Wed, 8 Oct 2008 10:12:47 by Kerry Dye
This follows on from my previous blog about using the long tail to measure success. There are all sorts of ways to work out how successful your search engine optimisation programme is. This blog deals with the most basic one – traffic.
From a company’s point of view traffic is a good measure of campaign success. If there are more visitors arriving at your website from organic sources, then the campaign has been successful at boosting traffic to the site. Whether this traffic is from main targeted keywords or from the long tail, picking up additional site visitors is generally a good thing.
In many ways, the traffic metric, (whether you use unique visitors or page views) goes back to the early days of the web, when people counted hits to their websites (and hit counters were de rigueur).
For a search marketing company, traffic is an easy one to measure, and whilst we always know that it doesn’t tell the whole story, increasing website traffic is part of the goal that we set ourselves for every client.
For many business to business companies, traffic can increase on a nice upwards rise, but for the companies that sell to consumers, there is much more variation in the graphs – gardening sites do well from Easter through the summer and then traffic falls seasonally. Likewise, travel companies see a boost in the New Year and gift sites see a huge rise through November and December as the annual Christmas rush gets underway.
Because of this it is always important to reference website traffic to another data source. This might be last year’s traffic figures, or some outside data, like Google Trends, which can show how queries vary throughout the year.
Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager |
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