So I'm trying many new marketing techniques but I think one of my biggest problems may just boil down to that my pages are not setup very well to turn someone coming into the website, take that person and let them go through registration & validation and to posting within a matter of minutes and keep that user around. I can't seem to get this to work, any help would be appreciated! I've tried vB welcome headers, but no avail with that. Working Digg/Stumble traffic at the moment and trying to market via those means, SEO is coming along with more & more traffic being driven in through Search Engines (top 5 referrers being direct & Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN. Any advice will be appreciated and looked into, please don't nit pick about a lot of banners since that's being worked out. My URL is www.ironmass.com Thanks, Josh
Maybe your have'nt "targeted" your market. StumbleUpon get traffic but it very un-targeted. You have to STOP those stumblers in thier tracks and grab them with words they can't resist to get them to your site. Just start thinking "target market". Hope this helps. -all4one
Not sure what keywords your going after and what is showing up for your site. Best thing is to make sure site is listed for correct keywords for users. I see alot of posts so you are getting people to use site.
What is your current conversion rate for each part of that funnel (register, validate, post)? If you don't know what they are, then set up Google Analytics, and set up a conversion tracking for each step. Tracking your conversion rate will help you know when your site is underperforming despite traffic. Sometimes more traffic isn't always the answer. If you can track and nail a good conversion rate this can help more than increasing traffic. Knowing exactly where they are dropping off can help you a lot. For example, are they dropping off at the validate portion? If so, it may be an email issue, double check your emails, they could be hitting spam filters, not going out, the formatting could be confusing, etc. If the conversion rate is pretty steady all the way through, then you know you will need to look at the registration process. Sometimes the captchas are so difficult that people just give up. Take a look at your anayltics, are you losing them on this page? Play with the captcha (if you can) and see if there is a change. If there aren't any issues with the process then you will need to more to get them to register. Perhaps some type of free fitness ebook, free fitness recipes, fitness tracking software, etc, when they register.... I don't know what a typical conversion rate is for a forum. But to give you an idea, for retail sites 1-2% is considered pretty solid. The leading retail conversions are around 12-14% (Amazon, Lands End). But that is comparing apples to oranges . Hang in there, you will find it, and when you do, the time and effort will pay off. You are on the right track, conversions are everything. You may want to do a search for "conversion optimization" for ideas, tips and tricks. Morty
Direct is my best traffic conversion, at .57% for registration. Yahoo converts better at .42% and .17% for Google. This is all from Analytics (as included into pages by vBSEO). For the week I'm at 26 registrations, which is less than 1% conversion rate (based on traffic) but this also includes already registered members browsing the forum. 70% of my traffic is returning visitors, so breaking this down even further with New vs Returning ... New Visitor 1,440 Pageviews 5.58 Pages/visit 1.18% Registration 0.35% New Thread 3.26% New Post I guess I'm not really losing people, but the 1.18% rate just seems staggering low. I'm not getting much traffic from StumbleUpon right now, most of my new traffic is coming via SE's. I'm going to have to buckle down and start watching my keywords from SE's and my ranking in searches, I've never done that since it's a LOT of work. Going to have to get used to the DP Keyword Tracker. Anyone had luck with the floating Div's that stay in the middle of the screen for say, 30 seconds, with the welcome headers/etc?
What is the conversion rate for each step in your registration process? Ie. vistiors compared to registration page registration page compared to "submit" submit compared to completed verification verification to first post. I know this stuff is boring, but your sign up process may be broken or need significant improvement, and if you don't know/track each step in your funnel, then you will never know if the issue is the process or the marketing. And its best to have a handle on this before you spend money and effort on marketing. Otherwise you risk a lot more money and time at marketing than you may need to. For example, if you have a huge drop off at the verification email stage, it may be worth it to send a reminder email 1 day later, rather than spending money buying links. Hopefully this makes sense Morty
Funnels are a way to describe the shape of a conversion process (whether is be sales, registration, email sign ups, etc) for any action you want your customer to take. Here is the google analytics help page on conversions and funnels: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26797&topic=8153 (I am not endorsing google analytics, but it is free and a good place to start if you want to start tracking the funnel). In theory, if your web site is performing optimally (meaning converting visitors to customers, or visitors to registrations at a good rate), and all things being equal, your funnel should hold the same conversion rate (roughly) no matter what the traffic. If you track funnels / conversion rates, it will make it easier to determine what marketing efforts are having an impact. If you conversion rate is low or the process is broken and you don't know this, then you may end up spending more money on marketing than you may need to (or not at the right audience). Sometimes increasing traffic is not the answer to increased revenue. For example, lets say you want folks to register for a newsletter, and you do things by the book so you send a confirmation email before adding them to your subscribe list. If your confirmation email to verify registration is getting caught up in spam filters, or has a typo in the URL, spending money and time on getting more traffic may not be the best use of your money. If you monitor/track your funnel, you should be able to easily tell when something is off. It can help flag you if you need to look at what is happening on your side (maybe your email server went down and you didnt know it). Something like this would show a huge impact on your conversion rates/funnel. If it is always steady, then you know that marketing for more traffic is where you need to spend your time. And then you can use your funnels to determine what marketing efforts return the best ROI. Morty
jmort, I took a screen capture but all of the registrations were completed. Even went through to check if all clicked their email validation, and all had done so. But out of those 26 new registrations, only about 8 of them had even made a single post. 3 or 4 had made more than 5 posts. I guess it's not that bad afterall, but I still need to figure out a way to get these people active. I don't know what more to do, run contests and activity goes for the duration of the contest than putters off a day or two later. I don't know what more I can do.
Ok, that's great. You know your conversion rate and your funnels. That is half the battle. So now you want to work on increasing that 30% rate from registration to post to over 50%. It always costs more to acquire a customer than to keep one. So you want to figure out how to improve their post rates because you have already acquired them. Once you nail this down, your website will be humming strong. If they have opted in for emails , you may want to work on an email campaign to remind them about interesting posts (you know something to lure them into posting), or offer them a contest. Play with it (and track it) to see what works. Maybe divide those folks into 2 groups (do what is called an A/B test). One group you just "remind them" or send them interesting posts, the other group you offer a contest. See which group gives you the best response (or best bang for the buck). Once you nail that down, you are all set to try different marketing campaigns. Because you know that on your web site, your conversions are streamlined. If you can, it may be worth it to see if the people who did post, posted to a particualar topic area , if so, this maybe a good hot topic area to promote or to include in email campaigns,etc. When you are ready to expand on the marketing, you should take advantage of your forum and run a poll to see what other web sites your members visit, topic interests, etc they visit. You can then try advertising on those sites to bring in traffic. Morty
I think the biggest thing I could do would be to install a email reminder for users of new threads (or that they hadn't posted in X days), but I can't find that plugin for vB 3.5.4. I don't want to upgrade to 3.6 since all my hacks are 3.5 based and my site works fine the way it is, plus that's $40 to upgrade I don't have. I'll have to play with that some, break some users into 2 usergroups sharing about the same activity/posts, etc. between the users then seeing which method works better between the two groups, then focus my means on that method.
If you can afford it, consider giving away something like an iPod or a magazine subscription (or anything else related to your niche) at random to a new member that signs up and makes a few posts.