At the end, I noticed that they were directing people to BuyKitchenAid.com. I excitedly typed in the URL because I anticipated a landing page made specifically for this commercial. And that’s what I found. Take a look.

If this URL is only being promoted through TV commercials (better yet, cable TV commercials), it gives the marketing folks at KitchenAid a powerful metric. When they look at how many people come to the site through typing in the URL directly, they know that most of those came from watching the commercial.

Companies have been doing this for years with toll-free numbers. They will use different numbers for different markets where a TV or radio ad is aired. That way they can know which markets are performing and which ones aren’t and adjust products and/or marketing accordingly.

What I like about KitchenAid’s campaign is that they used a simple URL. They could have tried something like kitchenaid.com/artisanmixer – but that would have been more to remember.

So take a page out of the KitchenAid playbook and try out integration marketing campaigns using unique landing pages with simple URLs!

Last month, our stats went up like crazy!

Unique visitors up by 126%
Visits up by 121%
Pageviews up by 109%

New visits are up to 88.19% (a 2.43% increase) – this is where i like this number to be.

Our search engine traffic increased by 246% percent, making 40% of our visits comprised of search engine referrals. Which is nice, because even though I love StumbleUpon, I wanted to reduce its percentage and increase other referrals.

Last but not least, I want to thank these bloggers for linking to us and sending us traffic:

Our local buddy Phil, who knows everyone and helped me find a great mechanic

Donna Fontenot, a must-read blogger who interviewed me

Marty Weintraub at aimClear blog, who let me guest blog for him

Andrea Morris at Write Ideas Marketing

Pat B. Doyle on her making money online blog

Michelle Capots at the Livingston Buzz blog

David Kam at Marketing Deviant

Kittens on My Homepage

Prying1, who mostly writes about politics, wrote about the Adbaaz craziness

Matthew Sherborne at his Marketing Strategy blog

GrokDotCom

Warrior Blog

TuneQuest.org

These organic links sent 136 direct referrals – and since linking helps in the search engines, they also helped optimize our site!

68 referrals came from commenting on other blogs, which ProBlogger Darren Rowse wrote about today. I’d like to increase my comments, but only when I really have something to offer. I’ve been whizzing through my feeds lately, and I want to take time to participate in the conversation. But it will be interesting to see if it increases traffic to the blog as well.

But before you start playing the violin for me, the news isn’t all bad. The blog is beginning to attract indirect succe$$ for Bold. These other bloggers may have triple the pageviews, but we’re approached by people who want our services and are willing to spend thousands for it.

Even if we had triple the pageviews, we couldn’t take on all the business that would come our way as a result. And in some cases, we wouldn’t want to. We look for a certain type of client. We’re not interested in companies that have to jump through a lot of hoops (legal, IT, etc) in order to make one small change to their websites. We want clients who are interested in the big picture. And that big picture is only achieved through holistic online marketing that includes usability, seo, paid search, social media, and email.

So, I’ve readjusted my expectations. This blog is succeeding Nathania-style. And last time I checked, Google Analytics didn’t measure that.

[tags]analytics, blogging[/tags]

Websourced eventually abandoned the project but this code has remained on many of client’s web sites with no adverse affect untill now.

Site owners experiencing this issue can simply remove the following code in order to restore their sites:

and also,

You will know you have it if visiting your site redirects you to this page at www.adbazz.com with WebSourcedTraffic.com as a Heading:

It would appear that the domain that used to be the home of the app is now feeding redirect code to those who still having the tracking tags installed. I would imagine that while WebSourced is still the registered owner, someone with poor intentions has gotten their hands on the domain and is replacing the old tracking include with a redirection include.

MarketSmart Advertising (the owner of the domain) is aware of the issue and is looking for ways to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.

UPDATE:

After talking to an old buddy at MSA, it would appear that this is some sort of issue with Network Solutions and how they handle 3rd party requests to non-resolving sites. He is working on getting a 404 page hosted at WebsourcedTraffic.com so that the request will resolve rather than going to the strange Network Solutions error redirect.

I wonder how many people have 3rd party includes on their sites where the request no longer resolves and NS is pulling the same redirect on them?

Are you having this same issue? Tell us about it in the comments.

UPDATE 2:

I just heard from my buddy at MSA again and the fix worked. If you were being redirected because of the old WebSourcedTraffic.com code, even if you still have the code on your site, that redirect will no longer occur. You most likely want to remove the code anyway though.

UPDATE 3:

This issue seems to be a lot larger than I originally thought. You are commenting all kinds of configurations and manifestations of the adbazz redirects that are way beyond my original experience.

If you have remedied your particular iteration, please comment your issue and your resolution. If you are still having the issue, let us know about it. Presently we are getting close to 200 people a day on “adbazz” related searches to this post so let’s figure this thing out while Google keeps us all in the same place.

The link takes visitors to a subdomain section that uses Amazon’s astore (part of their affiliate program). But no one is buying anything when they get there. I’m not surprised, though. The store doesn’t carry the look and feel of the blog.

I’ve actually been thinking of getting rid of the store because I’ve been reading about the success of ProBlogger Darren Rowse and others who use their own reviews of products with links in the actual posts to drive traffic to Amazon.

But that’s why it’s so important to pay close attention to your niche and your site’s analytics. Here’s what I know about my niche.

• There’s a handful of bloggers, many of them on blogspot (I host my own site).
• There are a bunch of non-blog sites that who’s domains are about 10 years old but the content is not updated as frequently as the blogs. And the designs stem from the 90s as well.
• The non-blog, high ranking sites get gobs of traffic and while the site owners don’t talk about the money they make off the site, it’s apparent that they do make quite alot.
• People who search for classic movies don’t care and may not know the difference between a blog and a non-blog site. And they’re a very different web user than Darren Rowse’s audience.
• My best content are posts about quotes by classic movie stars and when I live blog while watching movies.

So, with that in mind, and my newfound data on where people click. I know that I need to:

• Keep my store section and re-vamp it.
• Keep up with posts that involve quotes and live blogging
• Stick with my plan to review movies, books, etc. to offer even more value

My analytics also have shown me that my young blog is growing, slowly – almost painfully slow, but growing nonetheless. This is fine with me because I view it as a 5 year project where I blog about actors, actresses, directors, films, books etc. and then I can just let it be as an authoritative source on classic movies. I do, however, need to work more on the authoritative source part. But that’s fine with me, because I’ve chosen a niche that I love and am passionate about.

I don’t think my blog would be growing if I didn’t check my analytics. I have tweaked my site so many times as a result. I know where my users are geographically, and I know what content they like. I know where on the site they click and it drives my goals.

Is your traffic aligned with your goals? Have other analytics tricks? Leave a comment!

[tags]google, analytics[/tags]