Traffic, Conversions & Sales – Crunching the Numbers

As part of the Thirty Day Challenge, we are learning a process that allows us to very quickly rank fairly well in Google for a chosen keyword (or phrase), direct some of that traffic to an affiliate product and hopefully make our first $10. Based on my early keyword research I thought I would be raking in the traffic (and hence the $$$) but it has not happened, so I want to find out why. Time for some number crunching.

Now I’m not going to repeat the 30DC training material here. You can sign up for free and Mike Mindel posts excellent daily summaries of all the training in his blog, so I’m going to make the assumption that you already know what I’m talking about or will go and find out.

GTrends and What the Numbers Mean

Mike Mindel (super guy, what would we do without him?), has put together an extension to his free keyword tool called GTrends that allows us to analyze the kind of traffic that we can expect to get from Google for a given phrase. Here is the output for one of my chosen phrases “play dough recipe”:

One thing to note straight away that I managed to miss when I first looked at this is the erratic way in which the red bar (that’s my phrase) is represented. It looks like there were some strange spikes and then Google nas no data. This is not good but I didn’t spot that and went ahead anyway. But never mind that as another phrase that I used was this one (I wont reveal the niche as I may continue to work it):

Now here is where I believe there is a certain confusion. The second number in the report is labelled as “GTrends Searches/Day” which indicates that this is the number of actual searches on Google per day. Now it may be that the Wordtracker guys (who developed this tool) have more information than we do, but from what we have been taught about the technique from the training, that number represents the amount of actual visitors we can expect to get to a page that ranks #1 or #2 in Google for that phrase. Not the searches – the actual traffic.

What’s the Magic Number?

According to Ed Dale, the magic number is 200. Here is another source of confusion. When Ed first started to talk about this magic number 200 I thought he meant that if we got 200 visitors to our page that was listed in Google, we would see one sale from it. Now as you can see from my picture above, with a traffic number of over 500 I was thinking to myself, wow, I can make two sales A DAY from this!

Not quite.

The page that you have listed in Google is known as the landing page. This is where visitors land once they click through from the Google search result. Unless you are selling your own product directly (which is the last stage of the 30DC), the chances are that after visitors have come to your landing page, you will then try to direct them to another page, which Ed calls the money page. For most of us working through the challenge, this will be the sales page for an affiliate product. I found ebooks for both of my niches.

Tracking Conversion Ratios

Landing Page -> Money Page

Here is where you first start to understand conversion ratios. If you get 100 people to your landing page, how many will click through to your money page? You can bet it will not be 100! If it’s 10 people then you have a conversion ratio of landing page to money page of 10%. This is where your content matters. If you write good quality content and then gently guide your visitor to a product that might be of genuine benefit to them hopefully you can enjoy a much higher conversion ratio.

Let’s look at my numbers. Now I have a very small amount of traffic to work with on both niches (I’ll come to that in a moment) so it may not be very accurate but it’s all I have so here goes, this is the play dough one:

I have two play dough sites, one on Blogger that has received a total of 127 visits, and a hub page that has received just 41, so a total of 168 unique visitors – that’s actual people, we don’t care about page views.

Now I tracked all my affiliate links with the 30DC tracker so I can count the number of clicks to my money poge – 26 of them. That’s a 15% conversion ratio, not too bad. My first niche received a total of 162 visitors and sent 38 clicks to my affiliate page, a 23% conversion ratio, even better.

Money Page -> Sales

But now I need to track the second conversion ratio – the number of people who buy the product after hitting the money page. Unfortunately I can’t track this because it is zero for both niches. Ed says I can expect a sale for every 200 visits to my money page but if I’m only getting around 5 clicks a day through to my affiliate page it’s going to take me at least three weeks to make a sale! That’s a far cry from the 2 sales a day that I originally envisioned!

So What’s up With the Traffic?

I’ve already highlighted a potential traffic problem with the play dough phrase I used, and that was incomplete data on Google. But my first phrase looked really good, enticing me to believe that it could pull in 500+ visitors a day. Here is my traffic stats for that one (I only have one page, yes naughty me!)

There are 162 visitors in 7 days, an average of 23 a day, that’s less than 5% of the traffic level indicated by GTrends. What went wrong? In a nutshell, it’s the drop off factor explained by Ed in day 24 of the training. Look at this diagram:

The Drop Off Factor

What this is showing us is the affect that your Google ranking has on the amount of traffic you can expect. If the page at the number one spot gets 500 visitors (which is what the GTrends value is showing us), the page at the number 4 spot is getting perhaps 10% of that, around 50 visitors. So where did I rank?

When I first launched the page for the phrase shown above it got indexed within a matter of hours – lovely. Then over the next few days I checked the position that it ranked for with my target phrase. Now here is another potential area of confusion. So far when looking at number of competing pages and when using GTrends we have been using phrase match. This is where we surround our phrase in quotes. But when checking rankings, we must search as the visitor searches using broad match, which is the phrase without the quotes.

Here were my rankings:

August 22nd #12
August 23rd #8
August 24th #10
Today (August 29th) #19

Now suddenly it becomes apparent why my traffic has been so poor. In actual fact 5% looks to be just about right.

Ok I Have Crap Traffic, What Now?

Well all is not lost, because I can now understand why my traffic is so poor. But first let’s just put things into perspective for a moment. I have done some keyword research, built some content pages and got them ranked in Google for as high as position 8 for my chosen keyword in a matter of days. Now that is pretty darn good! That is the magic of the 30DC technique. This is just a test, we’re testing the market and it has not taken much time or any money to do it.

But there is still a problem…

If we take a closer look at the sites that rank above us in Google for those chosen phrases we will probably find that it’s not that those sites have better search engine optimisation for the phrase, but that they simply have more authority in that niche. What does that mean? Google has a number of factors that it uses to determine how important a page is, and how relevant it is to a particular topic. One of the biggest factors is the number of backlinks that a page has.

The trouble is, building backlinks takes considerable time & effort. Days 27 & 28 of the training have given us some wonderful techniques for doing it, but it’s not easy, nor quick. What Ed has said is that we only want to be using this technique if we have found a “phrase that pays”, but I don’t yet know if I have a phrase that pays until I make that first sale, and unless I get more traffic, I’ll be waiting a very long time! Catch-22 isn’t it?

An obvious solution is to simply leave the pages alone, and wait for the traffic to trickle in. Once I get a sale, analyse the conversion ratios again and evaluate. But look again at my rankings – they got an initial boost and then they began to slide. If I don’t give these pages some “love”, they will drop further down in the rankings and it will be even more difficult to get that first sale.

What’s the Solution?

Two weekends ago when people first started creating content pages and getting them ranked in a matter of hours the hype was huge, the excitement was incredible. People started getting sales, this technique was being proven to work day after day. BUT, there are thousands of people participating in the challenge, and we’re not all having that good fortune.

My personal conclusion to this is that we have learned an excellent technique to get a site on the front page in Google in a day or two. But that in itself is not enough to bring in sufficient traffic levels. We need to continue to work those pages – develop content, build back links, social post where appropriate. We need to put in the work up front in order to get enough traffic to do a proper test.

All these people thought they were getting a quick route to $$$ and it turns out that it requires hard work after all, wow :)

The Next Step For Me

Writing this post has been very informative for me. I thought my first niche was a bit rubbish but I got 23% of people clicking through to my money page so it may have some promise after all. I’d be interested to continue working the play dough niche to see if I can get the rankings up but I have difficulty identifying my target market, so where would I find other blogs in my niche? It’s a bit too small for that perhaps.

I think I will take a fresh look at both of these and see what I can do to revive them, and I’ll also go back to the drawing board and try to find a brand new one that will allow me to more easily apply the full array 30DC techniques.

Tweet This Post Stumble This Post