Traffic is the most powerful of the three items before the equals sign because the traffic influences both the AOV and the Conversion rate. That means that just driving a lot of traffic will never be enough. You also need to be driving the RIGHT traffic.
Chloë Thomas author of ‘eCommerce Marketing; How to drive traffic that buys to your website’ has some advice for attracting the right sort of traffic.
1) Understand the traffic mix that’s hitting your website, and how it is performing. Almost always this will show that one traffic source is performing particularly badly – so that’s the one you need to deal with.
2) When analysing your traffic you need to consider which type of traffic it is, i.e. what sort of marketing activity drove it to your website. There are nine key marketing methods in eCommerce: Content, Email, Social Media, Brand Awareness, Offline Marketing, Search, Pay Per Click (PPC), Remarketing, and Partnerships. These are either Free or Bought and Brand Building or Conversion Driving.
Not every marketing method perfectly fits at one end – for example Offline Marketing (such as catalogues) usually both builds the brand, and directly drives the conversions.
3) Think about which category each of your marketing activities is, then consider how it should therefore be performing:
– If it’s Brand Building activity – you want a low bounce rate, but you shouldn’t be too worried about the conversion rate
– If it’s Conversion Driving – you care about the conversion rate and the AOV
– Bought traffic – you want to have a low bounce rate on (a high bounce rate shows your marketing is badly targeted), and enough engagement (be it page-views or conversions to make it worthwhile)
– Free traffic, is less important to have the right stats on. But if you’re putting in a lot of work to get it – analyse it like you would Bought traffic.
When you start considering your marketing in this way you’ll quickly find some activity you really want to stop, some you want to do more of, and some you need to test.
4) Once you have your existing traffic sources optimised you will be ready to start looking for MORE traffic.
An eCommerce business can’t afford to rely on one traffic source – you never know when it’s going to dry up or change, or the Return on Investment deteriorate too much for it to be useful. As a minimum you should be using four at any one time, and testing the others. As well as testing the different tactics and tricks within each.
Recent changes to Google Adwords means ‘simple’ PPC has become a labyrinth of different testing opportunities which, when combined together in the right way, will bring you some very cost effective traffic.
Looking at and reviewing the performance of your traffic, and making sure you’re using the right marketing methods, and enough marketing methods really is essential for your success.
About the Author:
Chloë Thomas is author of ‘eCommerce MasterPlan 1.8’ and her third book ‘eCommerce Marketing’ is published in September. Both are available from: http://ecommercemasterplan.com You can follow Chloë Thomas on Twitter at @chloe_eCMP
