Jobhop Jobhop's blog : 3 Things A Website Traffic Controller Needs To Know

What is web traffic? Web traffic is the amount of data sent & received by visitors to a website ( definition on wikipedia)

With billions of people visiting the internet every day how does a company make sure a lot of traffic containing the right potential customers visit their website?

How do they get exposure for their website?

How do they get people to keep returning again and again?

Because these days big business is done online it makes sense to have a team managing all online activities.

Within that team there would usually be:

An online marketing manager and assistant
A content strategist
A social media manager
A community manager
A web developer and maybe a junior web developer

They would also have “A WEBSITE TRAFFIC CONTROLLER”

A website traffic controller's job is to work with the marketing team to drive traffic to the company website, to control that traffic and analyse it, of course it doesn’t stop there.

Working very closely with the online marketing team at the innovation period of their campaigns. During this part of the process a website traffic controller needs to understand the amount of possible traffic coming from any one campaign and act accordingly. For example: If 10,000 people hit the website at once, could it crash? Could it slow down and put people off from ever coming back? What extras need to be put in place prior to the campaign, perhaps load testing needs to be done and what contingency plans need to be put in place if it all goes a bit wrong?

SEO

You'll be expected know about search engine optimisation (seo), good links and the different types of social media, so when you’re chatting with the marketing team and the social media manager you’re all talking from the same page.

Customer Web Habits

You'll understand customer web site habits

For example where is it they look first on a website, what could they be looking for & why t would they bounce off immediately.

Using tools like heatmaps ( link) a website traffic controller could detect if the website audience was mainly looking at an icon on the left when ideally you wanted them all to look at the special offer on the right. It would then be up to the website traffic controller to alert the marketing team and create a split test ( link) to monitor and measure.

Monitoring & measuring

A huge part of your job will be monitoring and measuring, constantly recording peaks, what caused them and getting those peaks to repeat and get bigger.

A good example of peaks would be a D.I.Y company receives much more traffic every time a D.I.Y programme is aired on television, the marketing team may guess that would be the case but not until it’s confirmed can the marketing team get about putting a campaign to gether to surf that wave.

The marketing team need this valuable information so they can get to work immediately to try and replicate the peaks and make them more successful.

If you think this is your type of job role but you’re not sure where to start I would suggest get some Google analytics training and develop your skills.

Who would you like to be a Web Traffic Controller for?

JOIN Jobhop and spread the word.

Julie Bishop Jobhop.co.uk