How well traffic performs can fluctuate from month to month, and conversion rates from a particular traffic source could drop suddenly without there being any obvious changes to your campaigns.
The best way to ensure that you can operate a profitable business with consistent performance is to maintain steady streams of good quality traffic coming in from more than one source. This way you can focus your spend on the traffic source performing the best for that particular period of time.
Another reason to diversify your traffic sources is to counter overpopulation. If a particular traffic source is performing particularly well, the source becomes over populated with other advertisers bidding for the same spot.
This can lead to increasing costs per lead as you fight for the top performing ad spots and keywords, meaning you may have to increase your bids to remain in that position. Having more than one source will allow you to optimise your spend across different sources so your referral and basic registration counts don’t drop and you don’t lose revenue.
You may also discover a new source that converts even better than what you are currently paying for. We’d recommend that you trial a new traffic source every couple of months; you only need a small test budget to verify how traffic from a new source performs. Consider testing other traffic sources such as Bing, YouTube and Yahoo and compare them to how your current sources are performing. Even if you find they’re not performing as well as your current sources, you’ll gain a better understanding of the market and be better able to identify opportunities in the future.
You could also take a look at your top existing brands and mind map where your potential new members could be. This could be on certain lifestyle sites, magazines, holiday companies, Google or certain social media channels. Understanding your audience is key to attracting high quality traffic that will convert.
If you have any questions about how to test new traffic sources, get in touch with our Partner team.