Pumping Up Page Referrals

Page referrals are the biggest indicators of where your website traffic is coming from. The two main types of referrals sources are referral URLs and keywords (Kaushik, 2009). Identifying keywords that are driving traffic to your webpages can help you structure your online marketing campaigns and optimize your page content for those terms most relevant for your audience (Kaushik, 2009).

Referral URLs are also very important to identify, especially when you can couple them with conversion rates.  The cross-section of those two metrics will help you understand which referring sites are most valuable to your organization (Kaushik, 2009).  Once those referrers have been identified, it can be helpful to build relationships with the owners of those sites in an effort to continue driving the incoming traffic from those sites.

Another key element to building referral traffic is to seek out potential influencers and begin to build relationships with them to increase referral traffic.  Ideally, you want to turn these influencers into full-fledged brand advocates.  These brand advocates, especially if they are bloggers with an enthusiastic following will increase both your social referral traffic and traffic from referral URLs.

According to Forbes contributor Jayson DeMars, some strategies beyond building relationships with influencers include offering subject matter experts as guest bloggers for other sites and offering content for syndication.

A recent case study highlightingangling website called Fishidy was featured on BuzzStream’s Blog. Fishidy is an online social networking community geared toward fishing fanatics.  The website features fishing maps and reports, links to tools, and contests, and requires registration for premium content.

The case study highlights a few other strategies the brand used to build external referrals beyond what was suggested by DeMars.  Fishidy focused on creating external editorial content via a planned public relations campaign.  The brand also focused on developing external referrals via reviews and blog comments. Finally, Fishidy focused on developing relationships with government entities and tourism organizations so that links to the site would be included on government licensing pages and tourist-related fishing webpages.

After implementing the above strategies, as well as the ones mentioned by DeMars, Fishidy’s web traffic viareferrals grew by 157%.  The brand increased social referrals by 2,600% from Twitter and 252% from Facebook. Fishidy also acquired more than 60 resource links, which are links on government and tourism sites. These increases are all from relationship building strategies, which means that there is no direct cost for the improvements. The costs are indirect and come in the form of employee time that it takes to build such relationships.

Many organizations cannot afford the staff time to dedicate a huge chunk of time for such complex campaigns, so as time allows, it’s conceivable that you could choose any one of these ideas and develop an implementable strategy, which would deliver real results.  Then, moving forward, you could choose to tweak the existing strategy to further increase referral traffic, or you could choose to implement one of the other strategies to broaden reach.

As Kaushik said, you can ALWAYS grow your referral traffic (2009), so any moment is a good time to start.


Offline Reference

Kaushik, A. (2009). Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity. Wiley. Kindle Edition.

Raising Conversions Rates

Websites are created to educate audiences and drive action. According to website analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, “Life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot” (2009). The key to determining whether or not customers are taking the actions you are hoping they take is to keep an eye on conversion rates.

There are two ways to define conversion rates. One way is to measure outcomes divided by unique visitors (or separate individuals). Using this method indicates that it is acceptable that a visitor may visit your website repeatedly for research before making a commitment (Kaushik, 2009). Another way is to measure outcomes divided by unique visits. By committing to the latter, you are presuming that each and every unique visit is the opportunity for conversion (Kaushik, 2009). The method you choose to use to measure should depend on your business model.

Outcomes could refer to any number of events. Some examples include subscribing to an RSS feed, signing up for an e-newsletter, download a white paper, registering for a webinar or event, commenting on a blog post, sharing content, or completing a sale.

Comparing your conversion rates to other organizations can be dangerous because, as noted above, conversion rates can be measured differently. It’s best to compare your current conversion rates to your past rates. As Forbes contributor Dave Lavinsky said, “No matter how good your current conversion rates are, they can always get better.”

The KISSMetrics blog highlights a number of ways that companies can test out strategies to improve conversion rates. Below are a few of the easiest ways to improve conversion rates.

This first example highlights the value of testing different text in order to see which headlines and body copy drive the most conversions. In order to determine which variable is causing a change (increase or decrease) in the conversion rate, you need to be sure to only test one variable at a time. In the first example, the brand L’Axelle uses the phrase “Feel fresh without sweat marks,” which is a comfort-driven statement.  In the second image, L’Axelle uses “Put an end to sweat marks!”  This statement is driven by the problem and includes an exclamation point.

As you can see, the ONLY change made to the webpage was the headline.  And the action-driven headline increased conversions by 93% to a total of 33.8%.

Another change that is relatively easy to test is color.  Something as simple as change the color of a call-to-action button can improve the conversion rate.  Here’s an example from HubSpot that shows what a change of color can do.

The call-to-action on the button stayed the same, as did the page design and body content.  The only change was the color of the button from green to red. The assumption was that the green button would convert better because it indicates “go,” or forward movement, while the color red is typically associated with “stop,” or warning. The red button outperformed the green button by 21%.

There are many more complex ways to improve conversion rates for different outcomes on your website, but two easy ways to complete A/B testing with headlines and button colors.  This A/B testing will provide concrete evidence as to which specific elements will increase conversions. 

Offline Reference

Kaushik, A. (2009). Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity. Wiley. Kindle Edition.