Turning 5k into 1, Understanding how your website stats reflect on conversion
Buying Websites, For work, Website traffic May 21st, 2008
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
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