Sometimes in marketing, the word “traffic” has a bit of a bad rap, calling to mind images of rush-hour motorists passing billboard after billboard. With roadside billboards, the equation is fairly simple. The more traffic there is on the road, the more billboard impressions you’ll get. And hopefully, those extra impressions will eventually translate into brand recognition and sales.
But online marketing doesn’t quite work like that. In online marketing, traffic isn’t the number of people who see your ads, it’s the number of people who visit your site. People simply don’t buy something online because they saw a banner ad over and over. Attempts to increase sales by simply getting more impressions aren’t usually cost-effective.
If you want to succeed at online marketing, you need to prove that your business has what your potential customers need. For this reason, online marketers have started to put less emphasis on getting more traffic and more attention on making a better pitch to the traffic you already have. There are a lot of ways to do this, but the most scientific methods involve systematic A/B tests to build better ads, landing pages and websites. After all, if you can build the perfect user experience, everyone will buy, right? Wrong.
Website testing and optimization operates on the basic assumption that you have the right traffic — that people who visit your site are actually interested in your product. But what if they aren’t actually interested? You can send the right message to the wrong traffic till the cows come home and never make a sale. What’s more, you might never even find out what the right message was.
With that in mind, here are six reasons you should focus on the quality of your traffic before you even think about changing your website.
1. You’re probably attracting the wrong traffic.
I compare online marketing to fishing. Online searchers are the hungry fish, your ads are the lures, and every click is a nibble. But different fish go for different types of lures. Bass go for one lure; trout for another. When I’m fishing for bass, I don’t put a trout lure on the line.
In the same way, it’s important to create ads that appeal to your ideal audience. For example, if you’re running an AdWords campaign, you could bid on the keywords “sparkle princess kitten” and get a lot of clicks, but unless you’re selling glittery toy cats, none of your clicks would be potential customers for your business. And to make matters worse, you’d have to pay for all those worthless clicks.
This example sounds absurd, but you’d be surprised by how many paid search accounts struggle with this problem. After auditing more than 2,000 Google AdWords accounts, we’ve discovered that for the average account, 100 percent of conversions and sales can be tracked back to a mere 6 percent of keywords. The rest of the keywords, no matter how brilliant they may have seemed at first, are about as worthwhile as “sparkle princess kitten.” These keywords don’t go unclicked either. The conversion-less keywords in an account typically produce 72 percent of its clicks and eat up 76 percent of ad spend.
Regardless of the online marketing platform you are using, you have some ads and target audiences that produce value for your business and some that don’t. If you are tracking conversions and sales in your campaigns, you can easily use that data to figure out which campaigns drive real value for your business.
2. The right traffic saves you money.
If you eliminate the campaigns that are driving the wrong traffic to your site, you can save yourself a lot of money. Cutting the fat from your account might seem drastic and a little scary, but remember, you’re not getting rid of any of the traffic that makes you money. You’re getting rid of the clicks that cost you money.
Consider the average ecommerce business. In paid search, the average ecommerce cost-per-click (CPC) is 88 cents and has a conversion (sale) rate of 1.84 percent. The average worth of these sales ranges from $81 to $119, but we’ll go with $100 for easy calculation. So, if a business’s PPC marketing garners 5,000 clicks, they’ll get 92 sales, or $9,200. But they’ll also have to spend $4,400 getting the clicks, most of which never had a prayer of converting.
This doesn’t look too shabby, but remember, the average paid search account wastes 76 percent of its budget on irrelevant clicks. What would happen if we got rid of that useless 76 percent of traffic? The company would still make $9,200, but now it only has to spend $1,100 to get it. Suddenly they’re walking away with $8,100 instead of $4,800. The company’s conversion rate also skyrockets to 7.36 percent, putting their account…