At SEOmoz, our biggest goal is to convert readers into regular visitors. Luckily, through our Indextools tracking software, we're able to see exactly where our signups come from and what search terms and referring domains tend to bring the highest converting traffic. Here's a couple quick examples:
The above chart shows keywords that people came to SEOmoz with, the number of first time vs. returning visitors and the number of actions (in this case, a signup on the blog) those visitors performed. It's clear from these numbers that the best search traffic for SEOmoz comes from visitors searching for our specific site/brand and for SEO tools, although I'm happy to see that visitors searching for "SEO" also convert at reasonably high rates.
The next chart looks at conversions by referring domains, and shows some fascinating data:
I know I pulled a long list here, but I wanted to illustrate a few important points.
Notice that forums like Digitalpoint, SearchEngineWatch, SEOChat and Sitepoint send relatively good traffic, and they're in near direct correlation to my personal participation (and the participation of existing SEOmoz members) at those sites. SEW forums is where I was most active (and probably most visible, since they're closely tied in with the SES conference series). SEOChat and Sitepoint have fewer members that I personally know and connect with, and are lower on the list.
SEOcompany sends us trafifc primarily to the tools, some of which require a signup and hence, the signup ratio is high.
Social media sites like Digg and Del.icio.us are on the list, but the conversion rates from these are terrible (though Del.icio.us is nearly 5X the rate of Digg). Stumbleupon is the worst of the bunch, at 0.03%, but I'm actually surprised it's not even lower, since Stumblers aren't neccessarily in the web sphere, while Diggers generally are more webdev-focused.
The sites where rates are above 10% are generally sites that have pointed to a particular post (or a few) and send relatively passionate visitors who feel inspired to comment. There's also a few that have pointed directly to the KW Difficulty tool, where signup is required.
One of my favorites on the list is videos.webpronews.com, which comes directly from my interview of Vanessa Fox during my stand-in for Michael McDonald. It's one of the highest conversion rate links and yet it points to the site as a whole, rather than a specific post or tool, meaning those visitors had to at least skim through the site and join up - a very encouraging sign that I need to interview Googlers more often :)
The other big referrers are mostly blogs and personal homepages - the blogs in particular (Copyblogger, Stuntdubl, SEOBook) are worthy of attention, as this is the most likely audience to convert to SEOmoz readers, since they're already in the mindset of reading blogs.
If you take the above technique and apply it to conversion pieces on your own site - whether they be signups or form submissions, add to cart actions, checkouts or ad clicks, you can get an incredibly good idea of where your best visitors come from. Conversion data offers even more than what I've shown above - you can refine by entry points, pages viewed, countries, languages, browsers, number of visits and more. I believe that action tracking is one of the most valuable things we do, both for our own sites and for our clients and it's one of the best techniques any website can use to improve their marketing foci.
If you've got examples of action or conversion data that you've used in the past, I'd love to hear about it.
p.s. The above charts come from the last few months of 2006 (prior to that, we hadn't engaged action tracking).
Fascinating info! That's really interest about differing conversion rates between Digg and Delicious. I would have guessed the other way around.
Great post and thanks as always for sharing.
It's amazing how much information is at our fingertips. Even with just "standard" stats programs, let alone complex analytic setups. It's part of what makes this such an incredible medium.
It's so easy though to just pass a quick glance over the stats and leave it at an "oh, that's nice, that's interesting, okay, back to work."
I think you hit a good point here with taking even the "where'd they come from" referrer information to a higher level. Looking at that traffic based on the "perceived demographic" is excellent... traffic coming from other highly-focused, topical bloggers are "most likely audience to convert to SEOmoz readers."
I think this, in itself, is a great tip... to look and think about this traffic more deeply.
Rand, that's fascinating data - thanks for sharing it.
What I think is the most interesting is how some of the referrers result in 30% to 40% conversion rates. Amazing! I take it that these are based on really strong recommendations.
My blog Yclick.it recently got recommended in someone else's blog. Their blog was subsequently recommended by a bigger blog. And our subscribers doubled!
It really taught me about quality when it comes to link - there's nothing like a link that carries a recommendation with it.
Rand,
Interesting post! I have been working on a larger "visitor engagement metric" over in my weblog (https://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog) and I've used a similar concept to define a Brand Index. The idea is that visitors who come to your site directly (e.g., typing in "www.seomoz.org" directly into the browser) or visitors who are searching for well-branded search terms (e.g., "Rand Fishkin" or "seomoz") are already at least partially engaged with your site, brand, or products.
The engagement metric is more than just search and referrers but I'd love to get your take on the metric if you have time. You can read about the metric in this post:
https://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/...
Eric T. Peterson
Hi Rand,
Inspired by your post - and adding to this that it is an unbelievable nice and sunny day here in Budapest, I have a few comments that might be of value to your SEOmoz community. And of course; because I just like playing around with the analytics tool : )
I agree with you on the fact that one of the most important “features” that you just have to set up is “Action Tracking”. And I think it is really exciting to see how your Referrer Domains converts. However; I think adding just another level to this report (as you yourself add assumptions to why it is that the conversion differ so much) could be quite valuable in how one choose to optimize.
So making a filtered report; using “action tracking” on “most popular pages” – and then segment this by the top “Referring domains”, we will get a conclusion on which pages/posts/tools contribute the most towards conversion per Referring Domain.
Doing this we will discover and conclude that some pages works well for new SIGNUPS from specific referring domains and those very same pages does not work as well or at all on other visits from other referring domain. (I’d love to post a couple of good examples here, but can of course not go into details in public with your data Rand) - A conclusion which I assume you are OK with - is that we can see that the SEOmoz website generates the most SIGNUPS with the participation from specific (now known) pages for a certain type of traffic (referring domains).
And as with all Analytics; it should drive action. This said; one could conclude, for increased SIGNUPS, that having two or more versions of your “tools” would be an appropriate action of this analysis. AND we know which tools to do this on and we know which referring domains should see which version of the tool and we can see that the split is typically between what I would consider a novice users and an expert users.
Another fun discovery is that the positive converting referring domains mentioned. (I hope it’s OK once again that I comment on them)
DigitalpointSearchEngineWatch BlogSearchEngineWatch ForumsSEOChatSitepoint
e.g. The page “SEOmoz | Page Strength SEO Tool” ONLY works as a participator for signups for 3 of the 5 domains above; it does not really participate at all in two of them. The audience can take a wild guess on which two referring domains does not use the “Page Strength SEO Tool”
There are actually a lot more conclusions to make out of this - so I bookmarked the report under: “Important pages for signup conv. by ref. Domains” – under this description: “Which pages participates the most towards SIGNUP conversion, listed by top referring domains”
I have a couple exciting screenshots as well; I can email them to you if you want.
Hope to see you in London in a couple of weeks Rand.
Cheers. :-)
Dennis R. MortensenCOO, IndexTools
Index is a great analytics program. For most of my clients I still use Google Analytics, but I have an Index tools reseller account as well. Nice to see the conversion data, I would like to know how much time in total you put in to maintaining the website and if you would be better off using all that time and resources elsewhere. I'll be following your blog.
Good post Rand.
AND.....first comment on new site!!!!
Boo-yah!
Thanks as always for sharing your data.
How much of the referrer traffic though is repeat visits? As an example StumbleUpon. I agree it's going to lead to low conversions since many of the stumblers weren't targeted when they landed here.
But if someone has shown an interest in SEOmoz posts they've found in the past they'll likely be directed here more often. Wouldn't it make sense to think many of those stumblers are repeat visitors and so the real conversion rate is higher.
Same for most of the sites that would send repeat traffic. I would think most people who are SEO Book, Stuntdubl, and CopyBlogger readers are already SEOmoz subscribers.
Have you separated out first time and repeat visitors? That might give a better picture of the conversions for referring domains.
The examples using SEOMOZ as a keyword and as a referrer should and would normally be the highest - these are likely to be people who are already familiar with the blog.
The stats however are not showing the frequency of returns among those visitors.
Are these visitors who sign in on very rare occassions after the first time or are they very frequent sign ins and returninf visitors.
Besides SEOMOZ what are the other terms and referrals are bringing in the those types of frequent visitors.
And why are people putting in SEOMOZ as a searchterm? Why not just type in the URL in the browser?
SEW - If you study user behavior on the web at all, you'll see a constant pattern of people who use search engines as navigational devices. In nearly every usability test I've been involved in, a great number of the participants, when asked to navigate to a URL, simply type it into the engines. It's why the top queries at engines always contain "www.myspace.com" and "ebay.com," too. People use search engines as their preferred method of navigation.
Absolutely. I've seen this even sitting down with clients. Another reminder that it is often good to let them do the driving.
It becomes very easy to forget that most users aren't like "us." In some cases, their interactions with browsers and understanding of different concepts is a little behind, and other times it is light years behind.
Even more important to remember this when looking over stats when you aren't watching someone type in something.
Rand, love the stats - I wouldn't be broken up about Digg, Del.ico.us and Stumbleupon, though. They're good for links, right? ;)
In all seriousness - great info, i think we agree more than disagree. Plus, I can't dispute the conversion rates for your visitors who come to my site.
Matt - exactly, the traffic for conversions is exceptionally low quality, but for links, it's much higher in both raw numbers and quality (particularly unique-ness) than almost every other source.
Rand, I noticed that digg (among others) was listed twice. Did you combine those numbers in your analysis?
Yep - they're pretty much the same, just the "www" and non versions.
About the eBay forums thing - tons of eBay store owners (like me) are leaving eBay because of fee hikes and poor management. Many of them come by the eBay forums, looking for info on how to open their own webstores. Naturally, they are concerned with driving traffic to their new stores and know almost nothing about SEO.
So, I've been posting links to your SEO Beginner's Guide and other resources in the eBay forums for a couple of months now. I've had several sellers email me to comment on the fantastic info here. You are helping lots of people break free from eBay!
Now that you have this data, what next? Profiling conversion groups and spending more time on them?