(This article was made in collaboration with our resident Psychology Doctor and Professor for the Methods and Techniques of Scientific Research Department at University of Buenos Aires. For obvious reasons, I can’t post her name)

If you were in this business for at least a year, I’m pretty sure you have seen the motto-mantra “Content is King” ad nauseam. It has been said in every possible way and it’s the solution for EVERY problem in adult industry. When everything fails… CONTENT IS KING. It’s a pretty understandable concept in an industry like online adult business where content is the main product to be provided. And it certainly is a very important aspect of this business, yet I’m not so sure that it is the most important. Furthermore, I’ll shock many of you by saying that not only CONTENT ISN’T KING, but it’s closer to Miss Congeniality so to speak.

Let’s be clear: I’m not denying the importance of content, it would be totally absurd. I’ll just show you how this concept is flawed and why content might be the most important aspect for a few sites, while it is just a bunch of crap on most sites. And just to add a little more pizazz, I’ll teach you a few secrets based on extensive marketing research, which you may use or not, your choice.

First of all, I want to define the word MARKETING: If you think marketing is buying drinks at a convention or having 1 million posts on a board, please stop reading here. I know it’s the common meaning in adult industry, and of course,  it’s 100% wrong. This meaning emerged from an industry where there were no professionals and therefore PR got confused with marketing. This is one of the many mistakes that led this industry to the point where it is now, and I’ll show you why and how. Anyway, if you’re convinced that PR is marketing, I probably won’t be able to change your mind.

So, let’s define marketing by using our beloved Wikipedia (I like this definition more than the usual Kotler’s definition)

Marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.

Marketing is used to identify the customer, to satisfy the customer, and to keep the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business management. Marketing evolved to meet the stasis in developing new markets caused by mature markets and overcapacities in the last 2-3 centuries. The adoption of marketing strategies requires businesses to shift their focus from production to the perceived needs and wants of their customers as the means of staying profitable.

The term marketing concept holds that achieving organizational goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions. It proposes that in order to satisfy its organizational objectives, an organization should anticipate the needs and wants of consumers and satisfy these more effectively than competitors

Interesting, huh? I mean, no mention to buying drinks and quite honestly, nothing that 99.99% of adult companies and webmasters do. I’m leaving out a 0.01% because I know a few companies are in a stage of development where they’ve understood what marketing is and how to use it. And of course, they won’t tell anyone.

So, now that we can start from a clear understanding of what marketing is and what marketing isn’t, we can dive into the deeps of business research.

As a clear example, let’s start with the “content is king” mantra, I promise you a good journey, and whether you agree or not, I’ll do my best to give you some food for thought.

When I say “content isn’t king” I’m not making out things just to add some shocking factor. Like I said, content MIGHT be king for some sites. But it isn’t for most. To come to this conclusion, I’m putting everything in the mix: from costs to profits, customer satisfaction, technology, many years of experience and close to 5 years of research.

Let’s start: in real world, content isn’t king by definition. DELIVERY is king. Content has to adapt to delivery technologies, and all the philosophy behind content (audio, visual, written, interactive) is what delivery companies wants you to see, how will you see it and when will you see it. The most important part is this external part, and most of the times content is produced in a way where you have to buy way more expensive gadgets every single time, or adapt to some specific form of delivery, or adapt to the way it’s presented. That’s why most content companies (movies, music, TV even books) have been acquired by…. technology and delivery industry companies.

Furthermore, everything you see around, everything you buy, everything you wish, most of what you think, most of what you like, even how your body looks was molded in a laboratory by guys with suits and ties that decided that you will like, you’ll do, you’ll think, you’ll love something that, quite coincidentally, they’re SELLING AND MAKING MONEY OFF IT.

Surprising, isn’t it?

So, if you’re not researching, if you’re not creating a need or fulfilling a void, it really doesn’t matter much if you use that hot blonde with big boobs for your next great superb set. I’ve news for you: You, me and everybody in the world have seen that scene 1 million times before. Years before you shot it. Just change the background, maybe the blonde had smaller boobs, maybe she had a mole, maybe a different hairdo. But in the end, it’s a busty blonde being fucked, absolutely the same to thousand before her and thousands that will come after her.

What did you miss here? The differential. That very thing that makes your content stand out. The thing that will make a CONSUMER become a CUSTOMER, even helping you in promoting your content.

And how do we achieve it? You can use many approaches. You can use the perfect visual holder (ie a nice design with a nice flow, interactivity, ease to access the content with as many clicks as possible), you can add technology as a WOW factor or you can simply use marketing research to know what YOUR OWN MEMBERS want (let alone what your prospective members want). Yeah, I know, I’m cussing too much with the taboo words “marketing research“, but it is what this article is about.

For the first approach, you can use some professional adult design and development solution (cough cough), for the second, you might need to empty your pockets and for the third, you can either use existing marketing research or do your own. Whichever way you choose, it will only help you. Believe me, you should rather INVEST more money and efforts in development, design, traffic, research, interactivity, product development and so on that SPEND it in that hot busty blonde. It’s a numbers game: if your exclusive content costs are (say) $12k a month and you get 8 sets a month for 2 updates a week, try spending half of it in exclusive content and INVEST the other half in proper marketing and additional non-exclusive content so, instead of 2 updates a week you can make 3 to 5 updates A DAY. Do you really think someone will complain because instead of getting the same set again and again and again you added more quantity or variety? If so, think again.

But well, let’s say you want to keep it 100% exclusive. Or maybe you have a solo girl site. Or whatever situation that makes you need to shoot your own content. Here is where you’ll need marketing research.

GETTING TO THE POINT

Before anything, my first advice is that if you don’t know the niche, just don’t do it. You’ll save a lot of time and money. I’ve seen some ridiculously off niche sites that they weren’t even funny. And of course, they all failed. Without a single exception. Let alone if we’re going into fetishes, some sites I’ve seen got even to the point of being ANTI NICHE!!!

So, getting back to research, I’ll point you out some pretty obvious flaws and a few guidelines to get the ball rolling. Most of these will help you in one way or another. None of them will harm you, so what do you have to lose? TRY IT AND RESEARCH!!! The following scenarios are related to mainstream niches and are just a few examples of how badly content people is missing the point, the failing in specific fetishes is so huge it would take months to describe all the mistakes

Ridiculous Flaw #1: Nice teen gets a huge cock in her ass and she just stays comfy, smiling and looking to the cam.

I mentioned this one because it’s one of the most obvious and common scenes. Whoever researched at least a little on anal sex would knew that for males it’s related to rape fantasies, power, taboo breaking and infliction of pain, while for women it’s related to taboo, adventure and in some cases, the submission of male to woman’s desires by giving him that hidden treasure. Therefore, an anal scene should perform a woman in pain, or in lust, or in pleasure trying to make out the best off the situation (avoiding pain, dominating man, etc). And of course, the woman SHOULDN’T agree to be fucked in the ass! It’s so unrealistic and retarded that it can’t be explained with words! Instead, she should always say no and be forced to it, convinced to it or she should give her ass as a reward. And no, she should NEVER EVER EVER LOOK AT THE CAM, keep the fantasy alive, it’s content shooting 101!

Ridiculous Flaw #2: A guy with a huuuuge cock and perfectly shaped body fucks a girl for 30-40 or even 60 minutes. After that, he comes all over her face and mouth

Sounds familiar, huh? Well there are so many things wrong here it’s difficult to explain it, so I’ll be as short as possible. Porn content is always about fantasy, no matter how dull or wicked that fantasy is, the viewer has to relate to that fantasy and make it his own fantasy. Since nobody can guess what thousands of people’s fantasy is, you’ll need to get a reasonable middle point so your members (aka CUSTOMERS!) can re-elaborate their fantasies based on what you provide them*. Now, please tell me how anyone can relate to an impossible image of man who can’t even get excited enough to cum. Most people will get bored by the 3rd or 4th minute of that video. The ending is sublime too. After seeing that his lover isn’t excited at all and considers that fuck just a dull and boring work, her female partner will feel the urge to get a load of cum with a smile! Ridiculous, isn’t it?

Now, what about a guy that shows he is excited enough and can excite a woman in a way she’ll take that load because… she’s excited? What about a guy fucking a woman for 5 to 10 minutes (news flash: this is above average for most men) and then she gets an orgasm because that man is powerful enough to provide her pleasure at will? How many men can (and will) relate to this second scenario? The answer for non-pathological personalities is…. 100%! Still, you’ll see the unrealistic scenario above, but you’ll hardly find the realistic and desirable scenario.

Remember, people wants content based in fantasy. That fantasy can be related to the situation, the scenario, the performers or any combination of these. But in straight heterosexual scenarios, it will never be related to boredom, closet homosexuality and male gymnastics. If anyone disagrees, please explain it, I’m very curious to hear the arguments against this. The point is that your customer can fuck a whore in person. He can fuck his wife or lover. He could even interact online via chat with other women. But he wants fantasy. FANTASY. And most adult sites are failing at it.

Ridiculous Flaw #3: Girl with big boobs

Aaah, we all love big boobs (before continuing, let’s just say it’s an expression of Oedipus complex and it was considered a paraphilia until not so much time ago) . Problem is that due to that psychological singularity, this is a pretty complex niche. First of all, let’s say that any trick is ruined if you show the strings. The same happens when you show the scars of a boob job, or really bad boob jobs. Couldn’t you use make-up? Couldn’t you retouch the photos? Couldn’t you just hide this? No, it seems you didn’t even care.

Another thing: in boobs fetish , the main subject is… boobs! No matter how much you like that male talent’s cock, boobs fetish is about.. BOOBS! People wants the attention on that. They want to see those boobs sucked, pinched, squeezed, covered in cum, chocolate, milk, just dripping water, bouncing, moving at the sides… everything but your male talent’s cock, he’s just a prop, a mere contextualization for the real fantasy, slightly more important than the couch or the bed they’re on! And on top of that, when you film or photograph big boobs, most big tits fans will want to see the action performed by (or on) those boobs and the satisfaction face on the girl. In other words: FANTASY. People is fantasizing than they’re providing pleasure to their object of lust.

Now, for those that shoot big tits content, let’s say you’re pretty good and you got over the scars issue, you even avoid to display hours of your male talent’s cock. Good for you. Now, did you know the following?

1. Most people won’t care about natural or fake boobs AS LONG AS IT ISN’T EXTREMELY NOTICEABLE.
2. When they’re extremely noticeable, you can turn the fetish to inflation fetish. Another very different niche, but at least now you know what to do
3. Around 70% of big tits fan will favor dressed or partially nude/transparent clothed tits over fully naked tits
4. When it comes to hardcore action, around 65% of people will prefer that the bra is on while the remaining 35% has no opinion. If a boob pops out of the bra, that’s a huge bonus. Your beloved guy coming all over her boobs AND BRA: cash-iiing!
5. Tit fucking featuring the bra as part of the play: plan on your new mansion
6. Black, tan and white bras (in that order) are preferred over other combination of colors. Pink might be the worst (it’s associated to another sex object:  the vagina)
7. If you shoot partially dressed content, nylon and cotton sweaters, white office shirts and wet t-shirts are a real turn on for most boob lovers. If sweaters are wet and nipples erected, your content will be niched as big boobs as well as WAM or acquaphilia (yay!). Either way, you won.
8. Male talent should always be playing with the girl’s boobs. Always. He should MAKE LOVE to those boobs, not just fuck a girl who coincidentally has big boobs

Did you know all of the above? No? Isn’t it time to start doing your homework? After all, it could mean a difference of thousands of dollars

So, again, do you think “Content is King”? Well, then research your own content. There are huge chances you could save lots of money using it for other (more effective) purposes.

EVEN MORE RESEARCH FACTS TO HELP YOU

1. Vintage style lingerie (girdles, garters, bustiers, hosiery, stockings, etc) will be preferred in around 83% of cases over no lingerie or “slut lingerie” (the most commonly used)
2. Woman’s orgasm face outperforms no female orgasm by 78%
3. Short videos are preferred over long videos (15+ minutes)
4. Innocent romantic teens having sex in a tender way are preferred over slut teens ass fucked and bukakked (and smiling!). The numbers? 76% to 18% (if they smile I guess it’s 100% to 0)
5. Regular guys with decent sized genitalia are preferred over guys with perfect bodies and enormous cocks. However, you can do a set with enormous cocks guys for shocking purposes (and then you should research into pussy punishment and maledom fetish)
6. MILFs using stockings are preferred over no stockings. Numbers are really impressive: 93% (stockings) to 7%(no preference) and 0% for no stockings!
7. Amateur niches sell as much or even better than glamour, yet there are no real definitive numbers for one or the other
8. Are you planning to do a  femdom site? Are you personally into it? No? Then just don’t do it. You’ll fail miserably.
9. Do you REALLY know smoking fetish niche? No? Then avoid it.
10. Do you REALLY know about the new X fetish you’re planning to launch? No? Avoid it!
11. White backgrounds, black backgrounds and blue backgrounds (in that order but with little difference) are preferred over most other colors. Pale yellow, pale gray and pale pink are in a second league.
12. Professional looking sites with a big amount of interactivity sells better than amateur looking sites.
13. Horizontal navigation menus are preferred to vertical navigation by a huge margin. However, vertical navigation menus seems to slightly outperform horizontal ones in conversions.
14. “Magazine style” and long page designs seems to convert better than “episode” layouts. However, episode layouts on black backgrounds may have a slight non-conclusive preference over magazine and long page layouts.
15. Professionally made trailers are better than actually showing parts of scenes.  No content preview has poorer conversions but it sells more
16. Mobile versions of sites converts way better than home computer versions. However, the amount of sales for home computer versions is many times bigger
17. Do you do A/B testing? Even better, do you do A/B/C testing? Do you base it on traffic sources? on Geo-IP? on time frames? NO? What are you waiting for???
18. Did you take a look at this? No? Well, your loss!

I promised you it would be interesting, now it’s time to start to do your own research and get the most off your investment!

By the way, feel free to comment and ask questions, as a matter of fact I encourage you to! More to come soon!

*If you’re interested about the psychology part of this, you can read Sigmund Freud’s “Totem and Taboo” and Carl Gustav Jung’s works on Archetypal psychology, Anima and Animus and Atavism theories.

(note: this is an adaptation of my Marketing degree thesis and as such you may have seen a similar post somewhere else since I used it in a couple boards)

When dealing with marketing research and niches, we’ll always find ourselves in a point where applied research requires optimization to make the most out of our marketing budget(s). This point can be planned in advance (ie if we’re setting goals by time frames) or may surge out of necessity (ie, we notice our marketing efforts aren’t working as expected).

Now, if you’re worried this post may be something heavy and tiresome, don’t worry,  I won’t go into deep technical stuff nor research methodology. Instead, I’ll try to explain this in an as simple as possible way, by providing easy to understand examples and then some ideas on how to implement these techniques in a really easy way.

To start, let’s go with what I called the The Sniper and the Machine Gun models. In this scenario, we have two soldiers trying to reach their targets. One of them has a high precision sniper rifle, and the other has a machine gun. At this point I’m pretty sure you’re figuring out what will be this about, but let’s have a look at it:

The Sniper Model

This is the Sniper Model. Our sniper is using few bullets (money/resources) to make a sale by researching the proper way to get an easy target. Thus, the full line goes straight to the heart of the target (or, in other words, make a sale). Now, you’ll see the blue dotted lines that goes to the “body” of the target, “injuring” him, which may lead the target to “survive” (meaning he won’t buy because of a weak call to action or unrelated motives) or maybe he will “die” because of his injuries (meaning that he may NOT buy at that exact time, but may be buying sooner than later).

To add to that, our shooting range has 3 zones: niche targeting, media delivery (proper or wrong choice of media and marketing materials) and competition, and it’s easy to see our bullet will be farther from the target as the zones become bigger. The more accurate and restricted our “zones” are, the less loss in accuracy.

Let’s get the metaphor out of the picture and straight to business:  If we define our niche in an accurate way, our target will be closer to become an effective sale since we’ll have less dispersion. Once we start adding more factors, the dispersion ratio will have a compound rate increase.

Before continuing, let me add something that I know most of you hate to guts, but it’s very easy to use and extremely useful and needed in marketing and economics research: the Compound Interest Function. It’s as simple as this:
Value   =   IV (1  +  R / t)^Yt

where IV=Initial Value , R=Interest Rate , t= times of occurrence per year (every month would be 12) and Y=number of years.

In the graphic above, I’ve used a reasonable deviation of 3.4%, which comes out from the difference between total sales per campaign minus impulse buying multiplied by dispersion factors. So in this simple graphic, with only 3 dispersion factors, we could notice that around 30-35% of our budget is being 100% effective (leads to a sale) while the remaining budget has a 33% of chances of convert to a sale at a later time. Again, this is a very simplified model, you may find out that working with real numbers adds an exponential value of difficulty *

The Machine Gun Model

So we got to the dreaded “machine gun” model. Here, our soldier will use a really high number of bullets to get the same results than the sniper. Take a look at the graphic below:

Here we can see that the amount of resources used to achieve the same results increases in an exponential rate. In the basic example, we have a 360 degrees market with 8 targets, so, to our machine gun soldier it will take 45 bullets to get a 100% target (sale). In other words, the budget will increase 45 times for 100% effective sales. You’ll also notice that brand awareness is a little higher in this model, and that’s why companies going for wide range branding won’t care much about niche refining (this is a very common usage in mainstream marketing, however, in my humble opinion it’s a waste of energy and resources in online adult marketing).

In short, it’s common sense to use the Sniper Model. However, most people uses the Machine Gun Model. Why? Well, because unless you’re part of a certain community or a very knowledgeable person about a certain market niche, the sniper model requires a lot of specialization and the use of every single resource available to refine data. Of course, data research is the most important one, but technology usage, smart design elements, competition status research, innovation, economics and so on are factors to keep in mind. As an example, I honestly doubt any designer could compete with me in certain niches (ie pornstars, glamour and some fetishes) when it comes to results. But, what if I need to do a design for an amateur mature site? Well, 99.99% of designers will say “Yes, I can do that” and come with the same cookie cutter design, just changing the subject. We all know it’s like that, and I can’t blame anyone on that, there’s not a lot of work for designers, and at the same time, some site owners aren’t well informed on the subject as well, so it all comes to a vicious circle.

However, information is power, and I’ve the knowledge to make things different, so why not use it? I’ve seen/heard many times the usual mottos “marketing is useless”, “you don’t need a designer to do a site, do it yourself because you know the niche better” (I gotta admit this is the funniest one, out of tens of thousands of adult webmasters I can count with my hands the number of people capable of doing this with decent results), “I’ve been doing this for years” (yet most old adult companies are closing doors) and so on and so on. And so on. I won’t say anyone is wrong, to each his/her own. However, if everybody else is failing, why keep following the path of failure?

So yes, information is power, and although it’s very uncommon to see someone providing secrets to competition, well, here here are some useful techniques.

Some real life techniques

Marketing Effectiveness Research

First define a budget, no matter how small it is as long as you can do something with it, you can grow it later. Isolate this marketing action by using specific custom campaigns so data isn’t contaminated. Now, choose 2 to 4 marketing models (ie banners, text links, galleries, different traffic sources, same marketing materials with different selling claims/colors and/or any combination of these) on a strict time frame, for example 1 month. Try to keep traffic levels to be consistent throughout the whole time frame, for example, if you buy 90,000 hits try to make those hits come at 3000 per day.

After the time frame ends, you’ll have some amount of data, including traffic (one column per each source), CTR, sales, time frame and so on. Using Excel, input all the data per day (1 row per day) including amount of traffic, amount of traffic to sponsors (or to join page if you have a paysite), amount of sales and a last column should include cost of traffic (if you didn’t buy traffic, use the average value from traffic providers for the same kind of traffic you have). Make a graph with this data so you can see the results at first sight. Do this for each marketing model.

Now, if you kept the traffic flow at the same level, the last column should give you a somehow flat line, but chances are you’ll see several hills and valleys in the other columns. Quite possibly, you’ll see differences depending on day of the week and day of the month. So now, let’s go to data analysis:

a) first thing first, subtract  your initial budget from the total amount of money derived from that campaign. If you get a negative number or a little positive value… well, you’re doing everything wrong, so time to rethink your strategy.

b) take your total number of sales and divide it by 30 (or any time frame you decided to go with) to get the average sales per day. Add it as a new column to your graph, repeating the same value on each row. Now you’ll have a flat line. Check out every spot where the value is above the line, and try to find something in common. For example: are those spots on weekends? at start of month? coming from some traffic source? is there a daytime/nighttime difference? (most probably, yes). Again, do it for each marketing model.

c) now compare the marketing models themselves and you’ll see a lot of information that will help you to diagnose which are your strengths and weaknesses.  Thus, you may end with something like “best results came from Tour A with TGP traffic on Wed around 6PM and 3 AM with geo IP US-DE-UK”

so in this example, it’s very easy to see that all tour versions converts better on Wed to Fri  of Week 1, between 6PM and 6 AM (day/4 means we have divided the day in 4 equal parts, but you can do it with 3, 4, 6, 8, etc. I like 6 myself), with geo IP us-de-uk. We also see tour A converts great on TGP, while tour B seems to be built for SE. Let’s say our original budget was $3000 using 3 tours and 3 different traffic sources all equally divided, thus we invested (or wasted) $66.66 per sale, and common sense tells us to divide our budget in a more efficient way since most traffic fell out of effective range. Now it will look something like this:

Model 1: Tour A, TGP traffic, 3 days a week (Wed to Fri), first week of the month, 6 hours a day (6PM to 12PM), US-UK traffic

Budget explanation: when we started, we had 3 marketing models with $0.463 per hour per traffic source investment ($1000 divided by 30 days divided by 24 hours divided by 3 traffic sources).  Now we’re weeding out 2 traffic sources, 4 days, 3 weeks, 18 hours and we realize that each sale in this targeted model would cost us only $8.33 . See the maths below:

0.463 (hourly investment) x 1 (traffic source) x 3 (days) x 1 (week) x 6 (hours)

so Model 1 real cost per sale is 12.49% of what it was.**

Model 2: Tour B,  SE traffic, 4 days a week (Wed to Mon), first week of the month, 12 hours a day (6PM to 6AM), DE-UK traffic

Now we’re weeding out 2 traffic sources, 3 days, 3 weeks, 12 hours and we realize that each sale in this targeted model would cost us only $22.22 (33.33% of what it really was) . See the maths below:

0.463 (hourly investment) x 1 (traffic source) x 4 (days) x 1 (week) x 12 (hours)

Therefore, although we could use a budget redistribution of $1875 for Model 1 and $1330 for Model 2 (or $1750 and $1250 for budget correction ), we still don’t have a tendency, so we’ll give tour C another oportunity, only that the budget will look more or less like this:

Model 1: $1700

Model 2: $850

Model 3:$450

After this time frame, we repeat the analysis, only that instead we’ll add a “previous time frame growth” column (in %): anything over 0 will tell you we’re on the right path. Any negative number will require further adjustments. Either way, in no more than 5 or 6 months you’ll probably have a defined tendency and a pretty targeted niche

Next Week: Our Sniper Tumbles! (and even more techniques) Updated: New post is on!

*if you’re interested in going deep further into statistical analysis and research, you should use Variance or Standard Deviation to measure the dispersion values

** according to the table, you may say that I’m leaving out the 19 sales, however in this example we’re working on time frame trends and the cost isn’t per sale, but for the best hour spot

When optimizing your site for better results, you need to devise a marketing strategy, for which data research is a fundamental part of such strategy. Now, first of all, let’s define a marketing strategy in a very simple way by declaring these basic steps:

1) First of all, define your budget and existing assets
2) Define what is known as USP (Unique Selling Proposition). This is what you’re going to sell and why potential buyers should choose your product or service over other seller’s products.
3) Define your target and how to reach it that market niche
4) Define realistic goals with realistic time frames

As you can see, very basic, and nothing out of this world, even people that never opened a marketing book knows most of this in an instinctive or logical way.

So, we started our great business and we have a basic marketing plan. Now, even though this applies to online and brick and mortar businesses, we’ll stick to adult marketing strategy for online businesses.

In online business, SEO is crucial. I won’t go deep on SEO since it’s not the purpose of this article, however there’s an obvious direct relation with the subject: not only you can target certain keywords, but you can target different Search Engines. Obviously, you’ll want Google traffic, like everybody else. But… what about the other Search Engines and what about the results for each one?

Let’s see, the key for data research is to have the best possible data research tools. There are many in the market, ranging from $10 or so to 4 or 5 figures software. However, based in a price/quality relation and even as an absolute relation, there’s nothing better than the FREE analytic tool provided by Google: Google Analytics . Say whatever you want about specialty tools, but you won’t find many tools better than this, and with a price of 0 (zero, zilch, nada), you can’t beat it in any way.

As an example, I’ve this project (real case) where I get these amounts of traffic from different search engines:

• Google: 37%
• Bing: 22.6%
• Yahoo: 20.3%
• Baidu: 9.2%
• Yandex: 5.1%

Then I have some irrelevant traffic from Altavista, Tiscali, Terra, Ask and such. Now, please take a look at the last 2. many people didn’t even heard about them, however, they’re pretty big and they may send a nice chunk of traffic. Question is: what kind of traffic? Baidu is from China, Yandex from Russia. If you’ve at least a short experience in adult business, you’ll know that’s not very good in terms of money. And Analytics provides me with a nice tool (Bounce Rate) that proves me right: I’ve the almost impossible to reach 0% BR with Baidu and only 19% with Yandex, while Bing and Yahoo are around 38-40% and Google over 50%. Good news, right? NOT! If I follow the entire paths followed by the Baidu and Yandex users I’ll see that they’ll visit many pages, download everything they can and while at it, I’ll find many hacking attempts and spam.

Interpreting the results I’ll see that Google traffic is bigger and higher quality, people will bounce if they don’t find EXACTLY what they’re looking for at first sight, while Bing and Yahoo are quite good. And Baidu and Yandex traffic is almost all freeloaders which will produce $0.

What to do?

With the available data, it would be good to have some kind of service you can sell to Chinese and Russian demographics. Although chances of making a buck are scarce, if you know those markets and the language you may find the jackpot (we’re talking of extremely big markets discovering capitalism and consumerism ), but for most of us, the best you can do is redirect the traffic to a hub or site you feed and try to juice something out of that traffic.

However, with the “good SE traffic” and aided by the great Google Analytics tool, we can see what people is clicking, what they like the most and what they don’t like at all. Using that data, start some A/B testing and optimize your site as much as possible. You can track trends, hot spots, positioning, colors, browsers, sponsors, whatever you may think of and create very narrow campaigns without much effort, define the prices for ads spots in your site, adjust trades, maximize clicks. Anything you want is possible!

So… how are you planning to spend your day today?