Earlier this week I delivered a business emarketing workshop for my local university called “Would your business cope if Google stopped sending you traffic?” (You can view the slides here).
My thinking for the presentation came from finding dramatic differences in referred traffic sources amongst some of the tourism and travel sites I have analysed - with some sites displaying a worrying over-dependency on a single source (typically Google).
Essentially they have all their online marketing eggs in one basket.
And so I thought I would explore the concept a little further. How, for example, do you even know if you are at the mercy of a few major sources of traffic? What does “normal” look like? Why even bother worrying about where your visitors originate from?
Well the how is simple.
Any decent web analytics tool will give you a plethora of information about your traffic sources (or referrers as it may also be described). As always, absolute numbers are less relevant than ratios and trends over time.
Even without drilling down into any further detail, the traffic source overview shown in this graph is enough to set alarm bells ringing - loudly.
The site is incredibly dependent on search. Its lack of direct traffic suggests minimal emarketing efforts in the form of email marketing and so on. There also seems to be very little repeat traffic to the site via bookmarks, direct url typing etc (something confirmed by the new/returning visitor ratio). The proportion of third party referring sites is also low and closer investigation shows that just one or two sites drive the bulk of this traffic.
Why does this set my alarm bells ringing?
Isn’t it good to get lots of traffic from search engines? Absolutely - of course it is. The above site doesn’t need less traffic from search, it needs more traffic from other sources to reduce its complete dependence on something it cannot control.
There’s a great example at the Hitwise blog about the massive impact a major business has experienced as a result of being blacklisted by Google. Robin shows how gocompare.com’s traffic from search fell by almost 90% in a two week period, after they were pushed down the ratings from number 1 to page 7 for “irregular inbound links.” Unsurprisingly, their competition were the happy beneficiaries, with one seeing its search traffic triple in the same period.
If the tourism site in the above graph were to experience something like that, they would have no traffic and no way of emergency marketing to a loyal bunch of repeat visitors. Even if they didn’t experience something as dramatic as blacklisting, they remain very vulnerable to changes in the search engine algorithm, impact from competitors and search engine developments such as blended/universal search.
How do you know what normal should look like?
There is no right answer of course, it depends on the site’s purposes and functions and we are talking very general proportions, but this works as a guide for me: in the UK, search drives about 40% of traffic to the travel sector as a whole, in the US its around 35% (based on Hitwise data).
Obviously an individual sites are going to see a great deal of variation in their proportions depending on their other marketing activities, but I would expect to see traffic referred from search fall into the 30% to 60% band. Outside this band, I would make it a priority to investigate in a lot more depth to see what was going on.
In the following example, you can see the traffic source ratio for three different sites from the tourism sector. Site A is the one already discussed and is depending almost entirely on search for its traffic. Site B is pretty balanced and it search proportion falls within the band I would expect. There may be issues, of course, but they’re not sitting at the surface in a nice pie chart, waving a big red flag. Unlike Site C.
With just 8% of its traffic coming from search, Site C is almost the direct opposite of Site A. It has a band of loyal customers who return regularly to the site and a network of third party referrers. However, it is gaining very little new traffic to the site and does not perform at all well on the search terms it should. Search engine optimisation is a major priority for Site C and if it could maintain its absolute volumes of direct and third party traffic, whilst increasing traffic from search, it would see significant benefits in revenue.
(Site C is also not filtering itself out of its web analytics data, meaning direct traffic is inflated by internal activity. Though a bug bear of mine, that’s outside the scope of this post as I have written about it elsewhere!)
So what might a balanced mix of traffic sources look like?
In my view (and feel free to share yours) it would reflect that there are people arriving at your site who:
a) Have heard of you, in that they are responding to your offline marketing messages or may be previous site visitors/customers. They don’t know or don’t bother to use your url directly. These people will probably arrive from search using navigational key terms that relate to your business/brand name. (These navigational searches will typically account for your top key phrases, with people using them in place of remembering the URL of the site.) More on this here at the Lies, Damned Lies… blog
b) Have not heard of you, but are specifically looking for a business that does what you do. These people will probably arrive from search using key terms relating to your product/service - say “Scottish Island Cruises” or “Dolphin watching Inverness” These may be organic (unpaid) search results, or you may have bought them through pay per click or other paid search activity. You can seperate this traffic out in your web analytics tool and look carefully at the comparative conversion rates and bounce rates for the different sources and terms.
This type of visitor may also arrive from other third party sites that link to you - either freely or through paid submissions or affiliate schemes. Again, understanding what third parties are driving your actual conversions allows you to make strategic business decisions.
c) Have heard of you and/or visited you before and are “reawakened” by seeing your link or ad on a third party site, your prescence in an online community or your material on a social media site, or indeed your name in their search results.
d) Are pre-existing customers or regular site visitors and come directly to your site as a result of your email marketing or via RSS feeds or their own bookmarks. They may of course also type in your url following direct mail activity, for example (though in this scenario also keep an eye out for changes in navigational search traffic - as plenty of people will use search over typing the url).
Paying attention to the sources of your website traffic at this very high level view means you can sanity check the balance of your marketing strategy (or lack of it).
Combine this with awareness of your ratio of new & returning visitors and more detail about how various traffic sources perform and you will be able to assess whether like Site A, you are stuck in aquisition mode - continually aquiring new visitors from search, but failing to convert them into customers or repeat visitors. Or if like Site C, you are a very well kept secret amongst those regular visitors in the know, but are missing out on increasing that customer base though search visibility.
Let me know if any of this rings a bell!
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 11:23 am and is filed under Marketing strategy, Online customer behaviour, Web analytics and web measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
