Traffic and The Formula
We are going to start our series on e-commerce with “The Formula” for online revenue. The purpose of the formula is to calculate gross revenue to your website, by multiplying three specific statistics from your website.
In each of the next three posts on Feedback Secrets, we will be taking a look at one of these factors in order to get better understanding of what goes into the revenue that our sites receive every month.
The first of these factors is Traffic which can be measured in any number of ways. You could measure it in terms of page views, visits, or absolute unique visitors. Regardless of which metric you choose, as long as you consistently use that same metric in your calculation it should not make that much difference which factor you use in your calculation.
We can divide all traffic that a site gets into one of two broad groups. The first group is targeted traffic. This type of traffic could come from a backlink on another website within your niche, could have been sent to a conversion piece from a broadcast to your email list, could have found your site from a search on Google, or any other of a number of possible sources.
The important thing to remember about targeted traffic is that it has a “prequalified” characteristic to it. This people are interested in your particular niche, and that greatly increases the chances that they will purchase your particular offering when compared with the general public.
The second group of traffic is untargeted traffic. This is just random traffic, collected in a piecemeal, haphazard manner and funneled onto your site. Some people actually post blog comments from totally unrelated sites with backlinks to their site, in the hopes of sending traffic to there site.
Most of these untargeted visitors on your site will probably not stay long, probably not purchase anything on your site, and are unlikely to tell their friends about your product, service or company. In the world of online business targeted traffic is like a sniper rifle and untargeted traffic is like an antique shotgun at long range.
