Lesson #18 Essential Traffic Management Basics
Written By Cyndalie

Effective traffic management is often overlooked and a webmaster should nail down and optimize traffic flow once a few hundred visitors a day begin to roll through the door. There are many different ways to sort and manage incoming and outgoing traffic, and the importance is simple: Why work so hard to drive visitors to your site, only to have them slip through your fingers, or not capitalize on why the user is at your site and what they could be looking for to make their visit complete.

Traffic Sorting
The typical adult webmaster used to think traffic management meant redirecting or executing popup and exit windows. Today more than ever, popup windows have become an invasive mistake as a means of effective traffic management, and most likely will result in the complete loss of that visitor now and possibly forever. Although there are no certain stats, it's easy to estimate that 70% of popups are blocked through browser and tool bar utilities. The basics of traffic sorting begins with how the user get to, navigates through your site and creating sub categorical levels of content areas as a platform for cross promotional marketing and up sell opportunities. In many cases, this means creating separate entrance and tour pages (landing pages) for traffic coming from different sources.

Traffic sorting in adult sites starts with the disclaimer page. First you sort the underage from the legal age visitors by using an entry form, disclaimer page, or AVS entry pass. If your site offers free porn and features a pay site from the second options you sort the free porn surfers from the premium porn interested buyers. If your site offers 5 - 10 different types of free porn, let your users sort themselves into the niche they are most interested in and cross promote related pay sites or primary pay site features related to each content area. If the user "backs out" and is still not interested in paying for the pink, then link your "More Free Porn" links to a "4 free" type programs or free chat/upsell opportunities where you can still earn a buck off of the visitor sessions and the user is happy because they found exactly what they were looking for from the beginning.

Spider Wire
When it comes to search engine marketing and managing your incoming traffic flow, there are a few hazards and benefits that come into play. Every Traffic Lounge reader should know by now that making every front end page of your site marketable through optimization is key to developing good search engine real estate and rankings. If your site has 5 (softcore or censored - if not first going through a disclaimer process) tour pages, optimize them each for different (yet relevant) keywords according to the content offered on the page. If your site offers a free area (softcore or censored - you DO want to give them a reason to join) you want to make this area marketable as well. You could create every doorway page as a "disclaimer" page and sort them into the most relevant area of your site based on the keywords that doorway page was optimized for, but what about the pages of your site itself? Begin with the first element in the traffic sorting example above, the problem of the disclaimer - attempting to keep minors out.

How do you keep kids from "walking in" to xxx content from the search engines? The solution is fairly simple. Setup a JavaScript file (.js) that tells the browser to pop up a system window that contains an age and content disclaimer. The trick is to find a script that sets a cookie in the browser which tells the script only to ask the users once per session (the first page they may "walk in" to). Embed the remote JavaScript tag in ever page of your site containing xxx content that may have been spidered by the search engine or be "walk-in-able". Test to make sure the popup disclaimer message only appears once per visitor session so the user does not get annoyed and leave. There are various ways to do this, so utilize webmaster message boards like CozyCampus.com to get suggestions from other webmasters.

Playing Hardball with Software
Traffic sorting and management can get even more advanced than simple link direction or database driven dynamic link deviousness. There are traffic management tools now available that have become adult-friendly. Traffic management software solutions (also called CMS - Content Management Systems) allow a webmasters to get out of the trenches and get behind the controls with a bird's eye view of how visitors enter, exit, and move through your web site. Even more important is knowing where your visitors are coming from and where they are going to; how much control do you have? Analyze your stats for key information.

There are a few reasons why traffic management and control is becoming more important to adult webmasters. Beyond the fact that you will be more enabled to detect and direct visitors to the most viable payment options or language depending on where in the world they are located, it is becoming more and more the responsibility of the webmaster to know what audience they are displaying certain types of content to. For example; if you have a large number of visitors coming from Japan and you feature bondage content; try sending some of that traffic to Asian bondage content or sponsor site (with viable payment options for visitors from that region). This is called GeoTargeting and there are tools to help you manage this server side or through browser detection and redirection.

Limiting Risk
Also think that what you can get away with showing your French visitors may not be such a good idea to make accessible to visitors from deeply religious regions or you may want to block certain known IP address blocks or regions where hack attempts or fraud originate from disproportionately, often done directly by your payment processor (like CCBill or Paycom). If you are responsible for your own chargeback's, traffic management software that contains "geotargeting" sorting features may be essential to helping you identify where transactions are originating from in an effort to prevent fraud - the odds are small a credit card from West Virginia would be buying porn online in Lithuania. The good thing about traffic management software, is that it runs on your web server, is easy to setup, and it also includes a full suite of real time web site stats that are very accurate when compared with web based stats programs.

Finding tools and experimenting with your own ways to manage traffic can be very exciting from simply having more knowledge about how users navigate your site and where they come from to watching your sales conversions rise and your bandwidth bills drop with the same amount of traffic! Maximize and Monetize. Effective traffic management and flow control will become even more essential to every adult webmaster as the publisher is always responsible for the content they make available. Handling your customers responsibly and respectfully from the time they enter to the time they exit your site will pay off in repeat visitors and increased sales. Before you open the floodgates in the New Year, how much flow control do you have in place? The power to harness it all is yours.