5 Ways of Rethinking Your Referral Traffic

So you have a site, now what? Well, one of the first things you need to do is drive traffic to it, but how? What if you have a site with traffic, what can you do to better drive users to your pages?

In the past we could rely on Google organic and paid to generate most of our site traffic, but not anymore. While organic is still your highest-quality traffic, what if it goes away overnight? And while paid is helpful in generating specific conversions around keyword searches, in the end you are often just renting those visitors. So if you want to stay relevant today, we need to rethink our concepts of referral traffic as it looks much different today than it did even one or two years ago.

Here are five tips on creating a more perfect referral traffic profile and avoiding mistakes that could cause you pain.

1. Reliance on Social Media

Often we see sites that get a lot of their traffic from social media. If your site is one of those sites, congratulations - that is not the easiest code to crack. You have done good things.

Social traffic is a positive signal. It means your site is being shared and talked about. It means your site has relevancy to your user base. However, it is imperfect traffic and a strategy that is unsustainable on its own. Why is this?

First, if you are relying too heavily on your social media presence for traffic and the site you are getting that traffic from decides to change a factor that takes away that traffic, you have little recourse. There is really nothing you can do. Well, you can pay, but that requires more money and time, which following a loss of large amounts of traffic, you might now have to invest.

Second, unlike organic visitors, social media users are typically "one and done." They see something they like, they head in, they read, they head out.

While this can be an excellent method for long-term brand building, it is not your best traffic source for in-depth or lengthy visitor engagement. Some will like what they see and come back, but not as many when they find you by other efforts.

So while there is nothing wrong with this as a part of your comprehensive plan, you want to be careful of relying on social media at the expense of more relevant and engaged traffic such as organic search. In addition, if these sources suffer declines, you can more readily address the issues on other channels than you can with social.

Mostly, just make sure you are not ignoring other avenues for bringing users in to the site.

2. Reliance on Google Organic

Just as you can be overly reliant on social media, you can also be too reliant on Google organic. While organic search is your best traffic referrer in terms of engagement, site stickiness, and returning visits, if you accidentally trigger an algorithm negatively and it takes a slap at your site, well you might wake up with a cliff dive on your analytics and a sunken feeling in your stomach.

While it is very important to spend a lot of your time cultivating your organic visits, it is not a safe bet to rely on Google for that traffic alone. The most important thing you can do is diversify your traffic and find multiple generative and reliable sources.

3. Reliance on Google and Facebook

Many sites rely on these two sources are their primary traffic-drivers. Be careful if these are the only two. Don’t rely so much on Facebook or organic SEO that you forget to continue to diversify your traffic profile. Your traffic referrals are a delicate balance of visits from paid, organic, social, syndication, etc.

The most important thing you can do in this day of Google is to make sure you have built up as many positive traffic sources as make sense for your business. This way if you lose in Google or Facebook today, you can start cranking up the traffic in other areas tomorrow.

4. Organic Is Still King

Organic traffic is not just Google, though we typically think of that first. It can also be Bing, Duck Duck Go, and Yahoo, or even a contest or event. Whatever your organic source, the users are likely to be more engaged and user intent is typically going to be more aligned with your site content. While Google organic should and will be the largest organic referrer, building up your alternative referral sources will help protect you from getting hit in one area or another.

5. Watch Out for the Bots

Semalt, Buttons-For-Websites, and other bots visit your site and show up in your analytics. These referrals are not real humans, but bots meant to send traffic back to its owner by you clicking on the referrals in your analytics. There is no reason to support this traffic and there is no reason to not get rid of it. There are several methods for doing this, however Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools has the most comprehensive post explaining the issue and how to get rid of it.

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Top Social Efforts to Boost Referral Traffic to Your Website

Social media has many benefits for a brand. Raising awareness, generating buzz around events or news, keeping your name or products top of mind, managing customer service, gathering consumer-generated content, market research, and the list goes on. But for some reason, many of us get hung up on the fact that social media has to have an immediate, short term return on investment. Many social strategies are long term investments, so when looking at a tight time frame, we migrate towards metrics that try and allow us to justify our efforts. Enter: referral traffic.

Referral traffic is a very important thing to measure within a social media campaign. For many companies, bringing visitors to your website helps them learn about your products and services and establishes one more touchpoint in that very important buying process. It gets the user away from all the chaos on social media and lets them solely focus on one thing…you. And that’s valuable stuff. So after using many social media channels over the past few years, I’ve learned which ones generate the highest return on investment, based on time/cost vs referral traffic. Of course numbers will very based on your industry and the content you’re producing, but for the most part, this will give you a simple indication of which channels are best for driving traffic back to your website.

1) Blogging

The only one with 5 stars in terms of referral traffic is blogging. Are you surprised? If on a subdomain, blogging can be tremendously helpful to sending traffic to your website, if using links properly. If housed on the company site itself, blogs will generate organic traffic from search and attain visitors from referral links from any sites or bloggers who re-run your material or cite your writing. A misconception is that this effort is free but it is one of the biggest investments your company can make in the social space. The best blogging companies invest tons of time and resources into blogging efforts. Beyond time for writing, you will want to budget money for stock photography or time for your design team to create custom graphics, infographics, charts or visuals to supplement your material within the post and/or for social media when distributing. It makes the world of a difference in getting people to read, react and share your content. It's also helpful to promote your blog articles on social using ad dollars to "light the fire" and get the traction rolling.

2) E-Newsletter

Email marketing may not be the best approach to reach your teen audience (most do not use email with the exception of using it for registration purposes) but email is still widely used among most working professionals. It’s a great way to reinforce messages, introduce the latest news to a loyal audience, and keep them coming back to your site. Carefully design a layout – don’t have too much information there – and drive people deep into your site on specific landing pages, not just the homepage. Tell them what you want them to be looking at. Costs here are associated with monthly software fees (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc), stock photography, design costs, and the time it takes to prepare and distribute. Your list is critical. Always be conscience about growing this – whether it’s through other social channels, events, contests with registration walls, etc. Your list is powerful in bringing visitors to your site.

3) Twitter

Many of us know how great this tool can be at luring traffic to your site. But this audience is very cautious what it clicks on – simply because we are being bombarded with hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of tweets each day. Because of this, be strategic when you include a link to your own site. Always use the old adage “What’s In It For Them?” Push them to an educational blog posts, a cool new product, a fun contest going on, etc. Be creative and straightforward in your limited description too, because you have to convince them to click in less than 100 characters or so. Costs here are related to stock photos or designs you’ll want to use to pair with your content. Also, do not overlook Twitter advertising. It’s a great way to get new users in front of your material and you can select the type of person that is most appealing to your business, so it works well.

4) LinkedIn

Of all the promoted post-style advertising on social media, LinkedIn can often times be the most expensive. But it’s a great way to get highly targeted people in front of your content and lead them to your site. The filters available through LinkedIn are extraordinary, allowing you to target by age, geography, profession, industry, hierarchy, group, and more. Naturally, you’ll pay for this luxury in your higher cost per clicks. But regardless, it can be effective. LinkedIn readers love tips on how to do their jobs better, motivational articles, and the inside scoop on new jobs available in their fields. Keep this in mind when sharing material that refers back to your website. You don’t want them to be disappointed when they go for that click. So make sure it’s meaningful and in line with the type of professional readers that are here.

5) YouTube

I have YouTube listed as the most expensive of all the tactics. Because quite frankly, video production ain’t cheap. Sure, you can get away with haphazardly winging some videos together and throwing them up online. You might get a few views. But ever notice the ones that we gravitate towards every week (if they are a regular series) or the ones you pull to use in presentations or demonstrations. You and I both are using the ones that look professional, are in high definition, boast great audio quality, and subtly use visuals as examples to support the verbal discussions. You’ll need lights, microphones, a great camera (preferably two), lots of time and research, a personable and lively spokesperson, and more. But here’s the bright side. Of all the types of content available to you, in my opinion, videos are the one type that is most likely to really take off if done right. You can include links in your description area or within the videos themselves. And finally, you can expose your messages to more people through advertising (which again, costs money on this platform). But think about all the embeds and shares you can get if your videos are valuable to your target audience. In all, YouTube can be one of the biggest spends in your social media budget but can also see one of the greatest returns on investment, especially in terms of referral traffic.

Social media has a variety of benefits. Gaining visitors to your website is only one – though an important one if it matches your goals. Share content that is worthwhile and carefully select the channels that you wish to invest in to see high levels of return. Keep in mind that you don’t want to *just* share content about yourself – social media is all about sharing the wealth and getting involved in conversations that are out there on the web. But being selfish every now and again to impact the bottom line is a no-brainer.

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3 Social Media Metrics Your Business Should Track

Metric #1: Share of Voice

You may already be tracking the brand mentions on social media websites, as well as whether those mentions are positive, negative or neutral. And this gives you some useful feedback about your social outreach efforts.

But how would you to know how your company is doing compared to the available market?

You can take things to the next level when you measure the share of voice (SOV).

Your website’s SOV measurement helps you discover what percentage of mentions within your industry goes to your brand—and what percentage goes to your competitors.

Fortunately, there’s Social Mention, a free tool to help you measure and compare your company’s mentions to your competitors’.

This screenshot shows the number of mentions that exist for the phrase “social media examiner.”

Here’s how to see why this measurement is important. Imagine you track only the number of times your brand was mentioned on Twitter. As the result of your social media marketing efforts, you see this number go from 10 mentions per day to 20.

On the surface, this might seem like a win, but what happens if the total number of brand mentions across all of your competitors is closer to 1,000 per day?

Now you realize you’re only receiving a drop in the bucket of brand mentions in your niche. This highlights both the number of potential customers who have yet to be exposed to your brand and how far you have to go in terms of overall market penetration.

To calculate SOV, conduct a search for each of your competitors and then divide your company’s number of mentions by the total number of mentions in your market.

Metric #2: Referral Traffic

It’s one thing to build up a thriving social community on sites like Twitter and Facebook. But it’s another thing entirely to entice these visitors to leave their social spaces and head back to your company’s website.

Good social media marketing campaigns aim to increase on-site website results. So it’s only natural that measuring the amount of referral traffic sent by social sites should have a place in the savvy marketer’s tool chest.

Fortunately, Google Analytics makes this process easy. To view the amount of referral traffic your website receives from social networking sites, log into your account and navigate to the Referrals section found on the Traffic Sources menu.

From there, you’ll be able to view the social sites that send you the most referral traffic, as well as the relative bounce rate, average time on site and pages viewed per visit of each social site’s visitor base.

In this example, LinkedIn provides the most social traffic, compared to Twitter (t.co) and Facebook.

You’ll want to pay special attention to the traffic metrics from your social sites. They may show you significant differences in the performance of one social network versus another.

If, for example, you see that your Twitter visitors have a significantly higher bounce rate than readers who arrive on your site from Facebook, you might decide to allocate more of your marketing time and budget to connecting with followers on Facebook.

Metric #3: Conversion Rate

Finally, here’s the most important social media metric—conversion rates!

This is the metric that tells you what’s working for your business.

And this assumes that you’re utilizing social networking sites in order to generate some type of measurable activity on your company’s website, whether these activities (or conversions) occur as product sales, newsletter signups, lead generation form completions or other action.

If this is the case, it’s important to ensure that you aren’t spending time on social media marketing if the referral traffic you’re able to procure from these sources doesn’t ultimately convert on your home site!

To measure conversions, you’ll need to set up two elements within Google Analytics: Goals and Advanced Traffic Segments.

• Google Analytics Goals enable you to determine when a specific action occurs on your website. There are four default types of Goals made available within Google Analytics, though these can be customized to measure any of the conversion activities described above. For more information on setting up Goals, check out Google’s help documentation on the subject.
  

  This sample Goal measures the number of website visitors who visit at least three pages on the site.

• In addition, Advanced Traffic Segments allow you to break out your analytics data by individual traffic source. As an example, by creating a segment that looks at the on-site activities of your Facebook visitors, you can split up your Goals data to determine which social sites are sending you the most eventual conversions.
  

  The conversion data pictured above has been filtered with an Advanced Traffic Segment that measures the number of conversions that occurred from LinkedIn visitors.

At least once a month, take the time to measure the number of conversions generated on your site by visitors from different social media websites.

You can then use this information to allocate future marketing resourcesaccording to the social sites that provide the biggest impact on your website’s bottom line.

By taking these measurements and adjusting your social media campaigns, you’ll ultimately ensure that your social media investment will bring more value to your business.

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