Quality Vs Quantity?

Exploring the strategies of bringing traffic to your website.

All websites would love to see massive amounts of traffic come into their site, but a point that is often overlooked is the quality of the traffic they are attracting. If you are a business website, you are probably looking to obtain leads, make sales or some other end goal.

Target the Right Audience

When you are trying to attract traffic, whether through pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, email campaigns or other forms of paid placement, consider how targeted your campaign is. If your site sells gadgets, it is probably unwise to try and attract visitors from a blog about old people's homes. It may do well, but chances are this is not the best target audience.

Thinking about where your visitors are coming from and adjusting your campaigns can bring in a more qualified audience by choosing targets that are closely related to your business or services.

To help determine the quality of your traffic, study your website analytics and discover what your visitors are actually doing when they get to your site. Here are some key things to investigate when analysing your website statistics:

1. 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. Though remember a landing page, 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.
2. Average Time on Site - Look at the average time people spend on your site. This is a great indicator for checking whether users are actually taking the time to read your content or browse your goods, for if you have thousands of people spending 3 seconds on a page that contains a half page essay or 50+ stock items, they obviously aren’t interested in your site. 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.
3. Conversion Rate - If your conversion rates for lead form submissions, sales, click-throughs, sign-ups, or other goals are low, it is quite possible that your traffic is not of high quality.
4. 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 one of those sources seems to be under performing it could be worth investigating whether the cause of the problem is the quality of traffic from that source, and whether resources could be better spent on more profitable sources.

When aiming to increase the quantity of traffic to your website, take a look at whether or not it is helping you to meet your goals. Do this by analyzing your visitors’ behaviour concerning bounce rate, average time on site, conversion rate, and visitors by source. If you do not currently have this information about your site, you really should! You don’t know success unless you can measure it.

If you do not currently have an analytics solution or don't feel you are using your analytics program to its full potential, we can help. Contact us at StormForward and let us help you turbocharge your website results.