Find ways to monetize traffic that doesn’t come from search engines, and get more traffic like it.
Aside from search engine traffic, websites can get a significant amount of traffic from other online references. For instance, if you have a site that gets links from CNN or the Wall Street Journal, you may see an overwhelming amount of traffic in a short amount of time. On a smaller scale, there may be sites in your industry that send you high quality traffic which converts at a better rate than paid or natural search engine traffic. Furthermore, the proper measurement of search engine traffic can help you detect bad traffic, which comes in the form of undesired references or fraudulent clicks.
One of the best free tools for measuring site traffic is Google Analytics. If you have it installed on every page of your site, you can log in and go to Traffic Sources>Referring Sites to see the top sites that send you traffic. You can also click on specific sites in the list to see how much traffic comes to your site, and you can even get a graph of what days the traffic load is the heaviest.
The average amount of time that a visitor spends on your site, and the average number of pages visited, can give you a good impression of your site’s popularity among different demographics. For instance, if visitors from Facebook are spending a bit of time looking around, but traffic from MySpace doesn’t stay as long, you may want to make adjustments to content ads running on one network or the other. Generally speaking, the amount of time spent on a site indicates the value of a site to a reader, so traffic sources that last longer and visit more pages are better targets for your site’s value proposition.
One of the best things about segmenting your online traffic sources is that you can see how visitors from a particular site respond to your content. For instance, if the Bounce Rate (the ratio of people who visit one page and leave) is high, you may either consider improving the destination page, or finding a better source of visitors. If the bounce rate is unnaturally high, and the time spend on the site is very low (like a few seconds) then you may be the victim of click fraud.
Another positive aspect of traffic segmentation happens when you have goal, ecommerce, or conversion tracking installed. With goal tracking, you can understand the amount of traffic that takes a specific step like filling out a form or making a purchase. With ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics, you can put a real dollar value on the traffic from certain sites. If you’re paying a site for ad space, you may only need a calculator to see your ROI for that traffic. Similarly, if you see that the traffic isn’t driving sales, you can quickly re-allocate your dollars to better performing sites.
Knowing “who is visiting your site” can be especially useful when search engine traffic is taken out of the equation. In fact, Google counsels people to design their sites as if search engines didn’t exist, and Google’s PageRank algorithm is based around how sites link to each other, presumably as references for further information. Developing a reputation among referring sites can nicely feed back into SEO initiatives, since a strong site presence lends itself to more links, and more links in turn can lead to better search engine positions. Measuring referral traffic helps you understand what others think of your site, and communicating with other site owners may help you uncover business opportunities or potential partnerships with mutual growth potential. Finally, a clearer understanding about visitors who aren’t driven by search engines will give you a better ability to go after traffic from sites that are similar to the ones that drive conversions, and this can create a revenue stream with a lower cost and higher ROI than many paid search engine strategies.
