Understand Your Traffic Streams
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
