Idea to convert traffic leaking visitors to avid readers / customers

[Jackv94]

So the last few days have been pretty ground breaking for me a lot of self discovery and I'm hoping this will help you.

[start cheesy IM copy]
In this guide you will learn how to convert your traffic leaking page visitors into ravenous fans, who will be bugging you asking when your products are coming back in stock
[/end cheesy IM copy]
^
Hopefully

I was on a skype call with a friend discussing his website and he mentioned how he was getting visitors from for example reddit and forums relating to the topic and he was seeing a huge spike in traffic but very quickly it would go back down massively.
With this traffic he also tend to see high bounce rates from people quickly scanning, especially the traffic from reddit.

At the moment he's trying to make his site get more consistent traffic opposed to massive peaks when it spikes, so he can eventually sell.

So what he has tried is:
Making the opt in form drop down as people come to the page
Having an add notifications button come up
Changing the layout of the website
among other things...

But he said what has been most effective is re-targetting ads via both facebook audiences and google.
The eureka moment happened after he was browsing amazon on his wifes laptop (this is important I'll reveal why in a minute) looking at items and eventually decided against it.. that was until he had to use his wifes laptop over the next few days and these items seemingly followed him around the web.
Much like you can see here.

After 2 days he ended up purchasing the item. An item he decided he didn't need and this wasn't just a $5 item it was a $350 item.

I was speaking to him and he said how he had realised the reason that he had brought the item was because the item had followed him around the web and he had seen it everywhere and each time he saw it he wanted it more until he finally purchased it and he realised this was the key to his audience and therefore his business.

I can't find a source but a lot of copywriters talk about the fact only a small percentage of customers are going to purchase when they first see a product, lets say 5%. A further small percent will purchase on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th visit but apparently the sweet spot is the 8th-12th visit. At 8-12 views / visits of a product the person is most likely to buy.
NOTE: I will try find the source for this

So why does amazon do this? Because it works, it returns a positive ROI after lots of testing I would imagine.
And I'm sure you've seen it done by so many companies, I know I have. I look at an item and then suddenly their website is following me around the web.

The fact he was on his wifes laptop was important because he uses an addon called news feed eradicator so he wouldn't have seen this ad normally. So the first thing he did was install it on his wifes laptop, he's going to report back his monthly savings at a later date haha.

So get to the point?
You're probably thinking wtf is this guy going on about.

He added facebook and google tracking pixels to his website.
(I'm sure if any of you are more interested in it I can find out more details about how as I think he had certain pixels for certain pages)

He then set up offers / posts specifically for these people depending on what page they had viewed, he didn't reveal exact figures but he has increased his email list significantly since doing this but just the amount of people visiting his website directly.

So you're probably thinking..
Ok so great.. he ran ads and got more email subscribers big whoop why have I wasted my time reading this wall of text.

The real reason re-targetting ads are so great is that as they are your own audience not focusing on target keywords or specific groups of people the cost is significantly decreased.

A BuSo member has previously told me that they gets clicks for 1/10th the price of other PPC traffic when using re-targetting.

Action steps
1) Install pixels on your website
2) Traffic leak
3) Re-target
4) ???
5) Profit

He then copied the system that works so well for big ecommerce stores, big blogs ect.
Why wouldn't you try it with yours? It doesn't take a lot of money to test it nowadays, $100 will get you a metric shit tonne of data in most niches to see if it's going to work.

If your site / niche is typically very profitable per purchase I would be very interested in seeing the use of a trip-wire as your re-targetting ad.

Such as
Donald Trump shirt tripwire
Survival business card tripwire

Because of the law of reciprocity and all that crap..

 

[Asad]

Whats the niche? Asking for a friend.

 

[doublethinker]

What's your friend's website? Asking for a friend's daughter.

Sounds like a mighty fine idea that can apply to both e-commerce and affiliates. I'm doing some reading on this now and to add to your missing source

ReTargeter says that only 2% of web traffic makes a purchase on the first visit.​

 

[Samwise89]

Seems like e-commerce and affiliate sites that feel like e-commerce might do the best with this like @doublethinker said, but I bet a viral site with a lot of data on value per visitor could ramp up their earnings big time with retargeting, especially on Facebook.

 

[Jackv94]

Whats the niche? Asking for a friend.

Haha I think this one was a tech affiliate I may be wrong though

What's your friend's website? Asking for a friend's daughter.

Sounds like a mighty fine idea that can apply to both e-commerce and affiliates. I'm doing some reading on this now and to add to your missing source

ReTargeter says that only 2% of web traffic makes a purchase on the first visit.​

Yeah defo for affiliates as you can build up your email list which is only going to add to your flip value as well as your profit that is as long as you're not only making $1 per purchase

Thank you that source, but I can't actually edit it now

Seems like e-commerce and affiliate sites that feel like e-commerce might do the best with this like @doublethinker said, but I bet a viral site with a lot of data on value per visitor could ramp up their earnings big time with retargeting, especially on Facebook.

I've seen a popular sports news site do it, I can't remember the name might have been TMZ? but I'm not really sure.
I guess it really depends on your CPC for the re-targetting ads and the CPM / CPC you get for the ads.

I think some viral sites also are making money in non-ethical ways, for example I know someone that force adds amazon / clickbank and a few other popular affiliate cookies to visitors so they get affiliate payouts from that, imagine if a massive news site did that they'd make $x,xxx's per day probably from people who happen to purchase from them as they are getting such a large amount of traffic.

 

[Jackv94]

And.... I just got to day 13 in the crash course and realised I don't know shit compared to @eliquid
https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/day-13-paid-traffic.1302/

should have finished the crash course first

 

[eliquid]

The real reason re-targetting ads are so great is that as they are your own audience not focusing on target keywords or specific groups of people the cost is significantly decreased.

A BuSo member has previously told me that they gets clicks for 1/10th the price of other PPC traffic when using re-targetting.

Just wanted to clarify that this "depends" if the remarketing is cheap or not.

If you are getting nothing but free traffic to your site ( doubtful, if you are paying for remarketing.. you are prob paying for something somewhere like PPC or FB ads too ) then yes remarketing can be very very cheap in the grand scheme of things.

However, if you are doing PPC or FB ads ( or paying for traffic ) then no, it is wrong.

Action steps:

1. You pay Adwords ( or FB ) for PPC ads. In a very generic and easy to understand follow along, you are in the beard oil niche and it cost you $40 a day to get 1 conversion. You got 10 clicks, so $4 a click.
   
2. 3 days go by, that's $120 spent and 3 conversions at 30 clicks each at $4 a click
   
3. Someone finally converts from remarketing on day 3 bc they seen the ad all around following them. You only paid .50 for that conversion but they were not the only person in the remarketing funnel. Over 3 days you paid out say $10 total for remarketing to get that 1 person to drop.

People get these numbers mixed up all the time. I've had people tell me the conversion was .50 on remarketing in the example above, and people tell me $10 conversion on remarketing above.

The truth is, the person you converted on remarketing prob came in on paid PPC ads.

You won't know what it really cost you to be honest, but the answer isn't 0.50 cents and the answer is not $10. You have to use a blended approach to really be honest and that answer is:

total spend = $120 + $10 = $130
total conversions = 3 + 1 = 4
total cost per conversion = $32

People that use PPC to drive traffic and then do remarketing too generally do not know the true cost of their conversions from remarketing.

People also do not use View Thru Conversions correctly in figuring out their cost per conversion. But that's too late now. Back the end of March Google did away with the 30 day window and now you only have 1 day of data to figure that out.

eh.

 

[azswe]

@eliquid I fully agree on your logic on how to calculate CPA if one is doing proper remarketing/ppc, but how much are you putting weight on view-through? I´ve always considered it too easy to manipulate/too broad/too-much-of-a-catch all...

I understand the benefits of click-thru and attribution (to a degree)...but view-through, to my liking any significant display would rather be better accounted via total revenue (or for example organic+direct+paid).

Disclaimer; I work in smaller markets where a proper campaign too easily reaches a significant share of ones audience/clients thus muddying the numbers.

 

[eliquid]

I've seen many people cut what they thought was a wasteful keyword based on reg Conversions or Cost/Conversion metrics, only to see a dip in performance the next month and not know why it happened.

Backtracking, they can't understand what did it.

Backtracking, when I do it, I see they killed a couple good keywords that had good ( and valid ) view-throughs. Many don't even have this as a column in their display or reports to even know about it.

Is it enough to kill an account? No. Is it enough to cause issues and troubles when the client wants to know why things got worse ( and they don't buy the "its seasonality" bit ), yes.

But now it's all gonna go to shit since the window is 1 day and not 30. Thanks Google!

Some of the markets I work in, the customer buy cycle is 14+ days or longer ( like in Higher Ed ). These view-throughs were important to me for proper structuring of my account and to know what real bid I could put on a keyword.

I can predict what's going to happen... conversions will drop. Not massively, but noticeable. I already see it happening now.

I'm gonna to forget which keywords had good view-throughs and helped the account over time unless I write it down. New keywords I won't have this luxury. New people jumping into Adwords ( junior consultants ) won't even know about this or have the ability to use it.

People are going ( many already do ) to miss out on extra conversions. It will be too small to cause any uproar, but it will be a big enough sting for us that used it to get all we could out of an account.