5 Crucial Steps to Manage Your Traffic

Imagine you’re a store clerk and you have 50 customers with different needs asking you all sorts of questions.  

Tap… Tap…  Tap…  The lady behind the person you’re helping begins tapping her foot impatiently.

You also see a potential customer going back and forth searching and bouncing.  Panic starts to arise as your heart beats faster.

You would want to help all at once but you are so buried with the first customer’s request that only frustration grows. You do your best but helping one customer is almost like giving up on the others. 

It’s like if two users visit your site at the same time, it’s most likely only one will be interested.  The other visitor will bounce somewhere else with his wallet and never come back.

That’s kind of how affiliate marketers feel when they run multiple campaigns and not knowing where to start.  Without real-time traffic management your ability to personalize your visitor’s experience greatly limits your growth’ potential.

So how do you juggle all these visitors at once?  These are the 5 crucial steps to manage your traffic.

#1 Traffic Data Collection

Without collecting data about what traffic comes in, you won’t be able to define who to target in affiliate campaigns.

To most this means you would check analytics and identify the audience that’s using your content and bouncing.

According to this data, you might want to modify your site or call to actions.  But what if I tell you that you  can get information about your visitors and act on it in real time?

It’s hard for most affiliate marketers to understand since they’re so used to analyzing after conversions, drop off rates, page time after the visitor leaves.

With the right tracking software you can collect data provided by your traffic sources.  More importantly you can add “user-agent” data to understand your audience better. The collection of technical data points includes geo location, devices, network, ip, language and others.  You can make decisions the moment the visitors clicks your campaign link and redirect them to the most relevant landing page or offer.

For example, let’s say you have a visitors from all over the world, do you think all of them all want to be led to a site in English?  

Probably not.  Which means that you must act in the moment with the data you have before a visitor clicks a CTA to lead them to a page in their browser language.

#2 Data Driven Marketing

Once you know who your visitor is and what exactly he or she is searching for, you can redirect them to a site that meets their needs.  

This can be done in real time based on the visitors data.  If you have multiple CTAs or landing pages you can rotate them and do split tests to see which ones perform best.  

Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that a page from United States will work in another country.  Especially in the gambling industry which has different regulations in different countries. 

Read about Conversion Tracking for gambling affiliates

Having the ability to redirect users accoding to geo targeting data, and in real-time is what can make or break a campaign.

#3 Aggregate reports and analyze

How does a marketer know how to optimize their campaigns without knowing how they performed?

After redirecting your audience, it’s important to analyze what factors created positive ROI and what didn’t.  For example, knowing what keywords performed well and didn’t gives you the power to invest more on the ones that did.

Identifying the devices or operating systems that are generating higher ROI in order to adjust your bidding strategies is as valuable.

The agregation allows you to make comparisons and gather valuable data to give you head start for future campaigns.

#4 Optimize Campaigns

Now that you know what performed well and what didn’t, it’s time to put into action new or old elements that perform successfully.  This could involve keywords, landing pages, languages, or products, devices, OS, countries.

#5 AB testing : Without any question is a standard for any online marketer

Putting your new campaigns in action is the last step to optimizing traffic and profits.  Testing different elements is huge, in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama was able to raise 60 million dollars in donations using A/B testing. Read the case study from QuickSprout here

Seeing how they perform in real-time while having the ability to split test based on the percentage of how many users you want to see each page is a huge competitive advantage.  

Conclusion

Managing traffic is complex, especially when your optimization process includes both traffic data dimentions, and affiliate offers optimization.

It’s like, being able to match a visitor’s request, with the right offer, at the right time and for the appropriate device.

If you don’t have the right tools to do this job for you, it will be very difficult to optimize your campaigns and scale up.  

Being able to test and optimize can make the stress of having so many campaigns a lot easier. TrackingDesk users don’t have to wait till your visitor has left the page.  Knowing where the person comes from allows you to make actionable choices to lead to higher conversions.

To perform well in digital marketing is to have the tools that’ll let you act fast and with scale.

To see more about these 5 steps, check out my Calvin Ayre interview on the importance of managing traffic.