Oooh the stress!
November 29th, 2006
Today saw one of the biggest days with regards to SERPS traffic to my site ever with 171 UVs, unfortunately not one converted into a sale, even though I passed well over 50 percent onto the merchants. I cannot understand quite whats happening at the moment, everyone is reporting huge climbs in traffic but most people also seem to be reporting only poor to moderate sales, too much window shopping going on by the looks of things.
On a similar note but the main reason for the title to this post, I have been pulling what little hair I have out today, Affiliate Window have in place some kind of aggregated Tracking technology, that basically means all tracking is put on hold or delayed when in busy periods and somehow batch processed later on when the load on the server is lower. However today it took almost 10 hours to see clicks being displayed, had I been using a pay per click campaign to drive traffic this would have been a major set back as I would not have been able to monitor how well (or badly) things were going, in the current climate I think I would have been tempted to pause all PPC activity (if I did any) as I stated above the poor lead to sale conversion ratio would be crippling to a paying campaign (well it would in my main sites sector as the average sale only generates about £4 commission).
Google continue to add 2 pages and remove 10, so I guess shortly I wont have any pages left and traffic will dry up completely (having said that the pages I do have in G.co.uk are fairing very well and that is where all my current traffic is coming from). I am hoping to see the 2000 odd pages it has put into the supplementary index back in the main index early in the new year, as I start to link build and SEO the pages plus add some decent content around them.
I have entered a small competition over on the a4uforum where I frequent a lot these days, the competition is about creating a new site (from January) and seeing how far you can get with it (how much money one makes) in 6 months. There is a limited budget allowance for driving traffic and all domains must be newly registered from 1st January, it should be an excellent learning experience and also a lot of fun, the £200 cap on PPC is about the figure I had intended to give this area of affiliate marketing a go at early next year anyway, so this will hopefully prove a very worthwhile experience.
More soon
Mark