BANS Site Analysis
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I finally took a break from building BANS sites for a moment to check in on some analytics. I have a post coming about my daily routine shortly but most of you know that I don’t worry too much about my stats and am focussed on getting these sites up and running in the first instance - you can always go back to tweak them.
The site in question was bought on TDNAM for $5 in a the closeouts, it is a two year old PR 3 site with about 70 links; I was actually very pleased with this particular domain. I have done absolutely nothing other than install bans and get the site up and running so I was pleased to see that this site seems to be heading in the right direction. As you will see below, it has been up about two weeks now and has gradually grown to attract 50 visitors a day.
90% of this traffic has come from search engines (namely google) which means that while 50 visitors a day may sound like nothing to some of you…. as you will see below 280 of the 308 visitors are coming to BUY!!! Or at least thats what I am hoping.
While I am happy to share the statistics with you all, I am not going to share the keywords (not with this site anyway) but I was also delighted to see such a spread on the keywords too. I am ranking well on some good long tail keywords with no effort on my part and that makes me smile. Not because I don’t want to put the effort in but because I can now go back and do the tweaking that I mentioned before. There are keywords I am ranking for that I’d never thought about and keywords that I can use to improve my visitor numbers even more. One of the reasons I do not check my analytics very often is because it is a huge time sink. I’m building BANS for the long term and my work schedule does not allow for me to spend hours analysing every little detail, I also find it quite addictive and become victim to information overload so I tend to get in, get the information I require and get out again.
They are not spending much time on the site which means that they are either finding what they want and clicking straight through to Ebay (perfect) or they are bouncing. You’ll see that 60% are bouncing - for those that don’t know this means 60% of people who visit my site leave pretty much right away (or without looking at another page). So why is this?? Being a niche store whose traffic comes organically, I know that I am selling what they want, so there can only be one reason……..
The BANS program allows you to build country specific ebay niche stores and I have a UK BANS SITE!!!!! Out of 308 people visiting my UK BANS SITE only 81 of those are absolutely 100% potential buyers. As soon as I saw this I kicked myself for ever underestimating the power of the US market for anything! It does not matter to me that I am missing out on visitors from France, Finland, India and god only knows where else……..what matters is that I am missing out on a substantial amount of targeted traffic coming from a country that buys a huge amount online. This certainly explains my next picture anyway.
Now I am not impressed with that, but it only took me a few minutes to recognise the mistake and more importantly it will only take me a few moments to rectify it. I can add some of the long tail keywords from my analytics list which will help pull more organic traffic and, in order to maximise every single visitor I will add a US store to the site aswell. One of the joys of BANS is that it is so quick and easy to use….especially if you, like me, are not exceptionally technical.
Some of you who read The Affiliate Post are using Bans and I know that a number of you stay away but I am keen to hear what you have to say about this site analysis. Do you have any advice based on what you see here? Do you have any questions?? I’ll be doing a follow up post on this and might well use it as a good little experiment!
Thanks for reading, now go comment!
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Piss Biscuit
said:
Okay… I really do like this post and not just because you have some pretty pictures… it helps though
For a few months now, I’ve been running a little side venture. Yes, it sells a product, and yes it does make me some money… I’m averaging somewhere around the 300 dollars a week area and it’s nice to have a little extra coming in.I’ve also got NUMBER 1 listing for keywords and key phrases. I do basic advertising on a some community portal sites and it’s been pretty successful I think. I usually earn between 200% and 300% on my advertising dollar which to me pretty damn good.
In the spirit of sharing stats… here are some stats form the past week and a half.
03 Jun 2008 292
04 Jun 2008 194
05 Jun 2008 140
06 Jun 2008 109
07 Jun 2008 46
08 Jun 2008 61
09 Jun 2008 117
10 Jun 2008 97
11 Jun 2008 78
12 Jun 2008 50On June 3rd, I ran an ad so that’s what the spike in traffic was all about. It ran 1 day, and as you can see, had the trickle effect for a few days after. June 7th, was a Saturday, so traffic went down as the buzz wore off and the weekend went on. After the weekend, I pretty much kept all of my organic traffic… I’m pretty happy about the results.
Okay, so I’m a little more anal than most and I can’t use bans when I can build my own website… that said I think many of the principles still apply.
While I currently track referring URL’s, I don’t optimize to fit the demo… maybe I should? Anyway, thanks AP for a great post!
June 12th, 2008 at 6:26 pm -
Thor
said:
How about a link to a page where one can sign up for or at least get a good explanation of what exactly a Bans site is?
Closest thin I can imagine is hosted galleries, but that is a whole other dark (or rather pink) segment of the affiliate selling world.
June 13th, 2008 at 10:08 pm -
theaffiliatepost
said:
June 14th, 2008 at 4:02 am -
theaffiliatepost said:
Thanks for sharing the stats there PB. The key is cerrtainly in getting those number one spots. You are getting a good roi and it seems that your earnings are consistent. How often do you advertise this site??
Glad you like the post..and the pretty pics. I was a little worried that were not clear enough for everyone!
Oh, and as for the demographic….you should certainly optimize for it. Justin has some good info at seozombie.com
Let me know how you get on.
June 14th, 2008 at 5:07 am -
Piss Bisscuit said:
I’ll advertise once every other week. It seems to let a whole new crowd of people to cycle through. I’ve also found that it creates a little motivation as well. If someone is seeing the same link or ad over and over again, they tend to not value it as much… at least when it comes to things like forum ads, or newspaper classifieds.
Pictures are fine! Even if they aren’t perfectly clear, the visual interest breaks up longer posts and subliminally show your readers that you’ve taken a serious interest in creating a valuable post. I’ll be writing an article later today explaining how and why designers use images to “sell” online customers. There is actually a science to it, so it ought to be interesting.
As for marketing to a particular demo, I’m not sure what that demo is as of yet… still working on it. I’ll keep you updated for sure!
June 14th, 2008 at 1:15 pm -
theaffiliatepost said:
I look forward to the updates PB and it looks like you have a good little thing going with that site.
Thanks, as always, for the kind words. I really look forward to reading that post. Think I might have to add a few pics to my next post. It is rather long! Any suggestions????
June 14th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
