Continue reading »]]> Last night, Mike and I were sitting in the office discussing traffic to our website for our two upcoming auctions.  They both are doing well.  However, in the conversation, I noted to him that for the past 30 days, search engines have sent 51.75% of our traffic, 16.71% has come from referring sites, and the remaining 23.40% has come from direct visitors to our site.

That peaked my interest, and this morning I decided I’d take a look at the numbers for 2008 year-to-date.  The results surprised me a bit:  33.61% direct traffic, 25.64% referring sites, and 40.75% search engines (google makes up 35.08% of the total or 86% of all search engine traffic).  The results got me to thinking.

In a typical advertising campaign, we expend 90% of our ad dollars to generate the 33.61% direct traffic, and 10% to generate the referring sites traffic, and 0% to generate the search engine traffic.  Yet the results seem to show a completely different result than what one might expect.  Note, realize I’m generalizing this over the year to date numbers.  In a typical year we are running about 20 active marketing campaigns (about two weeks in length each, with some overlap), and the other weeks we are running passive marketing campaigns.

I’m wondering if we kicked the advertising spend around a bit, say 80%, 10%, and 10%, if we’d see increased traffic to our website?  I’m guessing we’d see increased traffic.  I’m wondering if that traffic would convert to a respectable ROI.

Increasingly, as general newsprint becomes less influential, and web becomes more influential, and specifically web searches, it is going to be important for small companies to make the transition.  Now, it shouldn’t be an overnight, immediate shift.  However, a slow steady trend to 10% advertising directed at the search engine traffic that generates 40.75% of our traffic would be beneficial to our company and companies of similar size.