Jay Dillon
Latest posts by Jay Dillon (see all)
- Which Social Media Platform Is Best For Your Business? (FB, Twitter, IG?) - February 8, 2016
- The Role of Social Media Manager in 2016 - February 1, 2016
- Why Placing Ads In Blogs Can Be A Negative - January 4, 2016
Remember my article on Using Google+ Communities to Promote Your Content? If you are yet to read it take a look – it talks you through the basics of setting up Google+ communities as part of your marketing strategy.
In this case study we’ll show you just how valuable an active Google+ community can be in generating traffic for your business. If you’re already pretty keen to use Google+ to improve your SEO and promote content, then this article may well provide you with the motivation to get started now.
The Challenge
My team wanted to test out just how far we could stretch organic traffic to a furniture site we created back in July, before we invested in any campaign. We decided to just use Google+ as our main social media and promotion outlet, and created a community to post content. The results? Read on to find out.
A few months ago we decided to sign up with Commission Factory, an affiliate marketing network that connects a variety of merchants with sites designed to showcase and sell their products. The site also gains a percentage of commission for every sale. After applying to a few furniture merchants, we designed a site called My Style Furniture:
Uploading, tagging and categorising the product feeds was a bit time consuming, but necessary for the setup and to show how far we could stretch organic traffic before investing any capital in promoting the site. We created a Google+ business profile and immediately a public community page titled Furniture Tips & Advice AU:
Although there is no definitive formula for how to succeed with community pages, our plan from the beginning was to post and share a couple of blog articles a week, engage and follow (commenting, giving +1’s) other communities of similar interest about 2-3 times a week and promote some of the featured products from the site at least once per week.
The results
With the help of Google Analytics we were able to keep track of our organic goals. Below is a breakdown month by month of all traffic results via their source/medium.
July 2015
August 2015
September 2015
As you can see, most of our traffic ended up being organic and although the sessions decreased, we were able to reach a more steady flow by September. In almost three months our Google+ business page has:
- Reached over 6,000 views and 23 followers
- Our community page now has 70 members that engage with our posts
- Helped us to gain commission from several purchases.
This is all a result of pure organic traffic and a constant presence/engagement on the web. Our site now has 16 published blog posts.
The verdict?
Well, we might have done a bit better had we gone into PPC but the focus of this case study was to see how much organic traffic Google+ could bring in. In conclusion it has been fairly decent – our next step would be to test out paid advertising, so stay tuned.
There is some bad news on the horizon. Google recently decided to drop Google+ links. This might thwart our efforts with this e-commerce case study to branch out from a growing Google+ community and land on SERPS. We’ll keep you updated.
