As some of you may know, I have a degree in food science and I worked for over 15 years in quality control or as we prefer to call it, quality assurance. I’m not saying that to brag, but only to give you a little background. Now, there are approaches and techniques that we use in that field that can apply or be transferred to traffic generation methods. One of them is called: “finding the root cause”.
In the food industry, when we get a complaint or we discover during an inspection that there is a hazard somewhere and that there could be a danger for the customer, we try and find the root cause of the problem. How do we do that? I will give you an example. Let’s suppose we get a customer complaint regarding the flavor of a product that would be different than usual. We ask ourselves: “why is it different?” To find the answer, we investigate. We test the product, we inspect the facility; we question the employees, etc, until we find the answer. Now, let’s suppose that the answer is that there was a microbial contamination. Again, we ask ourselves why. We investigate again. And so on until we get to the root of the problem.
Now, how can we transpose this method to traffic generation? I’m getting to that. You have to ask yourself “why?” until you find the root cause of your own problem. Let me give you another example, but this time with a website.
Let’s suppose again that you have very few people signing up to your mailing list. Now that is a big problem because those are your potential customers. Right? You need to ask yourself why is there so few people signing up? To answer that question, you will need to investigate. First I suggest you look into the statistics. A good way to do that is with Google Analytics. It’s a free service and quite effective. There are other services you can also use like Modlogan and Webalizer. Those two could already be installed on your web server. That is the case for me and you would need to check that. But the most important is that you find out the answer to the question “why?” You need to find out how many people visits your site, who are they, how long do they stay on your page, where do they click, where were they referred from, etc.
Another effective way to investigate in some cases is to add a poll or survey on your website. It depends on the kind of website you have, but this method can also bring you a lot of information.
Getting back to our example, suppose you find out that people remain on your page for an average of 20 sec. That is not much. If you get lots of traffic but the average viewing time is less than 20 sec, that traffic is wasted. That means that something is wrong with your webpage. It could be the offer that is not good enough. It could be the headline that is not catchy enough. It could simply be that the page is not loading fast enough. You need to find out. Test different things until your average viewing time gets higher.
But the problem can also be that you are not getting enough traffic. For that, you will need to check which method you are using and how to fine-tune them. You might decide to quit using some of them to try new ones. The key is to find your root cause. Ask yourself “why?” until you find it. When you do, work on it. It might seem a little simplistic but this technique has helped me a lot in the past and still does today.
