Driving Site Traffic - American Marketing Association

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Driving Site Traffic

By Steve Philips
Stephen Phillips is a Web and Marketing Solutions consultant with 17 years experience in building businesses. He has created award-winning Website projects, advertising, public relations and marketing campaigns for clients including Kraft, the NFL, Sara Lee.

	1. Introduction

"Build it and they will come", does not hold true on the Internet.

One must take an active approach to driving site traffic to a Web site. Creating a site without considering how to drive traffic is like creating a print ad and never inserting it into a magazine. Or like creating a TV commercial that never airs. Though these may win awards, neither will drive sales or consumer activity.

The key to driving traffic to your Web site is to use a broad range of techniques, from the simple to not so simple, free to costly, in an effort to maximize your traffic. Most critically though is to drive traffic from among your target audience.

First a few definitions of the key traffic components:

Traffic -- broadly refers to the number of clicks, visitors, or unique users into your Web site. However not all traffic is created equal. And each of these measures is something different.

Target Audience -- the primary user profile that you want to reach for your particular business activity. This target may be based on demographic, psychographic or attitudinal factors.

This may seem like an obvious observation, but so many traffic-generating activities are driven against the wrong target, that untold millions of dollars are wasted. It was John Wannamaker who first said “I know half of my advertising dollars are wasted I just don't know which half.” Don’t waste yours on the wrong target.

Return on Investment (ROI) -- traffic in and of itself is not the objective of driving traffic. The real objective is getting a measurable return from your investment to drive that traffic. If you are an e-commerce site, just having people walking in the front door doesn't cut it unless your conversion ratio (that is actual buyers/total traffic) is high enough to make the traffic building activity pay back. Keep in mind this is a tough task especially given industry estimates that 2/3 of all shopping carts are abandoned.

In summary, to effectively drive traffic you must know:

Who is your target audience
What you want them to do in your Web site
How you'll get a return on that investment
What your available budget is

Plus, you must be willing to both implement and adjust your traffic-driving plan. Adjustment is essential because with the Web one must always be willing to DLA - Do, Learn, and Adjust. You adjust both because the Web allows easy adjustment and it optimizes your program.

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2001 MarketingPower.com, Inc. Contents used by permission of the author.

Table of Contents

1.	Introduction
2.	Investing in Traffic Building
3.	Traffic Generation Techniques
4.	More Traffic Techniques
5.	Often Overlooked Techniques
6.	Final Considerations

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