Forum Moderators: buckworks
We do Adwords, Overture etc... and our budgets have gone up during the last 2 months. We get about 1000-1200 uniques a day
Is there a possibility that our competitors are running click-farms agains us? Is this stat something to be worried about or is it normal?
BTW, our front-end is flash-based .. can that be any reason?
Any help will be highly appreciated. thanks!
It has been steadily increasing and last 3-4 days
Now that fact says it's a new phenomenon, so it isn't the Flash which I assume was in place all along. It's also not the accuracy of the stat, which I assume has always been measured the same way. Unless ... some new form of traffic is now coming along -- could this be rogue bots that aren't being filtered out of your user numbers? A prominent new link or redirect from a busy site that is a poor target to your business?
Also, it's been a few weeks. I wonder if this new trend has continued.
The phenomenon has reduced back to 53.1% "customers leaving the site in 30 seconds or less". We have not made any changes what so ever on our site.
This I believe is a dramatic improvement over what we witnessed about 15-20 days back.
... and we are getting more an more anxious about the effectiveness of google's/ yahoo ad programs - which seem to be our major source of hits.
Just to report back.
That's not a report - it's a meaningless figure. Is that 53.1% across the entire site? For the home page? Where are they coming from? Paid searches, organic, or links? Look back at my last post in this thread. I have a feeling that the 53.1% is across all pages on your site (I may be wrong, but you haven't specified). What are your problem pages? How are people getting there? Are you running specific paid searches (i.e. "xyz widget") that bring people to your home page instead of the xyz widget page? (if so, 53.1% or even 80% abandonment would be GREAT). More than HALF of your traffic doesn't think you are worth anything more than a quick glance. Something is still wrong and the answer is in your logs.
Same is true online, it is not easy to get folks to stay. If you got 40% sticking around... that is not too bad.
And like many previous have mentioned, some folks will simply bookmark and come back later.
If you are still dead-set on improving that number... try evaluating your search engine. Do you have one and does it work well? Also, is your site overloaded with ads? That can be a big turnoff.
Good luck!
Could it be click fraud? Maybe. But then again, maybe you should be looking at the quality of your PPC campaigns.
And, yes, personally, I would be alarmed by that abandonment rate/time on any page.
If you think about it like shopping in the mall, if you got 40% of the folks walking by to stop in your store for longer than 30 seconds, I would consider that very successful.
That analogy doesn't work since these people came into the store. So if you had a retail mall store that had 60% of the people walk through the front door, take a quick walk around and then leave, you would have a very serious problem.
And I have done sites where there were no skip intro links, because I wanted the intro to be viewed.
Do you force that on repeat visitors too? UGH.
We had a similar thing happen a while back - and it turned out that we had mispelled a Google Adwords keyword that had NO relation to what we sell - so people would click it, and see it was not what they wanted, and immediately leave.
But we get a lot of that anyway - we sell solar electric systems - which has NO relation to things like the "solar system" (ie, planets and stuff), but we still get hits from it. In our Adwords etc we have negative keywords and phrases for stuff like that, but you can't do much about it when it appears in a standard search.
And just for the record, I don't think that Flash has any place in the INTRO part of an ecommerce website. Fine for optional viewing, short tutorials and intros, etc, but I detest it when I am forced to wait for some Flash to download. And then reload every time I use the BACK button on my browser...
