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Know Your Visitors
| You have a wonderful Theme-Based Content Site, full of
high-value content that overdelivers to your human readers and that ranks
highly and fairly with your Search Engine friends. And that means...
You have traffic coming into your site (from all your traffic-building efforts) and traffic going out of your site (links to your income-generating sites, merchant partners, your own store, or your own sales site). It has cost you time and money to generate your incoming traffic. Your outgoing traffic generates income for you. You can measure both expenses and income. And, as explained way back in chapter One, income minus expenses equals profits. If we stopped here, your site would be a black box. A black box is a concept used in physics. You can measure what goes into the black box, and you can measure what comes out of the black box, but you don’t know what the heck is happening inside of that black box. In other words, you don’t know why things happen. And for your long-term success, that’s critical. Why? Because if you know more about the nature of your incoming and outgoing traffic, you can maximize your returns for every dollar and minute that you spend! Yes, that is kind of important. And what do you need to know?
Unfortunately, all the traffic analysis packages out there are written by techies... For techies. They give you so much data... just because they can! But all you need to know is what you need to know! You need information, not reams of useless data. The key to traffic analysis is to simplify. Forget the 150 different ways that traffic-analyzing software slices and dices hits, visits, pages, page views, and visitors. You simply don’t need to know how many cross-eyed Corsicans visit your site on Thursday at 2 am.. So let’s prune away all the useless data, and just keep the “need to know” information First, the big picture. All traffic-reporting software packages cover the basics, average number of visits, visitors, and pages viewed per day, as well as the totals on a per-month basis. Here’s what those terms mean
the number of visits to your site the number of different people who visit your site (ex., a visitor could account for 10 visits) the number of pages viewed by all the visitors during all the visits. A single visitor might view only one page or twenty. See why the number of hits is a useless stat? But why does everyone quote hits, then? Two reasons, either they don’t understand the term, or they understand it and use hits because it sounds more impressive! In any event, hits is a useless thing to measure. By comparing your monthly big picture data, you should be able
to see steady growth in your site’s overall traffic. If not, the patient
needs a good dose of traffic-building medicine. Ongoing traffic-building
is a good idea even if traffic is building nicely, you can never have too
much!
Now that you have the big picture, it’s time to delve inside and pull out some important information
visits, visitors and page views must be reported on a day-by-day basis, in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the total. If you do a special traffic promotion on a certain day (run an ad in an e-zine), this is an easy way to gauge the response. your page view stats must be delivered on a per-page basis, with the page generating the most page views reported first. By understanding which pages are most popular, you understand better the needs of your visitors. Correlate this with your link-tracking data to make sure that your most popular pages get the click to your income generating programs. Also, use this data to get a better feel for what your market wants and, just as important, what it does not want. same as the previous section, except that this specifically tells you which pages are the most popular entry pages. A page counts as an entry page when it starts a visit. Correlate this with how people find you (referrers and keywords), and you have a wealth of insight into how your site is being discovered, and what people want. Use these conclusions to give you ideas for other related, profitable areas for content development. these are the pages from which people leave your site. Some people look upon high numbers for a given page as bad. But you have to correlate this with other data. If a high entry page is also a high exit page, that’s not really a surprise. If a high exit page is also generating tons of links out to your income generating programs for you, that’s not so bad either, is it? this tells you where your traffic is coming from, Search Engines, other Web sites from link exchanges, etc. Extremely useful info! which keywords are people entering into engines to find you? That’s what this super-valuable data tells you! Traffic analysis is the base. It tells you what you need to know about quantities of visits, visitors, and page views. It shows you where they come from (if via the Web) and what words they used to find you at the Search Engines. But you need more. Now that you understand traffic flow, you need to be able to see exactly what’s working in the two bottom-line areas that matter most
Off site links do not appear on your Web site. People will not actually click upon these links while they are on your site. Rather, your potential visitors see these links off of your site; in e-zine ads, or offline print ads, in flyers that you distribute at trade or hobby conventions, or in your sig file (at the end of your e-mail). And they’ll use these links to come into your site. Since you spend time and/or money on these traffic-building activities,
you need a way to measure this, to track what off-site promotions are working,
and which are not. Once you know which of your expense-generating activities
work and which ones don’t you know where to spend your promotional time
and money! And where to stop! You build upon your successes and fix your
weaknesses.
On site links appear on your site, and send visitors out of that page. These links all go to income-generating sites, merchant-partners via affiliate programs, your own online store, or your own sales site for products that you have developed. In other words, on site links generate income. Let’s talk about Click In Analysis first. Click In's occur when people click on an off site link and come into your Theme-Based Content Site. Click In's cost you time and/or money. So analyze what works (do more of it) and what fails (drop or improve it). In order to do Click In Analysis, you create special tracking links. You create these links specifically to track the success of your off site promotional campaigns. You place a different link in each of your promotional campaigns, so that it’s easy to track. When the user clicks on that link, he first goes to a computer program that records the click, and where it came from. Then the program sends the visitor to the page in your site that you had specified. Click In Analysis yields the following
Here are some of the uses and advantages of Click In Analysis
Some links have no Referring URL, so it’s impossible to know where they came from through regular traffic analysis. We need to know this data. For example ads set a different tracking URL for each ad that you write. That way you can measure which ad generates a better response. Here’s how Run Ad #1 in E-zine #1 and Ad #2 in E-zine #2, then switch a month later.
Which ad got more responses overall? Stick with what’s profitable. Drop
the rest. E-zine advertising becomes very cost-effective when you can drop
the dogs and increase your budget for the winners.
Even if your promotion is Web-based, it’s more convenient to run tracking links than to review the Traffic Stats Referrer information (which do tell you which sites links originate from). So use your special tracking links to track the performance of banners, Pay-Per-Click Search Engines, even posts to forums and discussion groups.
Let’s say that you have a terrific page about a special kind of flower. That page has several in-context text links... links to books, growers, ClubMom, etc, etc. You take an e-zine ad. Where should the ultimate destination be? To your Keyword-Focused Content Page! Since you have worked so many in-context text links into your overdelivering copy, you have a whole bunch of chances that a sale occurs on at least one of your merchant-partners’ sites. On the other hand, suppose you write a wonderful article about this special flower as content for a prominent e-zine published by a third party. Your payment is that you can include your URLs. Where should these links point? Work those special tracker links into the content of the article, and point them straight to your merchant partners. One link for each merchant. Since anyone who clicks passes through the tracking script first, you’ll see exactly how many people clicked on each link! No point in directing them to the same info on your site, right? Even a download URL can be the destination. Offering a free e-book on that special kind of flower? Take an ad in an e-zine, offering the link straight to the download. Naturally, the e-book will have links to your various merchant partners, and to your Theme-Based Content Site. Every one of those in-book links should be special tracking links, too! same idea. If you have an online store that needs traffic, and if the situation dictates that you’re better off by sending visitors directly to your store (after passing through the tracking script, of course), then do that. Same goes if you have a site that sells single products or your services. If an ad costs you $100, but you see that it generated 500 visitors, and if you know that 2% of your visitors buy, it’s easy to figure out whether your ad is profitable! Now let’s cover Click Through Analysis Click throughs occur when people click on a link on your Theme-Based Content Site and leave it (they don’t actually leave since you pop open a new window for them!). Click throughs earn you income. Why? It all depends where those click throughs are going
a percentage of those turn into sales or leads or whatever action your merchant partner pays for a percentage will buy, yielding you a profit that sells an e-book or software that you developed, or even your services. In order to do Click Through Analysis, you convert your regular outgoing links into special tracking links. When your visitor clicks on such a link, she first goes to a computer program that records the click, and where it came from. Then the program sends the visitor to the income-building site that you had specified. Click Through Analysis yields the following
Bottom Line? With Click Through Analysis, you have an exact success rate of every single onsite link. And that measures income, your money. You’ll know exactly what people are clicking upon and what they are not. From there it’s just a question of building upon your successes and fixing your weaknesses which maximizes your income. Click Through Analysis is as critical for your Theme-Based Content Site as Click In Analysis. Again, existing services are very expensive. And none give the degree of information that I have outlined for the perfect Click Through Analysis. POWER-USER TIP:
This technique works for e-zine ads, opt-in mailings, article submissions that direct readers to your Theme-Based Content Site. And it can be very helpful to test the cost-effectiveness of the Pay-Per-Click Search Engines As I said, though, this requires a fair degree of savviness and some work. Definitely for power users only. And, if it’s more appropriate to send readers directly to your merchants instead of a page on your site, then this extra stop would not be a good idea. Still, something to keep in mind. Bottom line for chapter 10? Know your visitors, they are the heart of your business, by following traffic stats. And tracking links in and out is the key to maximizing income while getting the most return from all your traffic-building expenses. |
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