The LDBA is a Superb Marketing Tool
Posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009
Would you spend $30/month to expose your business to 771 pairs of eyes AND be able to see exactly how many visits your profile page received for that $30? Thought so. Not to mention the $10/month to be a member—now, that’s a deal!
In January 2009, the LDBA relaunched this website as part of a renewed marketing effort to attract new members and better service our existing members. As part of this, we decided to become more transparent and open about how we operate and what benefits our members receive. This included our website’s performance, statistics available at every membership meeting on profile views, search engine traffic, keywords and more valuable marketing information.
You can see for yourself from the graph above how traffic has increased since January: from 65 unique visitors (different people) in December 2008—our old site—to 771 unique visitors in July 2009! That’s a 1,086% increase in 7 months! (psst… we provide more goodies later in this article).
With this improvement comes opportunity. We now have some fantastic advertising opportunities for your business at very reasonable rates—we’ll also provide precise feedback (click-through rate to your profile page) to you at our monthly meeting so you can see how effective your ad is, something print advertising cannot offer.
Web Traffic Statistics
Total Visitors
- December: 94 / 65 unique
- January: 321 / 181
- February: 580 / 358
- March: 625 / 427
- April: 553 / 425
- May: 590 / 480
- June: 914 / 685
- July: 1,061 / 771
- Average pageviews are 5.6/visit.
- Average visit time: 2 minutes, 33 seconds; 15% spending between 60 and 180 seconds.
- The search engines bring in 72% of total traffic.
Pages
- Home: 950 visits
- Members: 528
- Events: 226
- About: 106
- Join: 72
- Advertise: 50
Out of 5,907 total pages viewed, Member Profiles views make up 40% (2,346 pageviews, 23% up on June), Events 22%, Articles 3%. Top Profiles viewed in July were:
- 176 : Profiles/John Surtees
- 107 : Profiles/The Chronicle
- 77 : Profiles/Wildplay Nanaimo
- 61 : Profiles/Soulfire
- 56 : Profiles/Jill Dashwood
- 53 : Profiles/Mr Poppers
- 46 : Profiles/Bouma Meats
- 46 : Profiles/Sportsmans Pub
- 43 : Profiles/WR Hutchinson
- 41 : Profiles/Jennifer McCormick
- 37 : Profiles/49th Parallel Grocery
- 36 : Profiles/Inspired by Colour
- 36 : Profiles/Laura Forrest
- 35 : Profiles/JB’s Auto Supply
- 32: Lait Bloomer
Top Articles viewed in July were:
- 54 : Articles/Variable v Fixed… (Laura Forrest)
- 44 : Articles/Surviving Your Partner… (Michael Furlot)
Top Events viewed in July were:
- 395 : Events/Thursday Night Live
- 246 : Events/Ladysmith Days
- 106 : Events/49th @ Ladysmith Days
- 60 : Events/Ladysmith Show & Shine
Search Engines
These have never been higher, July bringing 764 in total compared to 398 in March. Google makes up 90% of total search (679 referrals).
Links
The key to the site’s success is links, especially inbound links. However, outbound links show that the LDBA is servicing its members’ websites and hopefully benefitting those businesses.
Inbound referrals were made up from:
- 50 : facebook.com
- 16 : ladysmithdays.com
- 13 : take5.bc.ca
- 13 : tourismladysmith.ca
- 10 : take5.ca
- 7 : verticalmeasures.com
- 5 : renovationbluesband.com
Outbound links from non-sidebar links (i.e. content area):
- 60 : ladysmithdays.com
- 31 : remaxocean.bc.ca
- 24 : islandhomesales.com
- 19 : movingproperties.ca
- 14 : ladysmithchronicle.com
- 11: wildplayparks.com
- 9 : facebook.com
Outbound links from sidebar Resource links:
- 8 : ladysmithtrolley.com
- 7 : 1stview.ca
- 7 : ladysmithdays.com
- 6 : ladysmith.ca
- 5 : ladysmith.com
- 4 : cvrd.bc.ca
- 3 : ladysmithhistoricalsociety.org
Search Phrases
Again, never been higher with 482 total phrases bringing traffic. Top phrases in July were:
- 34 : ladysmith downtown business association
- 21 : ladysmith days 2009
- 15 : john surtees remax (56 for “surtees”)
- 19 : variable vs fixed
- 18 : ladysmith days
- 7 : jill dashwood (20 for “dashwood”)
- 7 : laura forrest ladysmith
- 6 : inspired by colour ladysmith
- 6 : sportsman pub ladysmith
- 5 : thursday night live ladysmith
Regions
With 22 countries (90% from Canada) and 73 Canadian cities making up the visitor demographic, Ladysmith’s name is spreading out to a wider audience.
We had 137 visitors from Victoria (highest ever at 14%)*, 59 from Duncan, 51 from Vancouver, 18 from Calgary and 14 from Ottawa and West Vancouver.
. . . .
Contact us today to take advantage of the best marketing dollar in Ladysmith!
Not only is it one of the best marketing dollars you can spend to promote your business in Ladysmith but it helps to create a vibrant “business buzz” on the internet for the town.
To verify that this works, we have had a major company in Toronto interested in our product call because of our profile page. We also had a distributor call from the mainland due to the profile page. These are not just general calls, this is business for our popcorn wholesale which is what we were hoping for. It works, we like that people are coming to us which makes our investment in the LDBA worth it.