How to Be as Psychic as…Wal-Mart? Using Analytics to Find Untapped Traffic
March 13th, 2008 by CourtIn the offline world, especially in retail, businesses face the huge task of being basically psychic. What do I mean by that? I mean they have to guess what their customers are going to do so they can buy inventory in the right quantity and mix. A company like Wal-Mart could lose millions, or billions of dollars if they don’t guess with reasonable accuracy what their customers will do when they’re in the store.
That’s why Wal-Mart uses some of the most detailed and large scale predictive analytics programs in the world. They could probably fill a football field (I’m just guessing) with the number of servers required to collect, store, and organize the data pulled from their thousands of locations around the world.
Wal-Mart recently used predictive modeling analytics on its data to determine the top-selling items before hurricanes in Florida stores. Analysis revealed that the top-selling items stretched beyond expected items like flashlights and water–beer was the top-selling pre-hurricane item, while sales of Strawberry Pop-Tarts increased sevenfold during these periods.
As a result of this analysis, Wal-Mart is able to pre-order and stock the optimal quantities of these items during hurricane seasons. Such extensive, but efficient, use of data analytics has made Wal-Mart the world’s leading retailer.
You Need to Dig Into Your Traffic Stats
If predictive analytics are good enough for Wal-Mart and their hundreds of millions of customers, it’s good enough for me with my tens of thousands of monthly visitors, and for you – no matter how small your traffic numbers are right now.
I don’t spend millions of dollars per year on my analytics program – I actually spend $0 on it. But I can still glean important insight from the program that will help me build my business.
Finding the Hidden Gems
Here are some keywords (along with my ranking on Google) I found that I’d call the hidden gems of my search traffic. Why are they hidden gems? Because I haven’t put any direct effort into getting the rankings that give me this traffic, but it usually amounts to an extra 10-50 visitors per day.
how to make money online – 51
ways to make money online – 46
make money on the internet – 7
how to make money on the internet – 7
earn money on the internet – 13
The Traffic (and Income) Really Adds Up
You might be saying 10-50 visitors per day isn’t a big deal. Do the math – that’s an extra 300-1500 visitors per month. And what if 10% of those people subscribed to my rss feed? That would mean an extra 30 to 150 rss subscribers per month. And what if I know that I can make approximately $5 per rss subscriber per month? Just by mining some of these hidden gems I could add $150 to $750 per month to my income. That’s anywhere from grocery money to a payment on a very nice car, depending on your budget.
Here’s the kicker though. I get this traffic right now with no extra effort at all. What if I put a little effort into improving those rankings and by doing that I doubled the daily traffic from those keywords. The fact is I could probably more than double the traffic. Moving from number 7 to number 1 on Google would probably triple or quadruple my traffic for that phrase.
But let’s say I only double my traffic, and consequently, double my income from those words. Now I’m looking at $300 to $1500 per month in new income. Doesn’t sound too bad does it?
So how do you a) find these hidden gems and b) grab easy extra traffic with them?
We’ll talk about it tomorrow. 
Save to del.icio.us
Digg This!
Post to Facebook
StumbleItRelated Posts:
How to Find Hidden Money in Your Traffic Stats: Part II
...
Court’s Links – 4/2/2008
...
Blogging Zoom Zooming
...
Thanks for Downloading…
...
When Meta Matters – How I Wrecked My Search Listing
...
Learning From Your Statistics Part Three (Adjusting According To Your Stats)
...
March 13th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Court,
When you check your stats it tells you what Google thinks your site I have a blog that I put together around your “keyword sniping” articles. I had it optimized around the keyword I though Google would bring me traffic for. After checking stat Google showed the keyword that was bringing me traffic was not the one I had wanted.
Basically I added more articles around the keyword I wanted and submitted a few more to the article directories. It should now be better SEO for my keyword.
Check those stats you’d be surprised what you find.
March 13th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Court,
I completely agree with you. It is really weird to see some of the ways people find your site.
For example, I wrote a couple of fire safety posts before Christmas time last year. I am getting an average of 5 visitors to my site a day searching for those words. I didn’t mean to target them, nor was I planning to do so.
Also, ones writing style can bring unintentional visitors. Plus those quirky little sayings you might put in your blog.
March 13th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
This is really good information. I will think about my traffic in different ways now and how to utilize that source. Thanks for the post.
March 13th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Very weird. I had a company contact me for a link exchange and it was not a usual type of company that uses my services.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Man, the way you break is down is so awesome… i would have been like, “Cool, i got search for by typing blah blah” then i’d open the search engine and see my rank for blah blah, and then smile… i wouldn’t have thought of doing this at all!
You’re awesome!
March 13th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
…you do it by using:
http://www.hittail.com
check it out – it is very cool.
March 13th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Somehow I think I know what is coming tomorrow. Does this make me a psychic too.
Those pop tarts evoke memories as well. I just wish they would still make them with apple and cinnamon here in Oz.
@ Chris: hittail is a great tool as well and works a treat.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I love hittail!
March 14th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Choosing top rated keyword is the best way to get some extra visitor from Search engine.I always track my keywords in my site And used stumbleupon with my post. I got around 1900 and more hits in some of my blog post.
March 14th, 2008 at 3:24 am
Hmm interesting. I saw a post on 45n5 yesterday about tracking and admitted that I don’t track things very well and I certainly don’t pay anywhere near enough attention to my analytics stats. I’ll be tuning in to the next post in this series
March 14th, 2008 at 5:13 am
Looking forward to your post tomorrow.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am
I am awaiting the next installment eagerly. I was just looking at my tracking stats last night so this came at a good time.
March 15th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Yeah, I’ve found that peering through my keyword statistics I’ve found some random keywords that have gotten me lots of hits. I found that a game I wrote a post about got me an extra 50 visitors per day and since then it’s been great! I found some other random keywords and targeted them and now I’m up to somewhere around 3000 hits per day. Thanks Court!
March 17th, 2008 at 8:15 am
I think too many bloggers look at their traffic numbers and do not look closly at the other statistics that drive those numbers. Thanks for a good post.
March 19th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
This is a great idea, time for an audit of my analytics to see where we can boost our traffic.
June 29th, 2011 at 10:04 am
I wrote a couple of fire safety posts before Christmas time last year