3 Traffic Statistics You Need to Know

Lots of traffic just isn’t enough! You need to know a thing or two about the traffic you’re getting such as–are your visitors sticking around; are they buying anything (and on which pages); and, where is all this great traffic coming from anyway (and where are you wasting time with bad traffic)?

1. Where is your traffic coming from? As you might guess, this is always a good thing to know! But it’s only the first step. What do I mean?

You need to know from which sources you are getting traffic that makes money for you. After all, if one site sends 1,000 visitors that don’t buy anything from you, while another sends only two visitors that do buy something, which site will you want more traffic from?

It’s important to know where you are getting your quality traffic from, because then you can focus your efforts on these traffic sources without wasting time on traffic sources that don’t send any “money traffic” your way.

How do you know which traffic source is sending you the “money visitors”? Tracking software is essential. Google Analytics is only one of many programs people use to track their traffic.

2. How long do your visitors stick around? Congratulations–you finally made it to 1,000 visitors a day! Now, how many of these visitors are sticking around? Wait–how many did you say?

If the number is small, don’t feel bad–it happens to even the most experienced affiliate marketers while we test and tweak our copy, content, and traffic sources.

If people aren’t sticking around on your landing page, there could be a few different reasons why. It may be that traffic from one source bounces straight away while visitors from another source stay on the page and perform whatever action the page urges them to do. This kind of situation is one of many reasons to use tracking or analytics software.

3. Which pages convert? There can be a variety of answers to this question.

If you’re running a blog or large information site, you’ll probably find that people click ads more often on certain blog posts or articles than they do on others. Naturally, you’ll want to link and drive traffic to these pages as often as possible. You’ll also want to post similar content to your site–especially if your affiliate website is a blog.

If you’re running a more direct-sales model, then you’ll want to see which page’s sales copy works best. Successful marketers of all kinds are constantly testing one sales page against another.

How to write copy is certainly outside the scope of this article. Let me just say that if you have anything that even sort of resembles a sales page on your website, you need to be engaged in the act of testing–constantly.

The best way to do this is with some A/B split testing software–I believe there are even free versions of it floating around on the internet today. This combined with your analytics/tracking software should tell you which of the two pages is making you more money. Then, you take the winner of the two, and test it against another…