Is All Web Traffic, Good Traffic?
By Chris Le Roy
I am sure I have listened to just about every Internet Marketing Expert alive
on this planet talk about web traffic. Some will tell you, that you need to get
as much web traffic as possible, others will tell you that you only need a
little bit of traffic to make money on the web. Each of these gurus talk about
how they achieved so many sales from 10,000 visitors, or we will guarantee you
will make at least 1 sale from every 1,000 visitors you have at your website
even if it's a ugly website.
Well, I don't want to give you any false hopes on how many sales you will make,
in fact, I want to share with you, what can really go wrong on the web if you
are not seriously careful in getting the right web traffic. I had been working
with a couple of different mentors for our business from both the traditional
Bricks and Mortar perspective and an Internet perspective. I wanted to test out
a new sales page I had written to see if we could sell any of our Microsoft
Office Specialist Excel Training kits online. Everybody who has seen our
training programs have always commented on how easy they are to understand and
how much more professional they are to others on the market.
With the help of our internet mentor, we built a sales page, and then used
Google's Adwords to drive traffic to our website. The advert we had put together
on Google was nothing short of amazing; our Click Through Rate or CTR was as
high as 12.5% which is absolutely out there. I had achieved something I never
thought I would. After 24 hours we had 1,200 visitors with about 120 people
registered for our free chapter extract, after 6 days I had had over 10,000
unique visitors to our website with approximately 900 people having given us
their email addresses to get their free chapter.
One Catch - WE HAD ZERO SALES
What I had effectively done was to drive traffic from Google to our site to get
their free chapter but the traffic that was driven to our site had absolutely no
interest in buying anything from us, they only wanted what we going to give them
for free. Now to give you an idea of what that traffic cost, to get those 10,000
unique visitors to my site had cost me just over $3,500 US dollars. I should
make a note at this point, I had implemented all the programs, internet
marketers recommend like using AutoResponders, doing follow-ups on the people
who had registered etc.
Driving traffic to a site is easy. Just give something away Free that people
want and you will get people to your site. But, just like in our bricks and
mortar building, we only want to give the free things away, if people truly want
to purchase our wares, or what is the point in being in business.
Prior to driving this traffic to our site I had developed the website to track
where people were clicking off, I did a follow-up survey 7 days after they
visited my site and I asked them a range of questions such as were they
interested in buying my product and it was at this point I realised that the
traffic I had purchased from Google via the Adword campaign was absolutely the
wrong traffic for my website. I started to get comments from people demanding
that I give them our training material for free, that they weren't going to pay
for it cause they had no money and I was this big company who should be giving
it for free. I must have got about 50 responses along these lines and very
quickly I realised, the traffic I had driven to my site was the wrong traffic.
More than that, I can honestly say, getting responses like these really do get
depressing especially when I am only a small Australian business with just nine
people working for me.
Anyway, where I made my biggest mistake was that the Adwords campaign I had used
was simply the wrong advert to be catching the customers I wanted. In the
advertisement I had stated that who ever clicked on this link would get a Free
Chapter Extract of our Excel program. It turns out, the type of customer I had
attracted was one that only wanted everything for Free.
One of the lessons I learnt in using Google, Overture and other pay-per-click
search engines is that it is not the volume of traffic but the quality. In our
adwords campaign, I wasn't using generic keywords, I was in fact using very
targeted keywords but still attracting the wrong type of customers. I needed to
qualify my customers through the advert a lot more than what I had done.
Before you even think about building an Internet business you really do need to
have a very clear understanding of who your customer is, what it will take your
customer to buy, what attracts your customer, where your customers can be found
and how you can check to make sure that the customers you are attracting to your
website is valid for your business. The other issue to make a special note of,
is make sure you build your website that can test where people are leaving your
site, how far they are reading to and what their objections are in buying. If
you put these strategies into place, you will very quickly see whether your
website is working for you, but even more so, you will have the information to
know whether any changes you make are in fact working. Essentially you want to
take the guess work out of your website.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you would like to learn more about online web marketing then check out one of
our business
course that we have available. We also provide consulting for online
marketing, designing the buying process and search engine optimisation.
