If this was your first holiday season as an internet business owner you might have been surprised at what you saw. For some industries traffic and sales always spikes during the holiday season. For other industries you can see a big drop off in traffic and sales.
So if my traffic dropped, should I worry?
I wouldn’t worry at all if that is normal for your industry. If you don’t know what is normal for your industry then you should assume that a drop is normal. It is definitely not a time to panic. Just roll with the punches.
That is why we preach that you should focus on revenue per visitor because that is the thing that you can control. So in times of natural traffic fluctuation you just need to watch that number and you will be able to tell if you should worry.
For example, let’s say that I run a website that normally gets 30,000 visitors a month and the revenue per visitor is $0.50. Then I notice that during the holidays my traffic dropped to 15,000 visitors but my revenue per visitor is still $0.50. Yes I made less money because I had less traffic but losing holiday traffic was out of my control. I still converted the visitors I had at the same level.
So again the key number to focus on is not traffic but revenue per visitor. If you don’t see your traffic start to come back in January then you may want to make sure your search engine rankings are where they were before and compare other traffic sources as well to make sure you aren’t missing something.
1 comments On Did your traffic dip during the holidays?
I have a question for you and maybe you can write an article about it. I have noticed a dramatic drop in the cost to purchase keywords with Google Adwords since the beginning of the year. I’m not sure if it is due to the economic slowdown or the end of the holiday season or both.
This looks like a tremendous opportunity to buy traffic at a low cost. Many of the keywords that I was interested in were priced at $2 per click and are now $.10. In response to this, I have increased my online marketing budget and am enjoying the increase in traffic.
Also, Google has change the way keywords are purchased. A month ago, if your bidding price was to low, your keyword would show that it was disabled. But, now if your bid is low, it just says that your ad will not show on the first page. This change allows me to reduce my bids to very low and my ads are still shown.
Have you seen these things and what are you doing in response?