Traffic You Do Not Control
This type of traffic in an online environment might include organic links, meaning a potential client saw your link as part of a search engine’s returns and opted to click the link and visit your site and explore your services. You can’t really control that, and you certainly can’t force someone to click your link. You also can’t control what a competitive firm does for its own clicks, and while you might have the most ethical firm found anywhere, the reality is image is everything and even the most unethical firms get the clients at least sometimes. You do not control that type of traffic.
Traffic You Do Control
This type of traffic includes any pay for click advertising you might have purchased, or you may have opted for with Google AdWords. You can control it to a degree. It’s the old adage: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You can draw potential clients to your site, but you really need to be able to keep them on your site long enough to convince them you’re the best choice for their legal needs.
Traffic You Own
This type of traffic comes with having potential clients’ email addresses or other ways of contacting them. You might have bought a list of email addresses or created your own email list based on past clients and even traditional methods used to gather that kind of data (giveaways, drawings – anything that requires one to provide information necessary to notify them they have won). It’s data you’ve cultivated, not data that someone else put together, and it’s the type of information you own. Naturally, this is the ideal way to gather this type of data.
Keep in mind this is different than having Facebook likes or followers on Twitter or Instagram. These are social media platforms that first, you don’t own and have no influence – these platforms could fold next week, and you’d have no control. Perhaps most importantly, you can’t control who follows or unfollows your pages.
Knowing the difference between these three types of traffic can be extremely beneficial as you go about planning your next advertising promotion. You can’t control who posts what on Facebook or Twitter -and while you can delete posts that controversial, you always run the risk of others seeing it and reading into any kind of post or tweet a negative connotation. Text that has been carefully written for an email gives you complete control over the way your message is received.
