My experiment to see if my site can survive on free traffic alone, continues. It’s been three days now since I switched off the adwords campaign. The initial drop was much greater than I expected. Having analysed my stats through Google Analytics I had estimated that about half of my traffic was coming from sources other than pay per click but I was wrong.
As it turned out, my traffic has fallen by about 90%, which was such a shock that I almost turned Adwords back on again. However, I decided to hold my nerve and interestingly, it looks
like my signups have only fallen by about 50%, which proves the theory that organic and/or article traffic is much better quality than paid for.
After the initial sickening drop, daily traffic has held steady, so I’m going to stick with this for a while longer and hopefully shortly I’ll begin to see it slowly rising as more articles gain wider distribution.
My Alexa ranking also continues to rise. Well it falls really but the lower the number the better. It is now at 1,074,136 It may fall through the one million mark soon which will be an excuse to crack open a bottle of mineral water (well, it’s a pretty small milestone). However,
there is a big BUT here as it’s based on one week and 3 month averages - so the traffic drop won’t have been reflected yet and I expect it to start to move out again in the next couple of weeks.