What do Google's Changes Mean For Traffic Acquisition and CPA?

The first thing to say is that Google's recent decision to provide (or enforce?) end do end encryption across search queries will benefit SEO operations, traffic acquisition professionals, and the quality of information on the content.

In the long run.

In fact, a recent Website Magazine article agrees. As does the Keyword Cracker blog.It's actually quite hard to find someone (beyond the usual SEO scare-mongering tactics and anti-privacy activists moaning) who thinks otherwise.

By all means check out this article by the Keyword Cracker blog to get the full details of why it's such a big deal (and it is) but the basic skinny is this - nobody will ever know, going forward, what search terms brought a visitor to a specific page.

So, how will this affect your CPA?

In the world of Search, your CPA measurement (Cost per Acquisition) is more often than not linked to your AdWords spend. It's easy enough to see that, for a given search term, a certain number of visitors have been acquired, and that if you divide your total AdWords spend by that number , you have your first basic CPA metric.

Traffic Acquisition by regular organic search traffic, on the other hand, is more complex, as the CPA for that traffic now has to include the research component.

It's the ability to compare the two (organic and paid) that has changed. In fact, on the basis of keyword phrase analysis it's gone completely, and you can no longer figure out which the better tactic might be, or cross-pollinate from organic to paid search terms.

Tough.

How Does it Affect Traffic Acquisition?

In my opinion, it's just become a lot more fun again. we now can't look at organic search metrics to give us answers, and so, as an industry, we're going to go one of two ways. Back to keyword stuffing more or less at random (urgh), or towards quality content that counts (yay!).

If we bring value to our marketplace, we will acquire visitors, we won't be able to help it. If we acquire visitors, we will acquire customers for our clients. There are a whole lot of ways to add value to the content, and bring that content to the marketplace besides looking at marching figures of organic search metrics.

That's why it's going to become more fun - it will force us to become creative again. A byproduct will be content that enriches the marketplace, and forms lasting bonds; not just promote keywords to get high traffic numbers with little engagement.

Because, as we all know, the true CPA has to include a drop-off component, and reducing that increases efficiency, and hence brings the CPA down.

Don't thank me, thank Google.

Two Great Reasons Why You Should Be Buying Expired Domains

Expired domains can be found very easily using the DomainTools.com domain finder service. Those who are serious about traffic acquisition will already know their way around the various tools, but you may have overlooked this one.

It's called Dropping Names, and contains domain names that people don't want any more, or have no use for. A simple search yields a list of related names in a series of columns. The two that we're most interested in are:

• the domain name itself;
• the domain age.

Here's a quick reminder - the domain name must relate to your site, otherwise (a) these techniques won't work, and (b) you'll end up with irritated visitors.

So, pick a domain name that is relevant.

Someone Had It First

The first reason to buy an expired (or expiring) domain name is that someone had it, there are likely bookmarks pointing to it, and at the very least, it has some recognition. Plus, if you didn't have it, that's probably because you wanted it, but it wasn't available.

This could produce a trickle, or a flood of traffic, and is similar to the Revisitors.com philosophy.

Once the domain name has been purchased (probably in an auction, if it's any good), you will need to remember to update the 404 Page Not Found redirects to point to your own site. Otherwise, the bookmarks will fail, and you really want them to go to a page that contains quality links to your main site.

Authority Comes with Age

The second reason to purchase an expired domain name is age. A domain that has been around a while, and is relevant, can be linked to sites that haven't. Those sites can benefit from the Domain Age and rank more highly in search engine results pages.

This can also help to drive traffic towards your site, provided that all the other on- and off-page SEO principles have also been respected.

There are other reasons for buying up expired names, and other tools for finding them, but the process remains the same, and web real estate remains one of the more valuable components of a traffic acquisition strategy.

Website Traffic Flipping : The Traffic Acquisition Cookbook

This is one of the more expensive, but potentially one of the highest return, methods for increase quality traffic flow to a web site. It's lifted from the forthcoming Keyword Cracker Traffic Acquisition Cookbook, which contains (at the present count) eleven separate strategies for generating high volume, high quality traffic.

There are three steps to website traffic flipping:

• acquire the website;
• convert the traffic;
• integrate the site.

It's important to note that this is much like a company takeover in which a rival is purchased for the customer list, and other assets, and the two are eventually amalgamated. I don't personally like the term asset stripper, but if you're familiar with it, try to think of this as something of the same.

Acquiring the Website

This requires research, and verification. Low priced sites, such as Squidoo lenses can be found on the open marketplace, and I daresay that there are Wordpress blogs for sale as well.

They need to have a high volume of traffic, be turning a profit, and have high conversion rates. The high conversion rates are important, especially when measured for pages that rank highly for the keywords that your traffic acquisition plan is targeting, as you're paying for engagement rather than raw traffic and conversion.

Other assets include mailing lists and backlogs (pipelines) of un-published, quality blog posts. Be prepared to offer a bit more for these, as they are very valuable in the right hands.

Converting the Traffic

Sounds easy - all you need to do is put a link to your website in their list, right?

If that's all there was to it, then a simple Joint Venture would suffice. However, the reason that we're buying the site rather than just doing a JV is to have the control to be able to convert the traffic in a consistent and controlled manner.

It's a gradual process of re-education (of existing customers) and gently diverting them to the new site, where they are promised better quality resources and content, and better deals on purchases.

Integrating the Site

At a given point, all the existing affiliate links will be converted to yours, and the various back-links will have been upgraded to point to your own site; and the customers will be educated.

The final stage is to ensure a consistent look and feel by redirecting the URLs so that they point to content on your site, and gradually phase out, or move across, the acquired content.

This final stage is, in fact, optional, as you could choose simply to dispose of the acquired site, having converted the customers and re-deployed the key assets. This is the online equivalent of the asset stripping I spoke of earlier, and as I said, I'm not 100% keen on it.

But it does work, probably better online than in the real world.