The pros and cons of increased traffic
Every e-commerce has some usual set of traffic behavior throughout the year for its e-commerce website. However, during some holiday periods, this traffic can skyrocket. This is both good and bad, depending on how you look at it and how you utilize this. This blog aims to explain both sides of the coin for such an occasion.
Firstly, an introduction is in order. Why would you take my points of view as a credible source of information? Well, I have been working as a data scientist in SaaS (Software as a Service) company, named Enhencer, for more than 4 years. Our goal as a company is to help e-commerce companies to dig our valuable visitors as their target audience from their website traffic. Therefore, on a daily basis, we work with website traffic behavioral analysis. As a result, we have seen a fair share of different scenarios that can emerge under different conditions.
The Emerging E-Commerce with an Emerging problem
It's fair to say that we are living in an e-commerce era. Everything and anything can be bought over e-commerce these days. Starting from clothes to groceries to expensive ultra-luxurious items, you name and you'll be able to buy it online and deliver it to your doorsteps.
Some bigger companies have the luxury to deploy a group of data scientists on the matter and be done with it. But not every company has the luxury to do so, especially the smaller to midsize e-commerces. So this article is for you folks.
Most e-commerce companies do not know what to do with their traffic dataset. Little do they know that they are sitting on a gold mine of data and valuable information. Here are some of the questions we come across pretty often from e-commerce companies:
- Why has our campaign conversion decreased?
- Why has our traffic decreased from the previous month?
- How to get a better lookalike audience?
- How to obtain the best audience for our ad campaigns?
The list goes on and on. With the increase in the number of e-commerce, more and more problems/questions like this will emerge.
The Pros & Cons
No e-commerce has ever said no to more traffic. It basically means more sales. However, on an average day, the traffic is a fraction of what it becomes during a holiday period. While e-commerce can make an audience based on the website traffic like add-to-cart and product viewers and launch remarketing campaigns. The holiday period is a little different. Here is how:
- Most of this increased traffic will disappear quite fast after the holiday is over.
- Most of this traffic has either bought something for the holiday or won't buy anything after the holiday. They are seasonal shoppers.
Like usual times, if you used this holiday traffic as the target audience for a remarketing campaign then:
- You won't be able to benefit from the holiday website traffic using remarketing campaigns. On top of that, remarketing campaigns will suffer in performances like low conversion.
- You will be wasting the campaign budget for nothing.
Instead, What you can do is, use this increased traffic and create a lookalike based on these visitors. When they came to your website, this means they are interested in your product and brand, may it be for a holiday only. Use this to create a lookalike on Facebook & Google Ads and launch a traffic campaign. This way you will be:
- Gaining quality traffic full of visitors that will be interested in your product and brand.
- This way you will be able to gain more traffic not only during the holiday period but at other times as well.
- Since this is a lookalike based on the surge of traffic to your website, this is far better and more relevant than the Facebook Demographic & Interest-based lookalike.
- The lookalike will be more relevant to your brand and products.
Here is how this is different than general interest and demographic-based lookalike. Consider you are running a website that sells pet-related products like pet foods, pet care products and etc.
Facebook Interest & Demographics Lookalike: Facebook will randomly pick users and create a lookalike. Just because they are interested in pets does not mean they will buy some pet products. Even if they are somewhat more likely to buy pet products they might already be loyal to a brand or product line.
Holiday Traffic: These visitors have already come to your website and looked at your product. Therefore, they are more relevant to your products and your brand. Even if they don't end up buying something, you can use them to create a lookalike and bring more relevant traffic.
As a result, even if the holiday period is over and increased traffic has faded out, you can continue to bring in more traffic like this during non-holiday periods.
We also have a lot more blog articles coming regarding target audience selections and how to utilize them. Keep an eye out and subscribe for the upcoming articles.
Additionally, visit our website to learn everything and anything regarding e-commerce and online ads-related topics. Enhencer: https://enhencer.com/
