Use your international traffic to your advantage

Recently I have been rather fascinated with the amounts of traffic many Australian websites receive from overseas. Regardless of having a .com.au extension and an Australian hosting plan - the international traffic continues to stream in. Depending on the website, this traffic will normally not be utilised to its full potential.

By potential I refer to not catering to that particular audience as well as you could. This could mean serving international advertising instead of AU specific ads or serving different content on professional services websites that also service the international markets.

As someone who likes to take every last drop out of a visitor when it comes to achieving goals, why wouldn’t you look at customizing your visitors experience to help you achieve your online KPI’s?

We all know that bespoke, targeted and relevant content that aligns itself with the visitor has a better chance of converting, yet most of us do not include such traffic in our game plans.

A few take away ideas for maximizing ROI on international traffic:

Ad serving

If you serve ads, geo target AU for your Australian ads and set all other countries to see general ads that are not AU specific. Perhaps AdSense in conjunction with AdManager?

Dynamic geo-ip targeted content

If you service international markets, try making your content dynamic to align colour schemes, content, wording and more with that particular country. If I were a law firm in Australia that also worked with Hong Kong, I would be aiming to align my colour scheme to something that culturally reflects the status and prestige my brand must reflect in that country along with giving the user a local experience on my website. This would dramatically increase conversion rates.

Identify your international traffic

Analyze your Google Analytics and segment your biggest international traffic streams. Focus on them to begin with and think about ways you could perhaps fulfill a website KPI via that traffic.

Unsure of how to service your international traffic?

Look to capture their name and email via a newsletter sign up so that when you do, you can start to contact them. Arrange to have a spotlight only visible to international traffic that aggressively requests them to sign up to your newsletter. Better to get something!