Traffic from Twitter – Nectar of the Gods?
Twitter traffic has a few well known characteristics; it has a low conversion rate for direct selling and it is plentiful. One of those two statements is rather misleading though, isn't it? Conversion rates have always been low so it can't be that. But my server logs are full of hits and traffic so it can't be that either... can it? Let's put that to one side for now and look at happier and less worrisome things: who are the people clicking your links inside Twitter?
Primarily, the people clicking your links are your followers. Sometimes people hit your links as the result of a Twitter search query or from a site that has syndicated your tweets for your or for their own end. What made them click? Well, much like you pre-qualify a person with an Adword ad you are doing the same with your tweet. The advantage inside Twitter is that in theory the reader has some sort of self-created idea of who you are and the sorts of things that you talk about and link to - let's call this your 'reputation'. There is another side to the coin, however. Most twitter users shorten their urls using services such as tinyurl or bit.ly so the reader is actually clicking on a link without any concrete knowledge of what it is leading to. This increases the chances that the click is a mistake created by even the tiniest of ambiguity or based solely on reputation rather than the well recognised security of a human readable url. Additionally, you can make people visit a site many times over by using different tweets and different shortening urls. This repetition is itself a new sort of spam and is perpetuated by the plethora of affiliate marketers bombarding Twitter right now. And finally, there is of course the most basic deception of them all, say one thing, send them to another. It is wrong, but the traffic this can generate is vast.
So I can swell my traffic stats to a monumental ego bulging level. Great, I wake up in the morning and there we have it. Then I look a little closer; hang on these stats look a bit strange. So I cross check with other analytics applications and lo and behold I've been had. While my ego flies off like a balloon leaves the pin I sit there mouth open wondering why this has happened. So far for every 200 visitors I can generate through Twitter at LEAST 100 are bots. That is simply astonishing and I believe it is going to grow and grow as more and more search engines, harvesters, scrapers, automatons worm there way across the network. As a marketer this leaves me looking at my conversions thinking : "Am I really that bad a marketer? Is my product wrong for this market? My landing pages? knew I should have used the dark haired girl...Where did it all go wrong, I used to be such a smart young man..."
If the chalice is Twitter then its traffic is the poison. It is misleading, erratic, and uncertain. My advice is to tag every link you tweet so it easily separable from your search and ppc traffic. Start your performance reviews by boxing up your tagged Twitter traffic and placing it to one side until you have finished with the more genuine search and ppc traffic.
Additional: Google Analytics does a great job of removing bots from your stats, using server logs and many of the other analytics apps is a recipe for disaster, especially when sat next to conversions and sales.
The First BIG secret about Twitter and Search Marketing
There are many BIG things about Twitter today. Take its explosive growth. That's boring everyone to tears, including the commentators... like me. Take its massive impact in the world of journalism as it adds to the growing toolset that enables journalists to become even lazier. Who needs a press conference when Shaq just told us he thought Dwight Howard would never be the best center in Orlando on Twitter, right? 140 characters have never been so powerful. But there is so much going on with Twitter when it comes to Search Marketing.
On face value, the links inside Twitter are nofollow and no value. If you delve a little deeper the reality is those links are like seed carrying fruit. Such is the level of automated distribution and use of Twitter content that one link from one account may quickly appear on 5 other websites and from there spread wider and further and this is without the additional viral effects us marketers have loved to create over the last few years. Not only does this create traffic and backlinks but it serves as yet another way of ensuring our latest content is added to search engines.
If you want to see this in action do the following:
- Create a new page on one of your sites that is listed in Google's Webmaster tools.
- Tweet your page.
- Wait a day and go check the backlinks to the page and traffic sources. You will likely see your tweet mentioned, and several Tweet directory sites.
- After several more days you should find your url is listed on more sites.
To me, this alone makes Twitter as important as RSS feeds as a way of distributing your content and Twitter farms perhaps the King of link distribution - but that is for another day.
So there we have it, the first big secret. You can find more about this and more inside my free book. Go sign up now.
Where is Search Marketing?
I figured I would start off the site with a brief summary of where we are right now so as to provide a grounding for what will follow.
So where are we right now?
We have experienced about 5 years of a consistent search marketing rule set. The core values that have enabled a whole new industry to grow and thrive are now no longer the stuff of legend and myth but rather a mantra etched in stone for all to behold.
It is worth remembering however that to get here took an awful amount of time and research to first second guess then prove the way that the search engines find pages, index them and then rank them. This method of discovery for the marketing world is set to continue as no-one can foresee Google, Microsoft or any search engine company unveiling the secrets of their technologies.
Right now, the general approach to search marketing is seen as being a blend of the following:
- Backlinks
- Great Content
- Ping content/RSS/Sitemaps
- Good HTML
- PPC / Landing Page Quality Score
- Competitive Analysis
Inside this generic and well trodden approach the focus is on traditional web content. Back links from content in other websites, press releases, well written content all designed with predetermined keywords added at just the right densities and oh, just the run of the mill approaches. Now, don't get me wrong, even though this is a well trodden path the debates raging over duplicate content alone are enough to send you into a spiral of panic and terror as you repeatedly unlearn and learn the same stuff over and over but primarily the fundamentals remain throughout all search marketing approaches.
So that's where we are right now... oh that's right, it's not really is it. There's one more thing to cover in this first post before we move next time into the world of social media.
Since it really took off in 2007 sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and more have really acted as somewhat of a stepping stone in the evolution of search marketing and could provide a powerful insight into what we can expect from the impact of Twitter and perhaps Facebook.
What Digg et al provided was a way for people to bookmark interesting articles. This bookmark provided more than just a useful way of remembering a webpage - it served to rank the content. The thing that sparks my curiosity is that this method of content approval is rather similar to the back link / ranking rules. The more back links, the more important your site, the better the rank - at a fundamental level at least. How this relates to links in social media is something covered in my ebook and something I will go into in a little more depth in my next post.