Increasing Website Traffic - Quantity or Quality?
Post on June 13th, 2008
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Exploring the strategies of bringing traffic to your website, are you looking for tons of traffic, or quality targeted traffic?
Most website owners, if not all would love to see tons of traffic pouring into their website, but one overlooked point is the quality of the traffic you are getting. There is obviously a point to trying to obtain this traffic. If you have a blog, you want to attract people who will find your blog useful, subscribe, and come back often. If you have a business website, you are probably looking to obtain leads, make sales, brand your company or some other end goal. Here are a few tips to get quality traffic vs. a large quantity of visitors.
Target the Right Audience
When you are trying to attract traffic, whether through back linking, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, or other forms of paid placement, consider how well you are targeting your strategy to the right people. It might not be to valuable to attract visitors to your site about Playstation3 games from, say a retirement community blog. It could, but chances are, this is not the right audience. Think about where your visitors are coming from, and try to adjust your efforts to bring in a more qualified audience by choosing sources that are closely related to your business, product, blog or service.
In order to help determine the quality of your traffic, utilize your website analytics and statistics, and determine what your visitors are doing once they get to your site. Here are a few things to look for when analyzing your website statistics:
- Bounce Rate - The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that exit your site from the page they entered on. If you have a high bounce rate, obviously your visitors are not compelled enough to venture any further into your site upon entry. Even with landing pages, where there is a call-to-action such as completing a form, or making a purchase, it is not considered a “bounce” if the desired goal is converted.
- Average Time on Site - Look at the average time people spend on your site. This is a great indicator, as, if you have thousands of people spending 3 seconds on your page, they obviously aren’t interested in continuing further. This could be due to the fact that the source where the visitor came from was not targeted correctly, through the link or ad creative.
- Conversion Rate - If you are measuring conversion rates for lead form submissions, sales, click-throughs, sign-ups, or other goals, (which you should be), if you have very low conversion rates, it id quite likely that your traffic is not of high quality.
- Visitors by Source - When looking at your website analytics and statistics reports, most applications will allow you to drill down to compare statistics such as time on site, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. between your different sources of traffic. If you have horrible stats from one or more particular sources, it is probably a good idea to weed those out and concentrate on more viable sources.
When setting a goal to get a large quantity of traffic to your website, take a look at whether or not it is helping you to meet the goal of your website. Do this through analyzing your visitors’ behavior concerning bounce rate, average time on site, conversion rate, and visitors by source. If you do not currently have or are not utilizing your analytics program, this should be remedied very quickly, as you don’t know success unless you can measure it.
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