So a couple of weeks ago I was happily performing my morning routine. Tea, Jim Jams, and Stats (Oh what bliss!). I was starting my day with a quick potter around Google Analytics.
“I’ll just check yesterdays traffic on my lingerie site” I muttered.
I was confronted with this: -
“Goodness.” I remarked. “Where the hell has that come from?” This site usually gets 800 to 1100 UV’s a day, of which 600 to 700 is from PPC so I wondered what had ocurred.
“F***!!” I remarked.
“F***!! F***!! F***!!” Shouted my friends three year old son from the spot where he’d sneakily concealed himself in one of my oversized beanbags *oops*
After a short bout of de-programming for the child I was back at my computer. It transpired that it was not in fact paid traffic (thank god) but that I’d gotten a bit of a namecheck and link from a really huge Finnish site for one of my pages.
As you’ll see, my link was at the bottom of the page and they’d linked to the Adwords click ID also. (If anyone can tell me what the hell this site is about I’d appreciate it - I gathered the page was about Miraclesuit swimwear!)
“Ohhhh!!” I thought. “Wrong language, but maybe I’ll have hundreds of sales. Woo hoo!!”
My head full of dreams about riches beyond my wildest avarice, I off trot to check my sales stats. And guess what the massive figure was? NADA!! ZIP. HEE HAW! In total I got about 4,500 visitors through that link over the next 2 to 3 days. Not a sale in sight. I was SO disappointed!
*sigh* I suppose the moral of the story is that high traffic volume doesn’t always mean huge sales. It has to be relevant traffic, right market etc. Oh well, maybe one day I’ll get that link from a major UK site and score thousands of sales. Until then…. back to the internet coalface to do it the hard way!
June 4th, 2008 at 8:08 am
it’s a nice, comfortable coalface though!
June 4th, 2008 at 9:55 am
No idea what it says - couldn’t quite get past the pictures
Still a nice little inbound link. How long did the de-programming take and will your friend be calling round again?
June 4th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Heh he he… yeah, affiliating isn’t such a bad life and it seems like its a good incoming link if the traffic was anything to go by!
Deprogamming went quite quick. Apparently I’m not the first to set him off on a bit of an unintentional swearathon.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
hmmm. had that conversation a few times with my daughters
Out of interest, do Google still bill you for those and if so, do they refund ?
June 4th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Same here! I had the same experience on my site over 2 week period 3 very large spikes about the same level. Have I had anything else since nutta! Have found the best traffic is the natural organic type which is slim for me, that sounds so healthy!
Would be interested to hear from other bloggers of success coming from social media sites, or is it just large waves crashing in with no real ride..
June 4th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Not quite the same thing but I have found StumbleUpon to be the social network that brings in the most traffic (per post) but the conversion rate seems really sensitive to what gets listed and how. A single stumble usually seems to bring me in about 100 or so visitors in the day or two after I post, but the conversions on that have varied between 0% and well north of 4%. I’m still trying to figure out the magic formula though….
As for the mtv3 site - I think it’s just the Scandis pointing out how much better looking they are….
June 5th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Daniel - It showed up on analytics as PPC traffic, but in my Adwords account it was all fine. Gave me a bloody fright mind you, but I have reasonable campaign daily limits so I knew before I logged in that the figure couldn’t be right!
James & Matt - I’ve never really met anyone that got a huge amount of sales from a fortuitious listing somewhere on a website or social media site. But it must have happened to someone!!
June 6th, 2008 at 9:13 am
I had a similar experience the other end of the scale once just after I signed up for Google analytics, after two weeks of it collecting traffic it was telling me I only had around 30 visits from google paid traffic and since I was spending around $400 a week I was quite concerned about this. Spent ages looking into why my site was not working and where my visitors were going.
Turned out I had put it on an index page exclusive include and most of my ppc traffic was going to an internal page.
Doh!
June 6th, 2008 at 10:37 am
I’ve had a few big spikes in traffic from Stumbleupon and not only do they not result in affiliate sales, they don’t result in Adsense clicks either! Stumbleupon Shmumbleupon. Give me slow and steady any day.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
The internet can really create lot of expectations, but the best thing to do is to stay on the ground, and look at the facts and not ” what could been” , sorry man for disappointment!
June 9th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Google Translate to the rescue…
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mtv3.fi%2Fhelmi%2Fmuoti%2Fartikkeli.shtml%3Fmuoti-trendit-uimapuvut&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=fi&tl=en
Looks like some sort of survey about what women wear to the beach
June 10th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Most people who attempt to make money with their blogs don’t succeed for three reasons:
Unrealistic Expectations, Poor Planning, No Marketing.
You dont appear to fall into any of those categories. Maybe the Finns are just tight??