Monday, January 26, 2015

Unique Visitor Metrics Help Digital Marketers Monitor Ongoing Site Performance

Website owners large or small, for-profit or non-profit, individually-owned or governmental should evaluate unique visitor traffic data regularly. Estimated unique visitor counts, which ignore repeat sessions from the same browser ID (or mobile ID) provides a baseline on-going metric of visitors that engage with a website at least once during the measurement period. Unexpected declines in website traffic should be investigated immediately to determine causes for the reduced traffic, which can include technical website performance problems needing immediate attention.



Even more valuable over-time, is segmented unique visitor traffic further drilled-down to source, including direct traffic, paid traffic and non-paid traffic or organic search which can offer preliminary insights toward the effectiveness of return visitor interest, success of pay-per-click (PPC) placements as well as search-engine keyword optimization. The relationship event micro-conversions to unique visitors provides direct marketers with a conversion rate that allows them to understand the number of unique visitors needed to generate key outcomes like a purchase, site registration, paper download or RSS feed subscription.
Content remains king when driving unique visitor traffic. Website content includes the words, images, video and structure of an entity’s website. Content should be relevant, timely and perceived as trustworthy and sharable because of author expertise. While obviously writing articles including headlines, should be geared toward readers, less obvious is that it should be understandable by search engine algorithm. (Chris) High quality content is vital for keeping reader attention, improving brad loyalty, generates prospects and supports high event conversions.

Caloriesecrets.net, a blog which increased its website unique visitor traffic by 40% over 2 months to 250,000 visits in June 2013 applied several tactics beyond publishing its high-quality content, which helped the blog reach its desired traffic levels. These include the following (Chris):
  • Promote content through social media channels shared by existing social circles (followers).
  • Follow On-page SEO techniques such as publishing unique content; following headline, image and permanent URL taxonomy rules; maintaining optimal internal page linking and optimizing website speed to Google guidelines.
  • Promote direct traffic through developing high user engagement by having a consistent and frequent publishing schedule, provide a visible area for comments and respond promptly to visitor questions or comments.
  • Free services and tools provide visitor incentives to come back again.

Upstart Upworthy has become the fastest-growing media site though an aggressive content marketing model built on social media sharing through Facebook and Twitter, as shown in the graph below.
Source: Ellens

At launch, the website landing page was geared toward sharing site content with friends as well as capturing visitor email addresses. (Ellens) With subsequent A/B testing of landing page designs to balance contest social media sharing with on-site content exploration, Upworthy discovered that overall sharing per session didn’t decline but rather changed from sharing from the landing page to content discovered later in the visit. Upworthy’s 53.5 million unique monthly visitor experience suggests the following (Ellens):
  • Make social sharing the main call-to-action.
  • Provide readers with suggested on-site content.
  • Always test to find breakthroughs: “We care about testing because, we think we’re clever and all, but whenever we think we know what’s going to win a test, we’re almost always wrong.” Peter Koechley

Sources
Chris, Alex (28 August 2013) How to build a successful blog with more than 250,000 unique visits per month (case study) ReliableSoft.net [website] Retrieved from https://www.reliablesoft.net/how-to-build-a-successful-blog-with-more-than-250000-unique-visits-per-month-case-study/

Ellens, Jeremy (25 March 2014) Upworthy's 53.5M Unique Monthly Visitors Content Marketing Case Study. Yazmo Insights. [Website] Retrieved from http://www.yazamoinsights.com/optimization/upworthy-content-marketing-case-study

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