Our friends over at VHX do, and they are sharing it with you.
Earlier in the year we had the CEO and Co-Founder of VHX, Jaimie Wilkinson on our Business of Film podcast.
At the time, he had mentioned that they were working on becoming more transparent and had talked about disclosing the aggregate data on where customers and traffic comes from.
Well, now it’s here. And it’s pretty cool to see.
WHERE TRAFFIC COMES FROM ON VHX – this link takes you to a live page that is updated daily across all their sales.
When you have that many unique visitors these numbers tend to average out to the point where it takes a lot of traffic to move the needle in one direction or another. So lets talk about this traffic.
1. REFERRAL (36%)
This is traffic that is being sent to your site from other websites. Now, I bet you are curious to find out what the #1 source of referral traffic is. Well, as it so happens, Jamie mentioned this to us in our interview —
It’s YouTube.
Which, when you think of it, shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. After all, this is the video business we are talking about.
2. DIRECT (25%)
Here’s the really important take aways about direct traffic. The first is that direct traffic can be one of two primary things, either someone typing in the url directly; or from direct email links. It’s hard to tell. And in fact, there might be other sources as well. Those two make up the majority of direct traffic.
But here’s the kicker. Even though direct traffic is only #2 in terms of referrals it makes up the #1 source of revenue.
The Lesson: Build you audience. It’s the #1 converter of sales.
2. SEARCH (24%)
So, search is all about finding your film in Google, Bing, Yahoo. The name of the game is SEO. But that’s an entirely other subject. But, there is something important to take away from this.
If a full quarter of the people who come to your site do so via search, they are going to be making a decision to either stick around or not fairly quickly. So, keep in mind these two things:
First, look at your bounce rate. Are people actually sticking on your site or do they just leave right away. This will give you a good idea if people are coming to your site for the right reason.
Second, look at the conversion rate. As Marc Schiller talks about, you want your conversion rate to be at 3%.
If it’s less than 3%, you can try lowering your price. If it’s more, then good on you. But retail average is about 3% so you’ll want to aim for that.
It’s a balancing act between price and conversion rate. Keep in mind that Indie Game: the Movie would have flash sales on their price at least once a month. So don’t be afraid to offer deep discounts to affect conversation rates.
4. SOCIAL (15%)
Well, that’s low. But it’s to be expected. With Facebook changing their platform to be ad supported and the increasing noise in the various social media channels, I’m actually surprised that social is driving that much traffic.
I’d watch this number. My guess is that over time social will go down and direct will go up.
Still, it’s an important element. Mostly because you control it. Search and referral you have less control over. Social and Direct you have almost complete control of.