Tag Archives | Traffic Generation

The Illusion of “Direct” Traffic

Written by | Posted in Conversion, Traffic

For any blogger that has taken a look at their traffic stats in their Google Analytics account, they will be familiar with the term ‘Direct Traffic’ which Google uses as a catch-all category of traffic that they simply cannot accurately measure the source of.

Sometimes Google Analytics cannot measure traffic sources for reasons like people typing the web address directly into their web browser’s address bar, or where they’re directed to a page from an offline source such as a link in a PDF document.

This simply isn’t good enough for you as you desire an understanding of your traffic sources, so you can figure out what sort of reader engagement you have, which traffic strategies to apply more focus to and which ones to dump like yesterday’s trash.

This is extremely important since this understanding determines the allocation of your time, focus and resources. This helps you to use your most precious resource – time – wisely and effectively.

You should always be looking to get better results (more output) from less work (less input). This is the essence of business leverage – it’s all about setting up smart traffic systems that reward you again and again for a one-time effort.

My Findings

OK, now I’ve discussed the mindset elements of successful traffic generation, let’s get to business.

Before I did any custom link tracking using the Google URL Builder, my traffic was divided into the 3 main default traffic sources which Google Analytics divides the traffic into to help website owners understand their traffic sources. They are:

  • Search Traffic
  • Referral Traffic
  • Direct Traffic

You can build customised links which look like this:

http://www.theprofitshare.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=IM%2BTools

As you can see, the link contains tracking properties which assign the click within a source, medium and campaign within your Google Analytics account.

Let’s quickly have a look at the ‘Before’ and ‘After’ results of my findings.
[Click any of the images to quickly expand them.]

Before v After

After setting up an additional campaign source which I called ‘social’, you can see that a lot of my ‘Direct Traffic’ and ‘Referral Traffic’ moved across into ‘Campaigns’ traffic. You will also notice that ‘Search Traffic’ increased over the period too which has little relevance to the findings I’m presenting in this article.

I predicted the shift of ‘Referral Traffic’ into the ‘Campaigns’ traffic segment before I even started the experiment since it was obvious that any Twitter traffic that previously fell into the ‘Referral Traffic’ category would now fall into the newly created ‘Campaigns’ category.

However, what I didn’t expect was for some of the traffic that was being recorded as ‘Direct Traffic’ to also move into the ‘Campaigns’ category. Since Twitter was the only place where I was using customised link tracking, I knew that the decrease in ‘Direct Traffic’ was due to Twitter traffic that was previously being recorded as ‘Direct Traffic’.

Of course, I still do not know why Twitter traffic was previously being recorded under direct traffic, however I suspect that the use of either custom URL’s such as ThePS.co (my own) or other widely used URL shorteners such as bit.ly or budurl.com are not tracked. Hits in your Analytics account that arrive from such URLs are usually from the site itself where your links are being published.

Allow me to show you this change another way. Check out the screen captures below showing ‘Direct Traffic’ from 1st July to 31 August, 2011.

The graphic includes a catastrophic loss of traffic due to a computer hard drive crash taking my laptop out of action for 6 days. This meant I could not drive traffic from Tweet Adder, which is my secret sauce for Twitter traffic. However, from the graphic below it is clearly visible that the ‘Direct Traffic’ went through the floor straight after I implemented custom URLs with link tracking using Google’s Link Builder tool.

Direct Traffic

Compare this with ‘Campaigns Traffic’ at the same time in the graphic below. Sure, some of the traffic below is due to the reallocation of ‘Referral Traffic’ and the remainder will be the ‘Direct Traffic’ that I’ve been demonstrating throughout this article.

Traffic from Twitter

OK, so what does this mean?

So I’ve taken you through my findings and demonstrated that what is meant to be ‘Direct Traffic’ is not always just ‘Direct’ traffic. It is simply a collection of visitors that arrive at your site which, for whatever reason, Google Analytics cannot track, so it puts it into the ‘Direct Traffic’ category.

This always made sense to me because it seemed to me that 2,000 – 3,000 people wasn’t coming to my site each month by typing “theprofitshare.com” into their web browser address bars. These kind of searches simply do not fit in with browser behaviour on the web. Whilst some people do this since they know Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox auto-completes based upon their browsing history, I really do not expect over a third of my traffic to be doing this. It’s a nice thought for a blogger’s ego, but it’s simply not the truth.

One thing to bear in mind is that when you publish on Twitter, that content is most likely syndicated in other areas around the web which use Twitter feeds gaining you additional exposure where visitors can click but Google Analytics cannot track. This can especially be the case if you use something like Yahoo! Pipes to create a customised RSS mash-up feed and then an RSS submission tool/service to submit your feeds to. Whilst Analytics will capture most of the tweets from Twitter.com, they cannot capture all the syndicated tweets on other platforms.

Action Points

I hope you’ll create meaningful segments of traffic to help you understand your blog’s readership better. If you can set up custom segments using Google’s URL Builder in conjunction with Google Analytics’ Goal Conversions feature, then you’ll begin to build an accurate picture of what your most highly qualified traffic sources are. Of course this means better conversions from less traffic which has got to be a great thing.

What are your findings? Let us know in the comments below!

And don’t forget to Tweet, Like and +1 !

To Your Online Success,
Wayne Lambert Signature
The Profit Share

The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)

How to Write Traffic Pulling Headlines

Written by | Posted in Blogging, Conversion, Traffic

As a blogger, you’ll encounter hundreds of tactics and over-riding strategies to get traffic to your website.

One sure-fire method for getting traffic to your blog is to simply create content. And not just any old content neither. The content needs to be compelling content that solves a real high demand problem that people within your market are actively searching for.

Every time you publish a new post on your blog, you’re creating another indexed page in the search engines. Of course, I’m assuming you set your post to “index” in your SEO settings.

Essentially, when you create new indexable posts and pages, you’re creating more web real estate that can be found by search engines and blog directories. Increasing your web real estate means that there are more entry points (front doors) to your blog which of course means there are more visitors with a different set of problems entering your blog.

Furthermore, you’re alerting directories with fresh content and letting Google know that your domain is publishing fresh content regularly which in turn, will prompt Google to crawl your site more frequently.

Staying Ahead of Your Competition

To increase your visitors and decrease your Alexa rank, your objective to release fresh content faster than your competitors with a similar Alexa rank. Of course, the quality and demand of the content is more important than the quantity of posts that you create.

Tactic #1: Digging for Traffic Pulling Headlines

This method involves doing some quickfire research using Digg.com

  1. Head on over to Digg.com
  2. Enter some broad search terms into the search bar
  3. Filter the results by ‘Most Dugg’
  4. Identify a possible adaptation you can make to a headline in the list.
  5. You may even wish to browse the article to give you an insight into why the article was dugg so many times.

This type of article is likely to be shared amongst readers’ social networks if it is already receiving lots of Digg action.

Headlines from Digg

Tactic #2: Searching Top Magazine Publications for Attention Grabbers

Consult magazines that are world renowned for grabbing the attention of their readers. Ask any top copywriter if they read and take swipes from magazines such as Cosmopolitan.

The article illustrated below is a perfect example of an attention grabbing headline that fills the reader with curiosity, and potentially fear if the headline strikes a chord with the reader’s personal experience.

The reader immediately wants to know what the problem might be, what the tell-tale signs are, and possibly even how to remedy the situation.

Cosmo Article

Tactic #3: Split Testing Possible Headlines using Twitter

Once you have published a post, you may wish to test variations of the post titles to increase your clickthrough rate on your blog. Remember that your post titles show up on excerpts, sidebars, RSS feeds and related posts links. You can increase the number of pageviews per visit by implementing this type of strategy.

This is one of those tasks that I really know I should do more of myself because I know I can get more results from my existing content by doing so.

  1. Simply create two versions of a headline that you want to test.
  2. Ensure that you create unique tracking links for each of the headlines using a URL shortener such as bit.ly.
  3. Send out two tweets at approximately the same time and see which one gets the highest clickthrough rate.
  4. Change your article heading when you have a clear winner.

So… there you have it! A few simple ways to write traffic pulling headlines which will leave you enjoying increased levels of traffic and blog stickiness.

To Your Online Success,
Wayne Lambert Signature
The Profit Share

The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)

How To Get More Fans On Facebook – Part Seven

Written by | Posted in Social Media

In my final part of this guide on how to get more fans on Facebook, we look at why changing your identity on Facebook can help you to get more fans.

Method Seven – Change Your Identity

Before you ask, no, I don’t mean change your real identity. Nor do I mean create fake accounts on Facebook. I don’t like that way of doing things.

This method is a simple one that is easy-to-do, free and proven to work. It’s proven, not just by me, but because it is almost identical to a strategy that virtually every blogger to ever use the internet has utilised: Commenting.

To be specific, I’m talking about commenting on other fan pages. But there’s a key thing you need to do first, so that every comment you make leads back to your fan page and creates another potential stream (or at least trickle) of new traffic.

On your fan page, there is a series of options in the top right of the page that only you can see. I’ve taken a screenshot from one of my pages (right) to illustrate it.

As you can see, the top option (beneath the list of admins) allows you to change your identity and to use Facebook not as yourself, but as the page itself.

This means you can now go to pages related to your market or your readers’ interests and comment on them. Leave comments that are interesting and that contribute to the other person’s page. Perhaps start a conversation with people on those other pages. For example, for my page about the Channel 4 series ‘Campus’, I could go and find pages about British Comedy, or Green Wing, or Fawlty Towers or any other TV shows. I could also comment on the fan pages for the cast members, or any pages that were set up for the characters.

All of these comments open up another avenue, down which new visitors can come and like your page. Simple but effective, especially if you comment on photos and posts from a page that is still active (rather than one that has very little activity on it). As you may have noticed, it works in the same way as blog commenting.

Incidentally, while I think of it, there is one blindingly obvious way of getting more fans to your page that I haven’t mentioned yet, partly because I assumed everyone would do it automatically:

You can, of course, invite your friends to like the page via the ‘Suggest to friends’ link at the bottom of that admin panel in the top right of the fan page. This is another simple way of getting a few fans to get you on your way to the first 25 fans when you get started with a new page.

So, there you have it – How To Get More Fans On Facebook!

I realised when I started writing this that I could easily turn this into an e-book and give it away that way, but I decided to share it here as I think this way it will benefit more people (and it won’t do my traffic any harm either!).

If you’ve got something from this article or this series, simply let me know what it was in the comments section below. Similarly, if you’d like more posts like this one, comment below telling me what you’d like me to cover.

This short article is actually an extract from my full article on how to get more fans on Facebook. In the full version, you’ll discover 7 ways to increase facebook fans that you can start applying right now to your Facebook pages.

To get access for free (no opt-in or anything), simply click how to get more fans on Facebook and you’ll be taken straight to the full version. Take action now and start building your Facebook business now.