Traffic Management 101

The phrase “traffic management” in context of internet marketing is not at all uncommon. In fact, for beginners in the field who are attempting to popularize their websites, this concept is a highly relevant one. Essentially traffic management can be split into three somewhat overlapping areas:
• Monitoring and analyzing the traffic on your website,
• Generating more high quality traffic
• “Capturing” the traffic to provide you with leads for email marketing
The first step then is to install a traffic monitoring tool on your website that would keep track of the number of visitors viewing your site, as well as finer details such as which pages they view and for how long they stay. Google Analytics is an example of such software. Many of these tools are free, but you may have to pay a company for giving you a meaningful analysis of the results.
Once you manage to track and analyze the traffic, you will identify the problem areas, such as not enough time spent per visitor in viewing your site, or, more commonly, not enough traffic. The key aspect of traffic management, therefore, is traffic generation, or preferably, targeted traffic generation. The difference is simply that targeted traffic comprises people who are actually interested in what you offer, and have found your website because they were looking for something like it. There are several ways of increasing your targeted traffic. For instance, you can get listed with online directories, so that people who are looking for a business like yours can obtain a link to your website. You can use search engine optimization techniques to ensure that your website shows up among the top few results when anyone types a search string related to your website into a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Finally, traffic management does not end with generating and analyzing traffic – a major concern for a website, and particularly in context of internet marketing, is to capture leads. Leads are the people who are likely to be interested in what you are offering and on whom you should focus your marketing efforts. The idea is to legally obtain the email addresses of visitors to your website who want to know more about you. There are several ways of doing this. For instance, you can offer a free subscription to a newsletter, for which the person will submit an email address, or offer a free e-book for download, requiring submission of a valid email address. You can simply place an opt-in form on every page of your site, which would ask visitors to leave their email addresses if they would be interested in promotional offers from you.
Traffic management may appear to be a hassle, but it is a worthy investment if you truly want your website to prove effective for boosting your sales, ROI, and general reputation of your business.




Finding which traffic sources produces the most leads/list sign ups is essential. I find google analytics a bit hard to understand. But a decent ad tracking service can make things much simpler. Adwatcher is a great one. Long as you know where the most sign ups are coming from you can then expand on that source.
Traffic management is absolutely essential, isn’t it? Thanks for helping us to do this properly. So fundamental to any business. Keep up the great work.
Lina