Using Type-In Traffic as part of your Traffic Acquisition Strategy

Sometimes technology comes full circle, and it was only a matter of time before type-in traffic found it's way to the top of the list of inbound marketing and traffic acquisition strategies. Those of us with reasonably long memories find it reassuringly familiar, but others might find the following explanation useful.

Image courtesy of Suwit Ritjaroon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The story begins with AOL, in the 1990s, then one of the largest, if not the largest ISP, online publishing network, forum host, portal and community, and, importantly, a suite of online access software, including a dial-up adapter and browser.

If you're used to broadband and always-on Internet access, you'll be a bit shocked to learn that, in the past, AOL users had to use a special piece of software to connect their computer to AOLs computer, using a dial-up modem, before launching AOLs browser. This then gave the access to AOLs so-called "walled garden online community" as well as (for an extra fee, if they had any sense) regular web sites.

One of the features of AOL were a set of some 5,000 keywords which gave users short-cuts to various corporate-run forums and user-groups. There were even television and radio adverts that would quote their AOL keywords, rather than the now-ubiquitous URL.

Companies would buy these keywords to drive traffic from AOL users to their forums or web sites, and the more cunning ones would buy up related keywords in the hope of grabbing a share of the traffic from users typing in keywords that sounded likely to yield a useful resource.

If that sounds familiar, then it should.

After all, users of any of the mainstream browsers (Chrome, IE, Firefox, etc.) will have encountered this phenomenon almost every time they type an address in the bar. How many of us have just typed in a word, trademark, or company name, knowing that Google, Bing, Yahoo or any of their distant cousins may well lead us right to where we want to be?

Taking advantage of so-called type-in traffic for traffic acquisition merely requires that you identify the keywords that help define your product, and then buy a domain name that matches, making sure that you avoid trademark infringement in the process.

Some webmasters will just redirect the traffic to the appropriate section of their main site, whereas others will display advertising billboards of related adverts from the likes of AdSense or other networks.

Either way, if you grab a good domain name, preferably an expired one that once housed a relevant competing or complementary product or service (and activate intelligent 404 redirects as well), this can be a cost-efficient way to snare some highly targeted inbound traffic.

Sidebar - In researching this article, I found the original 1996 AOL Keywords book, listing and organising all 5,000 of them on Amazon. It's worth a trip to the site (disclosure, that's an affiliate link, you buy and I profit but we've all got to eat, right?) just to see the price tag, and read the most recent review from 2010. Read that again - a book about the Internet that's still relevant to someone 14 years after it was originally published may well be a record.

Leverage this Traffic Acquisition Technique to Make Your Fortune

Of all the different traffic acquisition techniques we talk about on this blog there's one we don't spend a lot of time on, because it is perhaps the most expensive to pull off. In fact, as traffic acquisition strategies go, it's not exactly common, but it certainly works, but will usually cost substantially more than SEO, social marketing or just buying other people's traffic.

The technique itself is pretty simple : find someone who's offering could integrate with your own, and buy them out. Predatory companies like Google, Facebook and even relative newcomer Twitter have all acquired a number of different, yet related services.

(According to Wikipedia, Google's bought over 100 start-ups, Twitter nearly 30, and Facebook around 10.)

Considering most of my readers don's have a  spare $40 million in their back pocket, it may seem like a strange topic for the blog, but here's the rub : what happens if you're on the other side?

Show Me The Money

The process can be broken down as follows:

• find a predatory market leader in a domain that you have skills in;
• set up a service that is complimentary, and valuable to their users;
• allow users to sign up for free, monetize via adverts if need be;
• generate social noise;
• get bought.

I'll admit that re-reading that in black and white it feels a bit naive, but looking over the hundreds of high-tech acquisitions that have gone on over the last 10 years or so, one can't help wondering if, sometimes, very clever people haven't just adopted the above five step process.

At the very least, you'll learn a lot about traffic acquisition as you try to build up the service so that it hits the radar of your target predator. For that alone, it ought to be worth a shot!

Testing Gmail Open and Click Through Rates

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Email is a great tool to use in traffic acquisition; it's a way to get existing customers to come back, as well as providing a way to communicate with your market.

However, to make sure that your effort is being rewarded, you do need to make sure that you are measuring its effectiveness.

There are two key measures for this:

• Open rates
• CTR

Of course, you'll want to add conversion to this, as well, but since that requires tracking more than just the email, it's outside the scope of this article.

How to Measure Open Rates

The classic way to measure open rates is to track the number of times an image included in the mail is downloaded from your server. To try this out, create an image and upload it to a specific folder, and give it a specific name.

Then, send yourself an email, with the image linked to (i.e. not sent with the email, but provided as part of an HTML message), and open it in your email client.

What you should see is that the image is downloaded from the web site, and subsequently, since you know how many emails you sent (1) and how many times the image was viewed (1), the open rate is 100%.

On the other hand, if you send the email to someone and they delete it without opening it, then the open rate will begin to fall.

What is it testing? Your subject line. If it's not compelling, the email won't be opened.

Of course, this also only works for HTML email. If the receiver only ever reads plain text, then it isn't going to work; which is where the CTR comes in.

How to Measure Click Through Rates

The CTR, or Click Through Rate, measures how compelling the email was that someone actually bothered to click on a link to follow through to the web site being advertised or offer being made.

The simplest way to measure it is to use a bitmark (from Bitly.com, or a Goo.gl link) and simply track the number of clicks.

Of course, there's going to be a confusion for people with text only email clients, who will likely see the "Can't read this email, click here" text and then use that to show the original email. So, it's important to have two pages set up on the web server:

• the original email
• the offer itself

The first page should, of course, link to the offer page. While the results might be a bit skewed, it's better than nothing.

Gmail Changes Complicate Matters

Now, Gmail has introduced image caching for email. This means that although email users will be able to see images in their email faster, and without specifically asking for them, it's going to play havoc for measuring traffic acquisition through email.

For a start, the open rates are going to be so unreliable that you should disregard gmail recipients from the open rate calculations.

Then, you will need to pay a lot more attention to the CTR and display rates, probably by adding counters on the two pages mentioned above, and adding them specifically to custom Experiments and Goals in Analytics.

It's not the disaster that many seem to be suggesting, but it does make testing and tracking traffic acquisition through email marketing a little more complex for list managers with a large number of gmail recipients.