks that can drive traffic, but what’s happening when the visitors arrive?  Tell me about what it’s doing for their business!

The interpretation aspect of traffic analysis cannot be underestimated! It can’t be automated and it takes time, but leveraging what the numbers say to identify trends and solve problems is what leads to improved performance. Once you understand it, you can begin to improve your focus for giving visitors what they truly want. Do that and we’ll begin to convert more!

Related Posts:

1. Overcome the Google Analytics Learning Curve in 20 Minutes
2. When Does Traffic Analysis Improve Lead Flow And New Business?
3. Get Over How Much: Get Into Attracting High Quality Traffic!
   

One of things we strongly advocate to clients is that they make the analysis of their traffic a priority. Simply put, if you’re going to put any time, effort or money into advertorial blogging, then you’ve really got to look at what is and what is not working. The obvious benefit being, better traffic and more new business!

We review California Olive Ranch’s {COR} data month over month not only to identify growth, but what might actually cause more growth. The service can’t really be automated; it needs to be based upon a sincere interest in identifying trends, solving problems and making a difference. Let’s ask VP Sales & Marketing Claude Weiller how traffic analysis has worked for COR: 

Frerecks: California Olive Ranch {COR} keeps a close eye on its’ traffic analytics data. We asked Claude if he could share a little bit about why?

Weiller: The analytics are a gold mine. The information – page views, unique visitors, etc. – tells us how we’re doing each month in attracting people to our Olive Oil for Chefs and Olive Oil for Consumers Blogs}. It’s also valuable to see the sources of the traffic: Google, Yahoo, other web sites or blogs, etc. And it really pays to see what topics we’re writing about are generating visits – like baking or deep frying with extra virgin olive oil, for example. That way, we can highlight these topics in future blogs or do related posts. Finally, we can see the geographic distribution of our readership – from countries such as Australia or India down to individual cities around the globe.

Frerecks: Are any traffic data points particularly important to COR?

Weiller: Page views and unique and return visitors are the most important yardsticks. Those are the basic numbers that tell us how we’re doing when it comes to attracting and retaining readers. When those numbers are compiled on a monthly basis we can see whether the overall trends are favorable or unfavorable – and adjust our blogging practices accordingly.

Frerecks: Has COR been able to identify new opportunities or direction from the data?

Weiller: Absolutely. We’ve expanded from olive oil culinary topics into olive health topics. Baking with extra virgin olive oil instead of butter has been a huge hit for us. We’ve been collecting additional baking recipes to write about and feature, underscoring how more and more professional bakers are making the switch to EVOO from butter. The change is not only for health reasons. But professional bakers tell us they like the flavor component that EVOO adds to baked goods. We’ve also seen strong interest in sautéing and frying with EVOO, telling us people want more information on these topics.

Frerecks: Does looking at your most popular pages, referral back links and key phrase searches help to determine what you’ll write going forward? 

Weiller: Yes. I’ll give you an example. We recently featured a menu that included almonds fried in extra virgin olive oil. That dish, popular in Spain, has been a good generator of traffic to the blog. In particular, a Spanish food blog in the U.K. picked up and featured our post, driving a notable amount of traffic to our site. That tells us that Spanish tapas dishes have a real following out there. Our posts about the different olive varietals that we use in our EVOO also have been a good traffic generator. That tells us we want to hit that topic down the road. Another thing we’ve learned from keyword data is that Olio Nuovo is a very hot topic. It refers to our limited-release EVOO that we crush and bottle right after harvesting the olives. The keyword data has spurred us to mention or feature Olio Nuovo in several posts. And, as I’ve said, the data we’ve seen about baking with EVOO has inspired us to pursue that topic more aggressively.

Frerecks: In summary has tailoring your blogging, based upon the traffic analysis you’re seeing, been a productive marketing exercise for COR?

Weiller: For sure. We’ve adjusted our marketing strategies in response to the data we get from our blogs, putting a greater emphasis on health matters in addition to culinary topics. We just devoted our entire monthly electronic newsletter to baking with EVOO. We interviewed professional bakers and featured several new baking recipes. We’ll be blogging about each individual recipe in the coming days and weeks.

Claude and his team certainly exhibit how to maximize the value of their blogs with month over month analysis. It’s one thing to get out there and share every day practical knowledge as an advertising strategy – to be a trusted brand these days you really must! It’s another thing to focus on what’s actually happening as a result of that strategy so that you’re always tuning for improved traffic, lead flow and new business.

Interested in blog traffic analysis services, please do not hesitate to get in touch. We can easily tailor a program for you.

 Related Posts:
•  “Lowest Cost Per Impression of Anything We Do… By a Huge Margin! It’s Been Somewhat Amazing.” – California Olive Ranch On Business Blogging
• Get Over How Much: Get Into Attracting High Quality Traffic!
• Bounce Rate: Are Site Visitors Translating to Leads?
• Hits aren’t necessarily traffic

Recently someone complained they had only reached 23 new blogsite visitors per day. We’re not speaking of page views, but new & possibly ‘ready to buy [because they have qualified you somehow or somewhere]‘ visitors. We looked at how long this particular business had been online [6 months], how much effort they were putting into blogging [7- 8 posts per month], their blog writing techniques [good] and also at their target market [i.e. home buyers & sellers, one specific farm area.] We then looked at what was bringing visitors and found a combination of highly specific searches and Twitter. And by the way, Twitter was strictly being auto- populated by their blogsite’s feed, so folks were finding them in Twitter and coming back to their blogsite for a depth that 140 characters doesn’t provide. Sure improvements could be made, but ultimately we concluded that above all… they had to get over ‘how much’ and start thinking about the traffic metric more strategically!

Traffic growth takes time & effort. Shear traffic volume may offer some conversions, but this is the web where most visitors come because they’re already looking for something you’ve written. The media and so many online marketing coaches often confuse business people with talk of quantity, rather than quality traffic. Unless you sell advertising [at a rate per thousand page views], your business doesn’t necessarily depend on huge amounts of traffic. What makes people visit and then buy? These days most transactions relate to a buyer who identifies your content somewhere, likes it enough to visit and then decides to trust you.

Looking At Traffic Metrics Strategically

Are you looking at your traffic strategically enough to understand what’s happening and how to leverage that information for improvement in subscriptions, lead capture and sales? An average of 23 new visitors a day from highly qualified searchers & subscribers may actually be good, depending on market potential & realistic sales goals.

That’s 690 qualified unique new visitors per month versus traditional advertising methods, which are often wasted on uninterested individuals. In this day and age empowered visitors mostly visit you via a 1) specific search, 2) an interesting back link from another site, a 3) bookmark they’ve kept, a 4) direct RSS or email subscription or a 5) site they visit that has picked up and/or runs your RSS feed. All things, by the way, your blogsite will develop more and more offor you… so long as you’re blogging useful content.

Traffic Data Points We Watch Month Over Month:

• Bounce rate – what percentage looked at one page and left
• Total unique new visitors – the key metric/ do we have new user growth
• Avg unique new visitors per day – mostly to see if we are sustaining or have growth
• Return visitors – do our visitors come back/ are subscriptions working
• Avg return visitors per day – mostly to see if we are sustaining or growing returns
• Total page views – are we improving engagement with our brand
• Avg page views per day – mostly to see if we are sustaining or have growth
• Avg page views per visitor – to think about architecture & content presentation
• Referral websites – who brings traffic to us [Twitter, Facebook or other sites]?
• Most popular pages – can we expand on those popular subjects?
• Searches that bring us traffic – can we target similar phrases?

For us blogsite bounce rate was, at one time, near 80%, which meant virtually everyone that visited was leaving. In the below video Google suggests bounce is common for blogs… and they are wrong!! We looked at that carefully and I understand their assumption’s basis, but we decided to redesign to a blogsite that wasn’t completely consumed by it’s most recent posts and we successfully reduced bounce to between 7 and 9%. Simultaneously, our page views per visitor increased by a multiple of 3, which we believe is also due to a better content architecture and presentation. That engagement with our brand drives more leads! We also noticed we weren’t getting referral traffic from other sites, which was disappointing considering so many business development deals, so we began looking at auto- feeding our content to various social networks and outside blogs. While not nearly enough, we also do some commenting on other sites, etc. but we now see traffic coming from Twitter and Facebook to the tune of near 15% total traffic.

Folks, get over how much and start thinking about the traffic metric much more strategically! And remember the crucial pipeline for future qualified leads and sales is content! Good consistent blogsites are a primary business asset because they will help you accumulate key phrase search indexing, back links, RSS subscriptions, email subscriptions, bookmarks, feed connections to other sites and more and more visibility – the currency of the web!

Bounce Rate

We’ve been thinking a lot about our sites, how to better engage our visitors and how to reduce our ‘bounce rate.’

Effective November 2008 we made changes to our blog site that brought some phenomenal results, including a dramatically decreased ‘bounce rate’ AND an impressive increase in total page views. In fact, ever since those changes we’ve seen a reduction in bounce rate of approximately 60+% and a simultaneous increase in page views of over 500%. And those results have remained consistent for 4 months running!

Wikipedia says, “A bounce occurs when a web site visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages.” Bounce rate is obviously good when the percentage is very low, bad when it is high. It can be an effective measure of traffic quality OR it can be a dose of reality for how poorly you engage visitor traffic. These metrics are available with most any website analytics software and are important as you look to improve your advertorial business blog. And remember, when people search or follow back links to you they may arrive on any page. So far as Google is concerned, all content is important to their search index… not just that on your home page!

Reducing Bounce Rate

Because our bounce rates were so high we felt, inevitably, that it was translating to lost lead opportunities. After all, can ‘one and done’ visits equate to much in the way of leads? Clearly we had to improve, so we started to look at our sites, the presentation of various content and, generally, at raising the ’status quo.’ Admittedly it was basic analytic data that gave us the heads’ up, but with regards to decisions we made about change… we mostly fell back on logic & experience.

With our home page we pursued a less traditional blog ‘look & feel’, going part website and part dynamic blog.

OLD HOME PAGE

NEW HOME PAGE

And then we also wanted to have lead capture forms where ever possible, offering education & instruction for basic contact information.

Less Bounce Rate = More Page Views, Leads and New Business

One influential blogger recently referred to bounce rate and his blog saying “With blogs people come mostly only to read your latest post, they’ll read it and then they’ll leave.”

While we used to agree, based upon a more democratic presentation of content and information we’re feeling pretty much the opposite these days. We’ve got a lot to learn here and we’ll report back while we do, but as bounce rates decrease and visitors find reasons to go deeper into our content… we’re definitely driving more page views, qualified leads and new business.

We wanted different categories of content, our ‘Business Bloggers Bible’ ebook offer and other free educational tips positioned where they were much more visible.

Visistat supports our belief that if consumers can easily search and find the exact information they seek they are more apt to tune traditional media sources out; especially media sources that aren’t personally meaningful. Increasingly [because of the power of search], businesses must commit to speak to the individual. When they are discovered by searchers they must convey knowledge, trust & value- add … and a cost effective means is blogging!

In a release dated January 8th 2008 VisiStat , a leading- edge Web analytics technology provider, suggests that home buyers and sellers are ‘without a doubt’ using web- based resources to research Real Estate. Their Real Estate- based data suggests that the home buyer is increasingly leveraging these resources to the tune of overall 2007 traffic growth (compared to 2006) of 36.8% and an increase in overall repeat site visitors of 47%.

Tina Bean, Director of Sales and Marketing Visistat [a Kinetic Knowledge recommended resource] suggested, “We provide data for thousands of brokerages and agents across the country, and because of this, I have been working closely with brokers and agents for some time. It’s no surprise that the figures in this report coincide exactly with what I have been hearing from them, and that is, home buyers are using the Internet to educate themselves and find properties, often long before they engage an agent.” – Read on here

Using the word ‘hit’ synonymously with traffic can paint an exaggerated picture, leaving business people confused about the actual return on their website [or blogsite] investment. Site metrics and business metrics can be very different sets of data and unless those metrics solely reflect human visitation, they will actually confuse the value proposition for a site owner.

Consider questioning a site provider if they report ‘no. of hits’ because when ’hits’ include non- human bot visitation AND/ OR the multiple files [often dozens] downloaded for a single web-page view, the nos. won’t reflect an actual return on investment. In the latter case, each file gets counted as a hit when a page is downloaded making the number of hits more reflective of complex website pages than actual traffic. In the first scenario, bot [crawler or spider] traffic is typically a lot more than, if not the majority of, total visitor traffic.

It’s worth adding that Google Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. bot [crawler or spider] visitation is very important to a website or Blog owner. For those not familiar, the Google bot is software deployed to collect documents from the web in order to build a search-able index for their search engine. So not all bots are bad and without a visit from the Google bot one cannot be indexed or show up in a Google search result. However, there are millions of other bots that continuously crawl the web, many with ill- intent.

Kinetic Knowledge offers VisiStat, which not only offers rich business metric data  and solely based upon human traffic, but an undeniably layperson- friendly dashboard. In summary, only humans purchase products & services: websites and blogs are marketing solutions and folks should have true business metrics so they can actually evaluate a return on their investment of time, effort & money

As the cost of Pay Per Click rises often to well over $1 per click in local markets, business people must inevitably turn their attention toward organic search engine indexing. In fact why wouldn’t they when ComScore analysis shows Google’s paid click percentage for when folks are searching to be 13%, Yahoo’s 11% and MSN’s 8%?

At 87 to 92 organic clicks per 100 consumer searches, a business person can easily see where they may want to place some focus. As local organic search awareness is raised, the competition for relevant organic search engine index placement will heat up more and more. In order to establish rankings, it’s important to be proactive in developing a strategy NOW and a locally focused Blog is the cost-effective answer!

It’s certainly easy to blog consistently on local business knowledge and the opportunity to establish search engine relevance, rather than trying and catch up later, is still very available and ‘for the taking.’ For our clients, who have the lowest monthly business-class blogging cost, there is an unlimited ability to blog, to cover local professional goings- on, to transfer knowledge, to establish keyword & key phrase search engine indexing and to generate broad discoverability.

What’s more, blogging can generate valuable long tail search engine topic, key word & key phrase indexing naturally. Long tail are terms affiliated with one’s primary search target terms, that may generate less individual discovery than the primary but more impact collectively. When blogging is consistent and on- topic, search engines will favor it offering indexing longevity where pay per click won’t. Addititionally, by being a transparent blogger who shares good local information, trust can be created with target markets where advertising [particularly PPC] never will.

In all and if marketing costs are a concern, why compete for only 10- 20% of the search traffic [Google Search Clicks: PPC 13% / Organic 87%] and pay hundreds to thousands when blogging can be a more valuable and cost- effective answer to search engine marketing?