Traffic Quality.
You may have heard me say that the output of yur website is
defined by £ Sales = Traffic x Conversion Rate(%)

So, double the traffic, double the conversion rate, right?
Well, not really. You see, the quality of the traffic has a
huge bearing on your conversion rate.

In fact, the equation above only holds true if the quality
of the traffic is consistent - which it doesn't have to be!
Makes sense really...
Say you run a website that sells chicken feed to farmers
and most of your traffic is coming from search engines
directing enquiries about bird flu for example, then your
conversion rate will be lousey. (In this example you could look at
your log files to see which search words people are using to find
your website and change the copy accordingly)
Or.... let's say your website sells office
chairs and you're using Pay per Click from Google to get traffic.
The word 'chair' might bring in loads of traffic and the
Clickthrough rate on Google may be great - but the actual
traffic that you get is people looking for all types of chairs
- consequently office chairs will only represent a fraction
of your target market - hence this traffic is fairly untargetted
and therefore of poor quality.
'Office chairs' would see less people coming to your website
- but would be laser accurate!
However, there are even worse sources of traffic - completely
untargetted traffic.
There are numerous places that sell thousands of 'visitors'
driven to your website.
BUT!!!
This could be from various dubious means - expired domains,
popunders or even worse - click bots.(i.e. programs that try
to simulate real visitors visiting your website)
I'm not saying all these vendors are bad - it's just that I've
tried some and unsurprisingly I've found them to be dud. If
you hear of a bone fide one - let me know!
My advice - don't bother with them. Your stats look good
- your sales look terrible i.e. a waste of money.
Sources of usually good traffic usually includes pay per click,
natural search, blogs, affiliates, micro-sites, inbound links
from relevant sites(esp directories etc)
In general - you're better off with multiple streams of highly
targetted traffic than a single main stream of untargetted traffic,
pound for pound.

How do you know which streams of traffic are working?

With web analytics software(like ours!)
Put simply, we can isolate all your various channels of traffic
that come to your site - so you can see which are converting
and which aren't.
The bottom line is that you can now increase which traffic sources
work and drop those non-converting traffic streams and thus see
your conversion rate soar!

Want to see your various traffic conversion rates?

I offer a complimentary 15 Minute Consultation...
For more details, simply call me on 01454 852414,
or visit http://mklink.com/consult/?source=newsletter
 
'till next time,
Mike Knight.
http://www.mklink.com
01454 852414