Posted on December 27, 2008 by admin

If you operate a commercial web site you know that how many visitors you get can be a key factor in your success. You may well spend a lot of time and money on getting visitors to your web site.

But do you spend as much time trying to make better use of the traffic you already get ?

You will be among a tiny minority if your answer is YES !

To most webmasters, website owners and marketers getting more traffic from the search engines has become the holy grail and a virtual obsession. Countless schemes, reports and articles are written about ways to increase traffic, but far less is ever said about getting more from existing traffic.

Let me try to illustrate my point with a particular scenario. Assume by spending 15 hours a month we get 1,000 extra visitors to our site at a cost in our time of $750.

Or alternatively we use Pay Per Click at an average cost of $0.75 per click to get 1,000 extra visitors to our site, at a monthly cost of $750.

If 2 out of every 100 visitors sent to the landing page buy our $100 product those 1,000 visitors would provide 20 more orders valued at $2,000. That gives us a net gain of $2,000 – $750 or $1,250 per month after deducting advertising costs. Over 3 months the net return would be $3,750.

Instead of spending on traffic promotion let’s assume we use the same $750 per month for landing page optimization over a period of 3 months.

Of the existing visitors assume 1,000 are presented with an optimized landing page which enables us to generate 50 orders, that’s 30 more orders than would have resulted from the current un-optimized web page.

Those 30 extra orders, worth $3,000 would give a net gain of $3,000 – $750 or $2,250 per month after deducting the cost of landing page optimization. Over 3 months the net return would be $6,750, which is $3,000 more than from traffic promotion.

So, if we compare the net gain from traffic promotion versus landing page optimization using the figures shown, landing page optimization clearly produces the better return and more profit.

With different numbers one could argue the results might not prove the case for landing page optimization, but there is nothing special about the figures.

One other important consideration and benefit to landing page optimization is that unlike traffic promotion, you don’t continue to pay for it month after month. A typical landing page optimization using the figures presented here would take about 12 weeks including testing and could pay for itself within 3 months.

You can calculate how long landing page optimization is likely to take with our online landing page optimization test duration calculator and determine if your page would be suitable for optimization using our online landing page optimization qualifier.

To get 1,000 extra visitors per month from traffic promotion methods we would need to keep promoting and with Google Adwords, keep up the monthly advertising spend of $750 per month, every month. The net gain from traffic promotion continues to be $1,250 per month.

Using our example figures with landing page optimization and a payback period of 3 months, the net gain in the first 3 months is $2,250 per month, rising to $3,000 per month in the 4th month and every month thereafter.

This illustration demonstrates how using landing page optimization on 1,000 existing visitors can be far more profitable than spending money on traffic promotion to drive 1,000 extra visitors to a site.