Understand Your Traffic Streams

Posted on 27. Jan, 2010 by Adam in Website Traffic

analysis If there is one thing that we would like you to take away from this blog post, it is that you cannot use generalizations when it comes to tracking and testing your marketing efforts. You really need to understand where your traffic streams are coming from and micromanage each stream, effectively, if you want to make an overall improvement in your performance. It makes little sense to try and establish averages over a number of different initiatives, just so that you can see how you are doing in overall terms.

We always seem under pressure to come up with statistics, to show that we are being productive with our time or initiatives or to prove that the money truly is “well spent.” The truth is that any analytics program worth its salt will enable you to drill down and really analyze every single visitor.

If you favor Google Analytics, you may have one of those plug-ins added to your blog to show you how you are doing through a summarized form, complete with miniature graph over the last 30 days. You will see your average “bounce rate,” and this may send you running for the hills, but after all what use are these figures by themselves?

The whole purpose of tracking and testing is to make changes. For sure, you could be the smartest marketer in creation or just plain lucky, find that your promotional and advertising methods work right out of the box and you need to do little to modify. We all know marketing a business is about trial and error and even the most educated and successful among us make mistakes and need to make changes. Be prepared to understand that you need to track each initiative before you put it in place, associate results with that particular track and you must be able to differentiate those results from any other concurrent initiative.

It is important to develop separate landing pages and associated anchor text, crucial reference points to enable you to quickly see where consummated sales originate. Remember also that a good proportion of visitors to your site will be poorly qualified and these will certainly help to skew your conversion rates.

If you are lucky enough to have a very highly trafficked site and have not taken steps to differentiate your sources, you will find it very difficult to move forward with any confidence. Whatever you may do to try and increase conversion rates in one particular area will be difficult to quantify as your average conversion rate, bounce rate or simple visitor rate will tend to absorb your efforts.

If you have not set up a trackable, definable list of goals and events and your landing pages are insufficiently identified, then it may be time for you to start afresh, redefine your objectives, come up with a plan and a means to track it and set a future date to start understanding and manipulating your traffic streams correctly.

Are all your traffic streams profitable – if not which ones are dragging you down?

Adam Toren

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tags: Advertising, analytics program, initiatives, Marketing, promotional, Traffic Streams

16 Responses to “Understand Your Traffic Streams”

Jason

27. Jan, 2010

We use a lot of A/B and multivariate testing.. this can help you determine which designs or layouts work better.

Reply to this comment
Eric

27. Jan, 2010

Test, test, and test again. You can’t test your landing pages enough. Always have two versions and be tweaking ‘em.

Reply to this comment
The Doxies

27. Jan, 2010

I agree 100%. I look at my stat counters several times a day to determine if my marketing efforts are working. I can’t understand ANYONE not having some sort of analytical tool to measure progress. A site tracker is absolutely essential to fine tuning your site.

Reply to this comment
Credit Girl

28. Jan, 2010

Google analytics is an extremely important and useful tool. Can’t even begin to stress how important it is to always test landing pages.

Reply to this comment
SLS

28. Jan, 2010

I’ve been meaning to install Google Analytics, and this post not only reminded me to do so, but motivated me to finally get around to doing it. Keep it up. Thanks.

Reply to this comment
teknoloji haberleri

29. Jan, 2010

Analyzing your web site traffic stats is the most important aspect of e-businesses. When you look at the numbers in your analytics, indicators such as bounce rate is crucially important. If you have a high traffic web site, %1 change in bounce may mean thousands to save for you. Nice post but you can also go to an in depth analysis of benefits of analytics

Reply to this comment
Consolidation School Loan

01. Feb, 2010

Tracking is indeed very important; there are several software that do that pretty well, and I agree with someone here when they say G Analytics is probably the best (and it’s free!)

Reply to this comment
flights to pakistan

01. Feb, 2010

you can check out many websites that will help you with analysis for your website, however google analytics is one of the best out there admittedly but check out some software also witch is very useful aso.

Reply to this comment
Ms. Freeman@Baby Steps of an Internet Entrepreneur

01. Feb, 2010

Oh boy! I view my Google Analytics a couple times a month, but I’m reading in the comments that some check it several times daily. Umm I’m glad I found this post. Time to go an truly understand GA and what it is saying about my site.

Reply to this comment
Laptop Briefcases

02. Feb, 2010

I have been doing internet marketing for a while now, but analyzing stats and doing testing is one of my weak areas. My problem is that the conversion rates for a lot of my sites are too low to be useful for split testing. I think in such a case I would really have to stretch out the testing phase to get better data.

Reply to this comment
gfx

06. Feb, 2010

Always have two versions and be tweaking ‘em.

Reply to this comment
Web Design Beach

08. Feb, 2010

Surely not all traffic streams are profitable… And the most profitable ones are always the relevant ones for me..

Reply to this comment
rosario

13. Feb, 2010

is probably the best G Analytics ?

Reply to this comment
tattoo kits

28. Mar, 2010

I like to use Google ad words and a quick fast way to see which key words are converting for me

Reply to this comment
Karthick

05. May, 2010

GetClicky also another analysis site. This is just like Google Analytics. Make use of it .

Reply to this comment
my online income system

12. Sep, 2010

I check my Google Stats daily. I want to know what works and what doesn’t.
Since google has added the annotations features, I am using it to its limit.
Everything I do on a day for promotion or design is added here.
This helps me identify the surges, drops and flats in traffic.

Reply to this comment

Understand Your Traffic Streams

16 Responses to “Understand Your Traffic Streams”

Leave a Reply