Sorry not to have been as productive on the blog front of late, but I’d rather say something meaningful than just be repetitive. On this train of thought of quality rather than quantity, I decided to write a piece on quality of traffic and targeting.

In the Dating Factory system we have partners who have huge disparity in the effectiveness of their traffic and the performance of registering members in the system, with regard to longevity and payment. Or in short, consumer satisfaction.
The one reporting statistic I always look at when analysing the traffic a partner is sending is the Country of Origin. If you run a report on your sites or site and set the final parameter “Rows by” to by Country, you will see what I mean.

Specific Country

The partners who are successful, set up a site for a specific country. They tailor the look and feel to fit and make the default language the right one. The traffic they send to that site then comes at least to 95% from the target country. We have a few partners, who send us traffic from all over the world to a single site. This traffic doesn’t perform anywhere near as well as more targeted traffic.
If you set up a German site you may as well make the only language on the site German. It’s better to have a .de domain although a .com isn’t a bad alternative. When you are setting up your advertising campaigns ensure that your ads for that site are only showing in Germany. This means the people coming to your site, at a cost to you, are more likely register and enjoy the service and ultimately pay.
Again don’t assume language bonds nations. A .de site won’t perform as well in Austria or Switzerland for example, it’s best to make a .at and a .ch as well. Send the traffic from the relevant countries to the relevant sites.
We have two relatively new partners, one has set up a German site and this month has sent us around 10,000 unique visitors. These visitors have come from 5 countries (I think one was me while I was in the UK), 99% of the traffic comes from Germany. This site is converting to free at 10% and has the first payments coming in already.
At the other end of the scale we have someone who set up a French site and has so far sent us 5,000 uniques this month. These visitors come from 127 countries and convert at 3.4% only 20% came from France and they converted at 8.1% and there have been very few payments so far. This means that 80% of his traffic is largely wasted. In many cases this traffic comes from countries where we wouldn’t accept payment and where we would probably delete the profiles as probable scammers.
If you have a free source of traffic and want to throw it at a site you will make money but your conversions won’t be good unless it’s targeted by country and type. If you are paying for traffic then do make sure you have the right site to send your traffic to, with regards to language and content. Ensure that your ad campaigns are only showing in the relevant countries.
Mark Harrison