What Kind of Traffic Converts Best?

505 days ago

Direct: My take is simple, it’s the best! Either the URL has been passed by word of mouth referral which is likely to result in conversion, this is a repeat customer,...

Direct:

My take is simple, it’s the best! Either the URL has been passed by word of mouth referral which is likely to result in conversion, this is a repeat customer, or it is an evangelist showing another potential customer your product/service. Nothing comes close to the conversion value of direct traffic; the following according to Avinash Kaushik:

1. People who are your existing customers / past purchasers, they’ll type URL and come to the site or via bookmarks.

2. People familiar with your brand. They need a solution and your name pops up into their head and they type.

3. People driven by word of mouth. Someone recommends your business / solution to someone else and boom they show up at the site. Uninvited, but we love them!

4. People driven by your offline campaigns. Saw an ad on TV, heard one on radio, saw a billboard and were motivated enough to type the URL and show up.

[If you were really smart you would use campaign tagged vanity URL so you can segment them!]

5. [Remember the part below, but.] Free, non-campaign, traffic.

Read more: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/#ixzz10PwWeTQ4

Search Engine Results:

Normally highly target, depending on the search engine and how cute/tricky your content architect has decided to be. These are very good because they are free in one sense, however you really pay for them in another sense. Free because there is no charge from the search engine, expensive because this is really a long-term process with painstaking attention to detail and constant upkeep. At the end of the day, an online business [or website] with a good SEO presence (especially in Google Search) will be exponentially better off than those without one. This [search] traffic is extremely valuable in my opinion, probably second most just behind direct traffic.

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Yahoo Never a Search Company?

532 days ago

Finally defeated by Relevancy? Or is that just Irrelevant? A blog about a Email and Search company turned community hub-spot, and how simple rectangle will always rule search by itself.

Finally defeated by Relevancy? Or is that just Irrelevant?

A blog about an Email and Search company turned community hub-spot, and how simple rectangle will always rule search by itself.

What is Yahoo if not a search engine? In my inexperienced whimsical mind, Yahoo’s greatest reason for prominence in the internet world has been its email and Aol-style “Home-base” brand services. I suppose models such as these eventually allowed what we now call Web 2.0 to develop.

yahoo.com-homepage

Becoming a hub for email was key to many of the early internet Mongols, Yahoo certainly made their name there and built on that reputation with a continued effort to cater to entertaining their email clientele.

As many of us know on the client side, if it aint broke don’t fix it – excusing the slang, the point here is once we find something that works [and for free at that] it becomes second nature. As long as it continues to solve our problems while remaining cutting edge, our loyalty probably wont be tested.

Now maybe that rule doesn’t apply to all verticals, and it certainly isn’t the same for modern products/services as it was for some of the earlier “wild-wild-west” types (as far as competition and user expectations being factors), but the “Mongols” are still “Mongoling” on because of this dynamic. I wonder how many have Yahoo.com set as their browser homepage?

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