People ask us all the time about our viewpoint on web traffic, how this process works, and what it means for industry trends. Well, customers come to TurboSquid from a variety of directions. Most just simply type www.turbosquid.com into their browsers to get right to our site’s own search. A lot find us because of our relationships with Autodesk and other 3D application companies with the Tentacles plug-in for TurboSquid.
A surprising number of people actually type a company’s name into Google because they know googling turbosquid will find us (or whatever company they are looking for). Others go to their favorite search engine and type in something like 3D models, then click on the results and start shopping.
Really specific searchers might type in something like 3ds max male rigged model -tutorials –youtube, which performs a search on the terms 3ds max male rigged model, but eliminates results for tutorials and YouTube videos.
So generally, there’s this process of finding customers (customer acquisition) and getting them to come to you directly and trust that you’re the best source. As a business, you want people to come right to you. In the web world, this is typing your domain directly into the browser, like “turbosquid.com”. This “direct traffic” is the most likely to buy or use your services, and these customers are worth the most to your business.
The best public measurement of direct traffic turns out to be people googling your company brand, for example “turbosquid”. Lots of people do this out of laziness because they know Google easily find a company. Here is what these brand searches look like compared to our direct competition using Google Insights:
Google Insights – TurboSquid & Direct Competition
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Since 2007, something interesting happened. Three major sites started to distribute free 3D content. Google’s 3D Warehouse has drawn an immense amount of traffic pretty quickly, though the quality of their models is extremely low. It’ s almost like we have three flickr.com type companies operating in 3D.
Google Insights – TurboSquid & the 3D Industry
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The trends overall show that an increasing number of people are consuming 3D content. Google has added an enormous amount of free and low quality content, but that will likely increase the size of the stock 3D industry as these users move “up market” to higher quality models.
Google’s move has also created momentum behind WebGL 3D graphics, and the drive to get 3D graphics to display natively on the web. If Google, Autodesk, Dassault (3dvia), Adobe and others can create widespread adoption of 3D content, it’ll be the rocketship for the stock 3D industry and 3D artists in general.
In the meantime, TurboSquid will continue to develop our website and focus on our building our brand and direct traffic.