Great Referral Traffic

On Wednesday, I noticed that Smashing Magazine had just updated their blog with a new post called Useful Web Design E-Mail Newsletters. After reading it, I decided to post a message to them on Twitter, saying, “Great list of web newsletters, though you forgot ours 😉” and included a link to our newsletter page. Shortly after, they messaged back to let me know that they’d added the Newfangled newsletter to their list. I was surprised!

Within an hour, we started getting a bunch of new subscriptions to our newsletter. You can see from the image below, which shows the on-page stats box that appears on our newsletter landing page when we’re logged in to our CMS, that our typical direct traffic to that page tends to be less than 10 unique visits per day. However, the Smashing Magazine link directed 470 unique visitors to that page over the past two days. It’s not an overwhelming amount of traffic, but it’s certainly more than normal for this particular page.

What’s even more exciting to see is that the goal conversion rate for this traffic was so high. In the screenshot below, I’m showing a similar blow-up of our on-page stat box, this time focusing on the conversion rate for this page. Over the past two days, we’ve had around 250 goals converted from the visits from Smashing Magazine readers who clicked the link to our newsletter page. That’s a conversion rate of around 30%, compared to our sitewide rate of 1.7%.

To put this in perspective with the rest of the site, over the last month we’ve been averaging about 7 goal conversions a day from an average of 670 unique visits each day. You can see how even a little boost in traffic from the right source can be very valuable. Smashing Magazine’s audience is right in line with our positioning as partners to creative agencies, which is why we gained so much value from a boost in traffic of only a few hundred visitors.