To run a successful business, you need a steady stream of fresh leads. These are the people you will turn into paying customers. That’s the marketing part of the equation. To get those leads, you need traffic. You need to reach out to new people on a regular basis and the most time and cost effective way to do that is by generating traffic – ideally evergreen traffic from a variety of different sources.
If you want to continue to grow your business, you should be working on getting more traffic. A wise person once said that what is measured changes. Before you can start to measure, you need to know where your traffic is coming from.
This information is important for another reason. Not all sources of traffic are created equal. If you’ve run an online business – or any business, really – you want to spend as much time and resources as possible on the ones that result in paying customers. In other words, you want to increase your traffic in a way that increases your bottom line the most.
In order to do that, you need to know what sources of traffic send you the most reliable customers. You want to know who signs up for your list, thus becoming a lead. And you want to know how many of those leads convert into paying customers. You can do that by tracking your traffic, email signups, and purchases.
A great place to start is a free Google analytics account. Make sure you have one set up, and then learn how to use the various reports. Your first stop should be Acquisition / All Traffic / Source/Medium.
Focus on one channel at a time. If you can, track each visitor as he or she moves through your autoresponder program and your shopping cart. This will tell you if it’s worth spending a lot of time interacting in a particular Facebook group, or if the person you’re hiring to create and publish multiple pins per day is worth the money you’re spending on them.
Rinse and repeat for other sources of traffic. Keep an eye on what keywords are converting well for you and create more content around similar ones. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers how they found you. You can even make this an optional entry when someone fills out your order form. Again, the idea is to get as much data as possible so you can analyze it and improve your top traffic sources.
Of course this is just the beginning. Stay tuned for more ideas on making the most of your website visitors.
Phoenix Education 