Traffic Alert…

It’s on the tip of everyone’s tounges, in the forefront of their minds … how do I get my traffic rankings up?  Well, that’s an important question when you’re considering only how high you rank in SL search for your keywords.  But in the end, traffic only TRULY matters if they’re making a purchase and thus, you’re making money.

So, how does your “traffic” equate into your sales?  Do you know the percentage of your visitors that actually purchase?  How do you get them to your store?  How do you let them know that you exist?

Very pertinent questions and the answers are different for each type of business and potentially for any business even if in the same category of products.

STRAIGHT TRAFFIC STATS

Bots … Focusing first on the easy answer, sim/land traffic stats for the purposes of search listings.  What are some good ideas for this?  Some I myself have used in the past have included modeling bots but these can be tricky as they tend to make shoppers frustrated when they think the bot is a person and try to chat with them.  But, if you sell clothing, a modeling bot can be invaluable, especially if they automatically rotate the clothing they are wearing every so often.  This is what I used to do, or rather, how I used to use my bot software.

An actual visual display of your products can make such a huge difference over just showing a picture.  The added bonus is that with a single bot on your land, your traffic will stay within the 5,000 range no matter what.  Other visitors just make that go up from there.  the down side is how complicated it can be to set up.  It also eats up your bandwidth on your computer as it’s always running in the background.

Live People … Over the holidays, while we had our 1/4 sim, I created a holiday present hunt.  There were 16 presents hidden all over our land, inside the store, by products, under xmas trees, outside the store and so on … if it was our land, it was fair game.  I announced the hunt to the typical fashion groups and ZOMG … for the next 3-4 days, there were NEVER any fewer than 15 people on our land hunting for the presents.

Within an hour of the announcement they all started passing around the coordinates on notecards for the RiFi Present Hunt.  It was fabulous and sales really boomed through this time.

You can do a hunt for any reason, holidays, rez days, just because days.  Also look for the grid wide hunts to join, though I found it better for the business that the hunt was all on my property, helped traffic, kept people there looking around, the more people were there, the more other people wanted to come see why so many people were there, and so on.

TRAFFIC = SALES

More important though, I believe, is how do your traffic stats equate into sales?  These are the true power numbers you need to focus on.  How do you track it?  Visitor trackers can help with that, knowing who came and went from your store and when and comparing that to your sales logs.  You can get a ratio that way.  Then you can begin the wonderful game of trial and error.

Ok, example … say 15 people enter your store in a day and only 5 make purchases.  Why did the other 10 NOT?  What prompted the buying 5 to buy?  You can always ask them, that’s a nice thing, a live survey, but you really need to be prepared to give them a gift of something to say thank you.

So what can affect the sale or in this situation, lack of sale?  Store layout, product pricing, product selection, personal taste of the shopper, product quality (or perceived quality), Store aesthetics (i.e. the mood your store sets, this is beyond display layout), the shopper’s on a specific mission and couldn’t find it there at that time.  There are a lot of reasons.  You need to know why.

For product pricing, store layout, product quality and store aesthetics, you can readily do something about these, but do not endeavor to make huge changes all at the same time or you wont know what change you made affected your sales up or down.  Make small changes, see how they affect things, then look into other changes.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

So, tell us, what do you do to impact traffic and how does your traffic impact your sales?