If you have a website or blog, you will also have a way of tracking your Online Traffic Statistics. If you don’t, you are missing out on a great opportunity to hone your internet marketing education and skills.
One of the keys of successful marketing is knowing who your customers are, where they come from, and how they found you. Without this information, marketing techniques are a shot in the dark – how can you tell if what you are doing is truly effective?
Reviewing Your Traffic Statistics
What is most important to know about your visitors? How about where they are coming from? There should be an area on your stats tracking page that shows how many visitors are doing an internet search to find your content, how many are being referred from other sites, and how many are typing your URL directly into the browser.
These numbers are vital for the successful internet marketer. For one thing, if you have a PPC campaign in place, you need to know if this is worth spending your marketing budget on. If there are fewer visitors to your site from search engine results for your paid keywords, then this may not be the best use of your marketing dollars. Then again, it might mean your keywords are not effective. Either way, some changes need to be made.
On the other hand, if most of your visitors are reaching your site through referral links, then that indicates you should spend more time developing them. Getting lots of clicks from a Tweet? Then plan on spending some time each day on Twitter. Seeing quite a few referrals from a reciprocal link? Consider finding more similar websites you can partner with.
Then again, what if most people reach your site directly? This might indicate that you are doing a great job of direct marketing via whatever means you use, i.e. face-to-face interaction, promotional materials, email marketing, etc.
Capitalising On This Information
There are several ways you can take your Online Traffic Statistics and make them work for you. Direct traffic is the best. It is not dependent on the whims of Google and its page ranking system, it is not directly related to popularity on social media, and it means that your incoming traffic is already qualified.
When much of your traffic is coming from referral links, you could look at this a couple different ways. Number one is that you could do a better job of marketing your site – why are they coming from somewhere else rather than accessing your pages directly?
Number two is that you should continue to build relationships with the owners of popular sites. Join some networking groups, partner with a blogger who has a good following, or advertise on other sites. Encourage referrals from sources by offering an incentive.
Make sure you use direct traffic to its full advantage. Once they’ve accessed your home page, don’t let them get away. Persuade them to opt in to your mailing list or consider adding a pop-up before they leave the site. These visitors are “warm” leads who should not need much encouragement to make a purchase or perform some other call to action.
Paying attention to your Online Traffic Statistics helps you to stop spending your marketing budget on techniques that aren’t working and capitalise on those that are. This makes good business sense, and saves you both time and money.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.AussieSEO.com 2010
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