Website Traffic Case Study: 45,0000% Increase in 12 Months

The Setting: Grow a New B2B Company's Brand Awareness, Traffic and Leads

A new B2B company wanted to grow their brand awareness, traffic and leads. They are experienced professionals and technicians, but were starting out on their own for the first time. And they needed help establishing their brand in a crowded marketplace. Besides boosting their credibility, they also
wanted their website to serve as a source of lead generation for potential prospects interested in services, speaking, and product sales.

Over the course of 16 months, we were able to grow their website's traffic over 36,000% (from around 37 monthly visits to over 13,000). We'll show you how in this website traffic case study.

The Solution: Use Inbound Marketing to Generate Consistent, Scalable Traffic

Very simply, there are 4 main ways to get traffic:

1. Search Engines
2. Referrals
3. Advertising
4. Partnerships

But each strategy will cost you something. The first two (SEO and referrals) will cost you a lot of time and energy. The second two (advertising and partners) will cost you money. They’re not too difficult to get started, but they ALL take skill to implement effectively in the long run. And most of the time, it literally doesn't matter which tactic you use. You can choose any of them, and it will still work fine. It all depends on what resources you have, and which you're willing to invest to get ahead. Either way, you should view "inbound" marketing as an investment that grows in value over time and pays you back in the future. 

The 5 Step Traffic Generation System

So now let’s start talking about how to use them more effectively. Here are 5 steps you should use to guide your decisions and actions.

1. Identify which of the 4 types of traffic you're going to focus on.  Again, it depends mostly on what you prefer, the resources you have, and what you’re willing to invest (either time or money). Here's a general breakdown of the Pros and Cons of each:

2. Create an overall strategy to guide your actions. For example, if you want 100 sales (at 2% conversions) then you’re going to need 5000 visits each month. Great - how are you going to get them? Break that number down by identifying where you're already getting traffic, or which tactics need to increase to make up the difference.

3. Now narrow down to the individual channels you’re going to use. Measure their performance, and figure out how much you can improve each. For example, to increase visits from Facebook you could post more frequently, use better headlines and images, or try to increase engagement by running contests. Or maybe you're all tapped out on your existing channels, so you need to start using new ones like Google AdWords or Facebook Advertising. (These are small examples, but hopefully you get the picture.)

4. Turn the "winning tactics" into a repeatable process. Now figure out how you can you scale these winning tactics.  Maybe you can use tools to automate and schedule social media posts. Or perhaps you can hire someone to help you do a lot of the manual labor.

5. Measure, test and iterate to find new tactics with a better ROI. You always want to be on the lookout for new tactics that will give you better results, for less time and money invested.  So you should look around and see if there are new tactics or techniques you can use. Start small by investing only a little as a test, and watch your key metrics. For example, how much traffic does it send? And how is that traffic converting? Here's how you can identify "good" sources of traffic.

The 2 Ways to Identify “Good” Sources of Traffic

On a really basic level, there are two things you should be looking for:

1. How much traffic are you getting (for the investment)?
2. Is it high-quality (converting at a high percentage)?  

For example, isolate the top 2-5 sources of traffic and see if you can invest more into those sources, while cutting your losses on the other small ones. Here's an example below of what you should be looking for. You'll see that 3 individual sources account for almost 75% of traffic (on the left), and the top two almost 70% of conversions (on the right).

The Results: From 37 Monthly Visits to Over 13,000

Using this traffic generation framework discussed above, we were able to grow this new B2B website to over 13,000 visits a month.

That accounts for over a 36,000% change from the beginning.

And as we discussed, traffic isn't everything. If you get a million hits from Pinterest, and none of them convert, then you don't want that kind of traffic. So here's evidence that this huge traffic growth wasn't wasted -- because we were still able to generate 845 leads in November of 2012. 

And at over a 6% conversion rate, you can tell this traffic is still high quality.