That Giant prize bunny gets smaller and smaller

Understanding the meaning of your website metrics is not always easy. I am a marketing and site traffic consultant. Last week, a very excited client asked my opinion of a website he was buying purely for its traffic. O.K., I kinda cringed when he told me and crossed my fingers hoping the numbers were as good as he believed them to be. Unfortunately, buying sites as a traffic source for another site does not always give the buyers their expected end results (tons of free, non ppc, traffic that they can convert as well as the ppc traffic they now receive).

So he goes on to tell me about the site. He loves the design, and has surfed the site himself for fun on several occasions. The content and subject is somewhat related to his field of business but the sites business model is based on advertising revenue and not product sales. He was not looking to change the business model even though the owner told him it was not doing well. He was looking to add that sites traffic to his current ppc traffic to boost his primary site sales. The seller showed him the logs and the site was getting 5k+ visits daily, thats 5 times what he gets from his ppc campaigns.

On his product site he averaged about 1k visits daily from ppc that convert at a fair rate of 11%. He was very excited at the opportunity of adding a good amount of that sites traffic to his own to grow his site and become less dependent on ppc.

He figured if he could get just a few % of those 5k to convert everything would be very rosey. In the excitement over free traffic, he missed some key issues.

Getting them to the “product” site from the “traffic” site in order to even try to convert them and the fact that the owner already told him the ad revenue was minimal (meaning those surfers aren’t to quick to check out the sites ads). Personally, I don’t think those issues even crossed his mind, he was just seeing this purely as traffic that he could somehow direct over to the shop.

OK, lets examine this

5k visitors? lets check em out. I pull up his logs and I run through it with him

The majority of those site visitors 67% are google referrals, most people would think thats great, but its not always as good as it sounds. Looking further into the google referrals I see that 2/3 are actually google image. So now, the REAL referrals are 1/3 of 67% of 5k

Or, 3350 are google image and 1105 are keyword search. The site is not completely related to his product, but it does fall into the same general arena. To put this in perspective, he is selling oranges, the site is about funny looking lemons. So they are both sites about citrus fruit, though different and his is a store while the site for sale is entertainment.

I explain the difference between google image search and google search, I was surprised he really never looked into it. Basically, he was only looking at the keyword counts without looking to see what kind of a search it was. Google image only loads the image into a remote frame, the visitors never really see your site unless they click on the url to see it while google search links to your page directly.

OK, he isn’t as happy now, he just lost 3k daily from his figures. But my news for him just gets worse here. Looking at the organic search words I see that none even come close to being related to buying or shopping for “fruit”, they just wanted to be entertained by cool images or stories of “fruit”. These people were obviously fans of “fruit” but how would that convert into selling them?

So now, knowing what the numbers mean a bit better, he says, ” It’s still 1k free customers and if 1% convert that would be OK”.

Not really, the site in question is a blog, not a store, so 1% conversion may be unlikely. Think about it…

You use ppc ads to get traffic, the ads say “buy fruit”, shop for fruit”, “even “cheap fruit”. When a customer clicks the link they are in fact, shopping and looking to buy. So every person coming to the site is looking to buy something. Out of every 100 people you sell 11 of them.

The site in question has a traffic stream of people who ARE NOT looking to buy anything and they are on a site not selling anything. He has to get them to his product site first with links, ads and reviews. The site visitors need to do more than the visitors he is used to on his site, they need to first click the ad, then go to his site and get sold. That means he needs another % in there for ad click trough.

So we get 1% (if lucky) will click his ads, then go to his site, since these people were not originally looking to buy, the conversion on them would be much lower, lets say 4%. So how many people are we talking about now? Well, less than 1 per day!

My advice to him was, add an extra few bucks to your ppc account and not have to worry about running another site!

After that rundown, I started telling him what the costs involved in updating and maintaining a blog were… he walked away in mid sentence.