CJU Course: Doing More With The Traffic You Already Have
Many publishers spend the majority of their time and resources trying to increase the volume of traffic they receive. In this session, the focus was on how to get more performance out of the traffic you already have. The ValueClick Brands division shared the tips and tricks developed during its ten year history; highlighting what, why, and how each optimization can have impact. The speaker was:
- Steve Neufer, General Manager, ValueClick Brands
This was pretty informative. I really liked the direct way Steve presented the information, and it made me realize just how important usability testing is to everyone! Steve was an engaging speaker, funny, and used great analogies to make his points.
Bullet Point Review!
Increasing traffic to an under-performing website is like adding more water to a leaky bucket.- What we say is we want more traffic, but what we mean is we want to earn more.
- Traffic is a tool, not a goal.
- Understanding your traffic.
- A little bit of information allows you to create a hypothesis and do more.
- What percentage of your current traffic is “productive”?
- Where is your productive traffic coming from?
- Resources: Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, session level conversion reporting.
- This is easy, doesn’t necessarily cost a lot of money or take a lot of expertise.
- Understanding your users
- If you’re not observing actual user behavior you are missing the boat. Usability testing is a must!
- Myths: expensive, complicated, requires expertise.
- Resources: UsabilityTest.com, Family/Friends
- Testing Scenario: go to Google, perform search for “Kohls coupons” and try to find a coupon that you can use the save money on your online order.
- Testing Results: tested 20 users, most visited 8 sites, 2 successfully found a coupon, most common initial response was confusion, most common descriptor used was spam (pretty much means they’re weary).
- Designing for Productive Users
- Them not us: you are not your users, your users are asymmetrically savvy, your users are asymmetrically patient, trust is an issue.
- Sophistication level may be very low but apprehension level is high, so we have to talk to them with sophistication to gain trust.
- Unfamiliar terms: SKU, S&H, merchant, related searches, promo, next, sponsored, post.
- Familiar alternatives: item, shipping, store, popular searches, promotion, next page, advertisement, news.
- Be concise: what is the user supposed to look at here?
- Be safe: why do you need my info before you answer my question? Give first, ask later.
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 35: Interviewing Jay Berkowitz
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A couple of hyper-caffeinated affiliate marketers (Mike Buechele) and (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
We’re continuing our series of interviews with some speakers at Affiliate Summit East 2010, coming up in just a month in New York City. This time, we talk to Jay Berkowitz about his origins in affiliate marketing & his presentation “Turn Website & Social Media Traffic Into Gold”. Jay’s actually going to be giving away a SOLID GOLD BAR as an incentive to go, so listen up for how to enter! In in this episode we discuss:
- Jay’s background in traditional marketing with Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.
- How Jay’s Ten Golden Rules presentations got him into consulting.
- Sign up to win the 10g GOLD bar at Facebook.com/TenGoldenRules.
- The head & head session battle against the fount of information that is Wil Reynolds.
- Jay actually shares some of the tips from his presentation with us with talks of Jeff Walker and Don Crowther.
Want to catch up with us & ask questions for the next show? Find us on Twitter: @AMF_Podcast, @MikeBuechele & @TrishaLyn. Like us on Facebook! You can also ask Trisha questions through FormSpring.me. Or leave us a comment!
Online Marketing Glossary: Arbitrage
Arbitrage:
- A practice through which Web publishers – second-tier search engines, directories and vertical search engines – engage in the buying and reselling of Web traffic.
From my understandings, this is not as frequent of a practice as it once was in the earlier days of internet marketing. But does still happen.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Revenue-Sharing Program
Revenue-Sharing Program:
- A program that allows merchants and website owners to increase sales. The host site links to the merchant with a banner, button or text link, for a fee. The merchant pays the website owner for increased traffic, sales and leads from the host site.
This seems like the less guaranteed way to go about performance marketing. I don’t have a lot of experience with this either, so someone out there that does… school us in what the benefit of this would be over pay per impression (PPI) models?
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
- Tactics that seek to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results. SEM methods include SEO, paid placement and paid inclusion. It includes the practice of buying paid search listings with the goal of obtaining netter free search listings.
Traffic to your website is the name of the game. SEM is primarily used to drive traffic; from there it’s the marketing and web designer’s job to convert that traffic. While there are many firms that focus on just SEM, many website companies also employ in-house teams to work on SEM. Often times, an in-house employee will be the best at SEM because not only do they know the useful tactics, but they know the product or service background enough to delicately utilize the right tactics effectively.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Social Media Pays Off
Whoever said that hanging around social media platforms never helped anyone is flat out lying. I’d like to think of myself as ahead of the curve in most situations. I try to be an early adopter whenever I can now. So I’ve been eager to jump onto the bandwagon with new social platforms like Social Thing and Britekite, most recently. I’m making a point to be a presence in the social media space for two reasons:
- Fun.
- Traffic.
I am geekier than I care to admit most times, and I’ve always been into instant digital communication like email and instant messenger. Which is why I acclimated to Twitter so easily. Making the jump from LiveJournal to MySpace, then later to Facebook was a piece of cake. So I have a lot of fun hanging around talking to people, exchanging ideas, or just exchanging rather meaningless comments. I’m just an online oriented person. Not that I can’t carry on a phone call or face-to-face conversation, I just enjoy the technical aspects of writing. Blame it on the geek in me.
But as I mentioned, the other more beneficial reason for hanging about on these networks has been traffic to my blog here. I’ve always known that my efforts and time spent on Digg and Stumble Upon would eventually pay off. At the same time, I was never worried about whether they would or not since it was the fun that kept me there. Today I decided to check my Analytics account, something I don’t do nearly as often as I should. I found a wonderful sight.
That’s right… my top 5 traffic sources include three social networks. This makes me totally happy that my addiction to these things is paying off. So listen to all of us social media nerds and register your brand names and participate. It’s just one of the many ways that you can make fun your job 🙂
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