William Charlwood

I took a look at some interesting numbers this morning relating to Traffic ReGenerator, a new service that I mentioned in two recent emails to my lists.

The raw stats are as follows.

Of my readers (and I’m sorry to treat them as a statistic here) 185 signed up for more information about the service when they visited the home page. A further 91 people signed up when they were about to leave the page.

That is an extra 49%.

Why did they do this?

Because Traffic ReGenerator gets more people to take the action you want them to take.  It detects when people are about to leave your page without taking the action you want and it then gets them to take that action.

So if you want people to visit another page on your site where they can click AdSense ads or buy something from you instead of leaving, you should at least take a good hard look at this service.  The statistics from this case study speak for themselves: by using this system, my opt in rates jumped 49%.

To speak statistically for a moment, the data sample is also big enough to be significant.

In other words, a statistician would say that these results are likely to be repeatable with a strong degree of confidence.

That’s math speak. Not marketing speak.

Clearly I can’t speak for sales rates or AdSense clicks because I haven’t tested it with them. But for opt ins, it works and it works well. I see no reason why it shouldn’t work as well for other actions.

Worth a trial in my view. Traffic ReGenerator

A clever tool is about to be launched that addresses one of the biggest problems faced by online marketers – keeping people on your site until they have taken an action that is profitable.

If you think about it, most (but not all) people on your site will either

• click a link on your site (which is presumably what you want otherwise why have a link there in the first place?)
  or
• hit the Back Button.

So what could we do about people hitting the Back button?

One technique which is frankly bordering on the unethical is to disable the back button! Bad, bad, absolutely terrible practice. Don’t even think about it any more.

But what if you could spot when someone is about to click the Back button and do something that will stop them in their tracks and make them think again?

It can be done. It has been done.

Look at this example.

TrafficRegenerator

It’s neat. It’s powerful. It’s clever. It’s also amusing!

You may hate it. You may love it. But it works.

Here’s a quick, cheap and simple way of doing some online market research.

Suppose I want to sell widgets (they seem to be quite popular after all) then should I stock red, green, blue, and yellow widgets or just red ones? Which widget is most popular?

What I can do is set up an AdWords ad promoting my widgets and then run a campaign using the keywords “red widgets”, “green widgets”, “blue widgets” and “yellow widgets”.

After a while, I’ll start to get three sorts of data back from Google.

First, I’ll see how many searches there were for each keyword and in general the number of searches done relates to the market interest. So if more people search for red widgets than blue widgets, I’ll know that there is more interest in red widgets.

Second, I’ll see which keywords generate the most traffic which will give me a better idea about the potential demand for my widgets: people who click on ads are more likely to be interested in buying widgets than people who just search for the things, especially if I include the word “free” as a negative keyword in my campaign.

Finally, I’ll start to see where my ads rank for each keyword which, if I’ve set the bid prices to the same level for all my keywords, will tell me some interesting things about what my competition is doing.

For example, if the keyword “red widget” causes my ad to rank lower than for the keyword “green widget” then assuming my competitors are smart, it is likely that red widgets are more popular and profitable.

What should I do about this? Stock red ones.

If you are thinking of opening a store selling branded goods such as motorbikes, a quick bit of market research like this can tell you which brand to run with: Honda, Harley, BMW etc. You clearly need to take into account local factors here and that is something you can also do with Google.