Internet and Electronic Marketing

Web Traffic Plan

The hottest topic for any web project is definitely traffic. The traffic problem immediately occurs once a website is created and posted on the Internet.
Traffic is the flow of website’s non-random visitors. Its study is important because traffic implies the exact segment of the market a website occupies. Visitors can get to the website in three ways: 1) Through search engines; 2) Through the URL-bar in a browser if the visitor knows the URL-address of the website; 3) Through a link from another site that has been set there in advance.
In order to attract the target audience to the Facebook group, one can register the website in directories; participate in a banner network, use link exchange or system of active promotion (SAP), and many other options, which will be discussed further. Generally, the significance of quality performance of initial attracting of visitors to the group’s site stage is very high, because it largely determines the number of visitors and their quality, i.e. their compliance with the target audience of the site.

Options of sharing, “likes” and invitations on Facebook
The first step the organizers of a group should do is to offer their friends on Facebook relating to the target audience to enter the group. Facebook limits invitation to 5000, but these new members may in their turn invite their friends interested in the marketing content or share the link to the Facebook community, or vice versa, offer other current members of the group to add them as friends.
On the whole, up to 20 invitations are planned to be daily sent through the option “Invite friends” by each administrator of the group to those individuals who fit the appointed parameters. However, in a 2 month interval, 200 people out of 1200 will have been interested in the group, as there are only 10% of users who typically confirm the request, and only 1% of active users who will probably comment the post, take part in the discussions and follow the links provided in the community.
Thus, another powerful instrument is possibility to share links and post “likes” to the group, its events and its posts not only in the borders of Facebook, but also outside it, through the sites supporting Facebook logins. This will increase clickthrough rate (CTR) by 3-5 times (Figure 2).
Figure 2. “Like” Optimization in Facebook. Possible CTR growth.

Source: Kaynama & Keesling 2000, pp. 84-89.
Simple process of adding users as friend is factually the transfer of information from one site to another. As more users become the friends or fans of the group, the more sites will link to targeted web-page. The ability to easily transfer information from the group site to other sites is an effective way to increase the level of citation. If the group is successful at the stage of creating interesting content, other users will increasingly copy and paste/post it their pages by using RSS-feeds and special tags. One-click to “Share” button allows users and administrators to send out news on updates or events to all the friends on Facebook. Another important option of Facebook is an opportunity to offer the member of the group to sign up for the updates in order to receive them regularly and keep in touch. Social bookmarks will also help draw attention to the community. The essence is simple: having found an interesting site, users add it to their bookmarks collection which is seen by other users.
Facebook also allows creating a graphic badge with a link to a page on Facebook; this link should be placed on the personal pages of administrators, their blogs and be temporary reposted in thematic discussions. It is further proposed to implement cooperation with other Facebook communities, thematic blogs and website owners with similar audience, as they already have their fan-pages and can share “fans” (an additional influx of target audience). One more effective method is to enter other communities, introduce the group by leaving a message on the wall, and finally exchange links with other niche groups, etc.
The advantage of social networks as Facebook primarily lies in the fact that all the above mentioned updates and activities of group members are easily spread and seen by their friends and colleagues on Facebook through the interactive newsfeed. The practice shows that 50 fans/member/likes of the page give 13-15 transitions to it, 100 fans provide 30-40 transitions, etc.
On the whole, the dynamic growth of subscribers to the marketing community page on Facebook for 1-2 month interval is planned to look this way (Figure 3):
Figure 3. Projected dynamics of group traffic growth

Placement of paid advertisement on Facebook-pages with target audience
Servers like Facebook (with high rates of attendance and covering a large amount of the target audience) provide the services on the promotion of sites through paid ads appearing on their pages. Internal advertising on Facebook makes $ 10.25 cost-per-lead and allows the customer to set the target audience, which makes these methods of advertising very effective. Advertisers can now target users basing on a variety of filters: the place of residence, age, date of birth, gender, keywords, education, job, relationships, interests, languages, and communications.
It is possible to say for sure that advertisement in Facebook will be effective in the B2C segment, as all the social factors are taken into account. Also, one can plan an advertising campaign taking into account the geography of the end users location. Advertising can also help attract the Likes to the official webpage to further develop an active community.

Registration in search engines and web-directories databases
Search engines perform automatic search for new resources and their automatic indexing. The indexing procedure consists in entering the information on the server pages and key words that correspond to these pages into a search engine database. To accelerate the process of finding the site by a search engine, there is the possibility to register it ”“ to provide the location of the site to a search engine, which greatly speeds up the procedure (“Setting up an eBusiness website” 2006). In addition, it is possible to make the content of the group page on Facebook search engine friendly, i.e. easy for search engines perception and for getting into their key words identification bases.
Just as search sites, directories are used by the Internet users to find information. They are hierarchical databases organized by subject areas. Unlike search engines, entering a catalog is only possible after registration in it. Since directories do not have their own means of collecting information similar to search engines, all the information on the servers included in them is taken exclusively from the registration form (“Setting up an eBusiness website” 2006).
To simplify this operation, one can for an insignificant fee use proxy servers that provide automatic registration in catalogs. For example, one can place the data at a server Submit It (www.submit-it.com). The filled form will be automatically sent, and the information on the new server will go down in the relevant categories of dozens of directories and search engines.