Get Over How Much: Get Into Attracting High Quality 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!
Contributed by Chris Frereckschris@kineticknowledge.com
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