How To Identify Quality Website Traffic
by Dean on October 25, 2015Quality website traffic. How do you know when you have it? How do you know when you don't? A lot of businesses measure their online success and their website success by the volume of visit that they get. I would make a case for a more important factor is actually your quality factor. If you have any analytics software set up on your website, and I hope you do ... if you don't, check out one of my other videos that explain why you should have it. This is actually a great example of why you should have analytics. There's pieces in there that you can take a look at to easily tell a quality factor overall of who's visiting your site.
There's three major metrics that I would look at first. These can be extracted a little bit further. There's other detailed metrics that you can look further into analytics, but these three will give you a pretty good idea as to how much quality visits you're actually getting on your site. I'll explain why that's important here in a minute.
First off is bounce rate. What a bounce basically is, it's a measurement of how often someone is entering your website on a page and leaving that same page without visiting any place else. If they hit your homepage, they look at your content, they're like, "Nah, this isn't feeling right. I don't think that this is really the site I'm looking for," and they leave, that counts as a bounce.
In this first scenario I actually have 72% written down as a sample bounce rate. That's really high. If you have a 72% bounce rate, then you're clearly not getting the right traffic to your site. It's a bad match. You either have the wrong visitor hitting your site and you've got the right content, or you've got the right visitor and you have the extreme wrong content. They came with the intention of expecting one thing and found another.
Time on site: 32 seconds. That's not a long visit. This basically is exactly what it means. It's how long someone is visiting your site on average. Then the final metric would be pages per visit. In this case I've got .089. It averages out to less than a page, which maybe I should have this at a 1 or a 1.01. Because if anyone is visiting at all, it's probably a single page. The point is you can see some pretty low numbers on pages per visit. It's also an indicator that your content or your visitor, it's not the right match.
Scenario number two would be a little bit better picture and something I would consider more in the range of having a quality visit. 43% bounce rate. I've seen them in the 30s. I've seen them, on rare occasion, some websites with bounce rates in the upper 20s. It is rare but it can happen at the same time.
Two minutes and 47 seconds on site. That's a good indicator that you have content that is interesting to the user. People are searching through your site. They're navigating through and looking at different content pieces that you have on there. It's an indicator that you are delivering the quality that they're hoping to find. When they did that search and your result came up, it's a good indication that there's a good match there. Then 1.75 pages visit on average, so some people are hitting 3 pages. Maybe some are hitting one.
The point is this shows that people are active. This shows that people are not active. That's what this really comes down to. If you have this situation and you really feel like the content that you're offering is good, then for some reason you're attracting the wrong type of traffic. Maybe your content keywords and how your sites being identified needs to be examined.
If you're seeing this and you're not getting the conversions you want, maybe there's some conversion pieces on your site that need to be tested. Maybe they need to be looked at again, moved around, rephrased. Maybe the messaging needs to change. Maybe you're getting those good visits but you can't quite get over the conversion hump.
First and foremost, identifying what that traffic looks like is actually the first step. You can dive. Analytics has a lot of things you can dive into to help support these numbers and really see the behavior of your users. Because the bottom line is, if you're getting a quality visit and you're still not getting those conversions, that's a different story and you've got to start looking at other elements, even within analytics, to help you define that road map as to what you need to change next.
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