Traffic Cowboys - Driving Visitors to Your Website

Several years ago one of our customers was investigating ways to increase the traffic to their new website and so they did a web search and came across a company that guaranteed to increase the amount of traffic to their website and they were so confident that they could increase the traffic to any website that they offered a guarantee -- if we don't increase traffic then you don't pay us. Sounds great doesn't it? An increase of traffic to my website guaranteed... there has to be a catch. No, there was no catch, they did deliver on the amount of traffic and I'll talk about how they did it in a minute, but first my annoying question, "How many more sales will I make if I make this investment?" No one asked this question and that's where the traffic cowboys failed to deliver as expected, though they did deliver as advertised.

Here is how I explained this situation to a friend recently who came to me with a similar proposition from a consulting organization. You have a retail store, for this example assume it's a physical store, and you are situated right near a busy street with lots of foot traffic so you assume that your store will get lots of people dropping in, so many in fact that you won't have to advertise. But after the first couple of days you realize that you need to advertise and no sooner do you think this then two cowboys arrive with the promise that they will get you more traffic, guaranteed, all you have to do is pay them for each visitor they bring in -- no visitors, no pay. Seems like a great deal and being the crafty business person that you are you decide to wisely try before you buy. So on the first day of their services people just keep coming in the door and you are pleased that you decided to use their services and you watch as people come in and out of your store but none of them appear to be buying anything. So you go outside and you discover that the two cowboys are standing outside of your store with a detour sign sending customers into your store as they walk down the sidewalk. You are understandably not happy so you tell the cowboys to stop and they do and they come in to your store and are curious why you want them to stop driving traffic to your store and to which you reply that you want shoppers not traffic. Oh, they exclaim, you wanted shoppers not just traffic. Well they guaranteed traffic not shoppers, that's your job to sell them once they bring traffic to your store. They thank you for the money you owe them for driving traffic and move on to the next store.

Now, one more thing that came up during a conversation that I think is very salient to this example and something I hear all the time, but Chris I would notice right away if there was a problem and they have references and they have other customers so these other folks must be getting value from their services and also they wouldn't be in business for very long if their services didn't actually work. So let me dissect this argument because I hear it all too often and it drives the logical side of me insane.

I would notice if there was an issue...
In my physical store analogy you, the crafy business person, were able to step outside of your store and see the problem of the detour sign and you were able to fix it immediately, but what would have happened if you were not at the store and instead your minimum wage store helper was tending the store and instead you phoned in at the end of the day and asked how it went and your cheerful helper said that it was a great day and there were so many people and it was crazy. You might ask them how sales were and you would probably attribute any increase in sales to this campaign -- and if there was no increase you would probably discount it and rationalize that it might take some time, in fact they may even tell you that. If you weren't actually measuring the results of these transactions and weren't looking at them immediately you wouldn't see that there was a problem until much later in the engagement. In fact your sales might be going up because of the cowboys and so you would be happy, unless you started to actually measure the number of sales and the contribution to your margin that they made after subtracting the cost of the two cowboys, remember it's all about adding more to your financial bottom line.

Always verify customer references...
Clever sales people always ask for references as soon as they can and preferably in writing as they know that future prospects will trust other people more than they will trust the sales person and so they get references -- it's Sales 101 (I know this because I just took a Sales 101 course!). Most people trust what they are given and don't check references ... same for job references but that's another post. It might be that they are paying those references and it might be that they are providing a great service and nothing is wrong here. I'm not saying these folks are nefarious, crafty and untrustworthy but I am saying that you always need to check references and verify that the reference is relevant and credible (and not the guys brother -- it's happened to me before).

Most people don't measure...
Guess what, most people don't measure their marketing so if they see an increase in sales after employing the cowboys then they will naturally assume that it's because of the cowboys -- but they don't verify and they don't measure. So, they will have lazy customers who don't measure and they will make money for them and the trick here is that you can't be lazy in a situation like this, you have to measure because when we measured for one of our customers who went down this path they immediately discovered that indeed they were getting more traffic but not more shoppers and so they forced their cowboys to bring them more shoppers and paid based on shoppers until the cowboys dumped them. So this particular argument covers two things, their references may not measure and thus are blind to the actual performance, at least for now, and two, they will continue to make money from all of the folks that are not measuring until they measure and so they will get as many as they can as quickly as they can and either figure out more services to keep these customers or just keep adding and dropping customers until they find something else to do.

So, did you figure out what happened to the customer I referenced at the start of this post? We put in place tracking mechanisms to actually track and measure the performance of their cowboy campaign, actually we did this several months after they had engaged their cowboys, and the results were abysmal. They took our data back to the cowboys and confronted them about it and they, the cowboys, swore that they would improve the quality of the traffic but instead came back to our customer and asked for a reference first and in return they would give them a discount on their upcoming improved visitor generator that was guaranteed to drive not just visitors but shoppers! Our customer declined and instead told them to shape up or ship out and so off into the sunset the cowboys rode.

Oh, in case you are curious, what is the equivalent of a detour sign on the Internet? Well one of the groups that we encountered would buy domain names as soon as they expired and immediately put a redirector page on the domain that pointed to our client's website. Here is the problem though, in one case the domain they bought was for a defunct historical society and so the people that were visiting the historical society were shocked to discover that their final destination wasn't the society but instead an e-commerce retailer selling something completely unrelated to their destination and so the bounce rate was nearly 100%... but not 100% so every once in a while someone would buy something, but since they were paying per visitor the conversion ratio was horrible and so the actual cost at first seemed very low but in fact was actually higher than other methods. So imagine if you went to a store and when you opened the door it was another store and a completely unrelated store at that, would you stay, probably not, unless coincidentally they sold something you needed.

Have a question or comment, email me, chris@xmodus.com.