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Posts Tagged ‘Traffic Patterns’

The exciting thing about search marketing is that people’s search behaviors are always changing; this can depend on the time of year, trends or new developments in the industry. But how do you stay ahead of these changes and more importantly, what do you do to counteract any negative effects in your accounts? In this post, I’ll focus on understanding traffic trends in your PPC accounts and in my follow-up post I will talk about how to effectively leverage your findings to benefit your account.

Digging-in To Your Account

There are many tools out there to help you understand traffic patterns for your campaigns. However, the first place you need to look is in your PPC account. Start out by running a campaign report for the last few years. Under settings choose “monthly” as your unit of time. Alternatively, set your time range and look at a graph for impressions and clicks in the interface. Either of these tools should give you insights into when traffic drops or spikes occurred. Are there any patterns in your data? Now start thinking about what events (good or bad) happened during those time periods:

• Did you make any significant changes in your account during those times? The “View Change History” tool can be very insightful.
• Did something big happen in the industry?
• Is seasonality a factor for your product or service?

Drill down even further by pulling keyword placement performance reports. Some keywords might be affected by seasonality as well. Certain keywords may have been star performers for a few years, but have dropped off in performance even if their average position hasn’t changed much over time. Pull out these keywords and use Google Trends to further trouble shoot. Searchers might be using different search terms than they did a year ago. Along with Google Trends, your Google Analytics can also help you identify search patterns based on geography.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

Keep an eye on your competitors – know what they’re doing, not only in the PPC space, but other marketing efforts as well. It is easy to get sucked in to the PPC world, but take those blinders off. Your competitors maybe running compelling awareness-building offline campaigns that are driving searchers to click on their PPC ads as well. Your traffic might be directly impacted by what your competitors are doing.

What Is Going On In The Industry?

You may want to set up Google alerts for your most important keywords and try to catch-up on some industry news on a weekly basis. Traffic may spike if there is a huge surge in your industry or tank if there is some bad publicity, so keep on top of what’s going on and think through what that might mean for you PPC account.

I’ve recapped several ways in which you can start identifying changes in your PPC traffic. In my next post, I will discuss how to utilize the knowledge that you have about search patterns to maximize your account performance.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

The Tuitive team is still trying to settle down after this year’s South By South West Interactive (SXSWi)

conference in March. We all had a great time and learned a lot about the interactive community and what is coming next. There were loads of interesting sessions from a panel with the Gmail team to

Cooking for Nerds, many of which have been popping up online. I wanted to share one of my favorites with you.

Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon by Jared Spool

Jared Spool is a leader in the User Experience world, specifically in the quantitative research space. He has been working with Amazon.com for many years, analyzing their traffic patterns and trying improve the user experience of Amazon shoppers. His talk had two major points.

1) He pointed out the interesting things that Amazon does with new features and constantly implementing tiny changes to improve the user’s experience.

2) He also discussed that you can’t do the same things as Amazon and expect to be successful.

Why can’t we all just copy Amazon? In one word “traffic.”

Amazon has had 71,431,000 visitors since December of 2008. They have served 76,000,000 customers since they launched. There are 24 orders placed every second. Does your website have those kind of traffic numbers? Mine either.

he best example Jared uses is user generated reviews. Most people find reviews to be very help when buying online, and the user reviews on Amazon are highly regarded. So why can’t you just add user reviews on you site? Jared cites research that shows having less than 20 reviews about a product does not actually help people decide if a product is what they want. In some cases it actually reduces the positive perception of the item. He continues to share that only about 1 in 1,300 purchasers actually write a review. Think about how many online reviews you have writen versus how many you have read. So in order to get those 20 reviews to help the sale of an item you will need to have 1.3 Million people buy an item. Whoa.

I encourage you to watch Jared’s presentation (see below). He is very clever and easy to listen to.

I also encourage you to make sure you are always improving your online products in ways that make the most sense for your particular site. Every site is different, it has different users and those users have different needs. There is no magic bullet feature for success online. The only way to ensure your success is listening to your users, and continually improving the tools they need to complete their tasks.

You can listen to Jared’s entire presentation, with audio, right here:

This post was written by Travis Smith

Travis was born and raised in a far off land called Nebraska, and after attending college in Missouri, he completed his MBA and Masters of Social Psychology at Ball State University. Travis has been many things, including a cameraman, tutor, disc jockey, underwriting salesman, barista, a nomadic tourist, librarian, sandwich artist, office manager, researcher, research subject, HR lackey, and project manager, all of which have prepared him for the role of User Experience Analyst. At Tuitive, he is in charge of user research, user testing, user modeling, requirements gathering, and keeping the human in human centered design.

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The Tuitive team is still trying to settle down after this year’s South By South West Interactive (SXSWi) conference in March. We all had a great time and learned a lot about the interactive community and what is coming next. There were loads of interesting sessions from a panel with the Gmail team to

Cooking for Nerds, many of which have been popping up online.  I wanted to share one of my favorites with you.

Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon by Jared Spool

Jared Spool is a leader in the User Experience world, specifically in the quantitative research space. He has been working with Amazon.com for many years, analyzing their traffic patterns and trying improve the user experience of Amazon shoppers. His talk had two major points.

1. He pointed out the interesting things that Amazon does with new features and constantly implementing tiny changes to improve the user’s experience.
2. He also discussed that you can’t do the same things as Amazon and expect to be successful.

Why can’t we all just copy Amazon? In one word “traffic.”

Amazon has had 71,431,000 visitors since December of 2008. They have served 76,000,000 customers since they launched. There are 24 orders placed every second. Does your website have those kind of traffic numbers?

Mine either.

The best example Jared uses is user generated reviews. Most people find reviews to be very help when buying online, and the user reviews on Amazon are highly regarded. So why can’t you just add user reviews on you site? Jared cites research that shows having less than 20 reviews about a product does not actually help people decide if a product is what they want. In some cases it actually reduces the positive perception of the item.

He continues to share that only about 1 in 1,300 purchasers actually write a review. Think about how many online reviews you have writen versus how many you have read. So in order to get those 20 reviews to help the sale of an item you will need to have 1.3 Million people buy an item. Whoa.

I encourage you to watch Jared’s presentation (see below). He is very clever and easy to listen to.

I also encourage you to make sure you are always improving your online products in ways that make the most sense for your particular site. Every site is different, it has different users and those users have different needs.   There is no magic bullet feature for success online. The only way to ensure your success is listening to your users, and continually improving the tools they need to complete their tasks.

This post was written by Travis Smith

Travis was born and raised in a far off land called Nebraska, and after attending college in Missouri, he completed his MBA and Masters of Social Psychology at Ball State University. Travis has been many things, including a cameraman, tutor, disc jockey, underwriting salesman, barista, a nomadic tourist, librarian, sandwich artist, office manager, researcher, research subject, HR lackey, and project manager, all of which have prepared him for the role of User Experience Analyst. At Tuitive, he is in charge of user research, user testing, user modeling, requirements gathering, and keeping the human in human centered design.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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