Quantity vs. Quality Web Traffic

Seth's Blog: Different kinds of traffic

So many discussions of the issue of quantity vs. quality, whether it's time spent with children, money spent on clothing or shoes, reading romance novels or War and Peace, or hours in front of the television. Now here's another one for you: web site traffic.

We in the web marketing world talk about unique visitors, page views, and conversion. As Seth Godin illustrates here, it doesn't necessarily matter how much traffic you get to your site, but whether or not you're getting the right traffic.

I worked with a client who had signed a longterm contract with a company who promised to drive traffic to her web site where she was selling an audio CD. I have to admit that they did exactly that. Her site got lots of traffic, but no one bought her CD -- not one!

Now you may think that the problem was with her product, which wasn't the case. Her CD was professionally produced with quality information. You may say that the problem was with her web site, which was partly true. There were definately some improvements to be made that would promote her CD more effectively and allow for a more simple method of purchasing it.

But even if she had a horrible web site and a horrible product, you'd think that with the millions of visitors sent by the company, she would have sold at least one CD from her web site to an anonymous visitor. But no, the CDs she did sell were to people she met on her own or who were referred to her site by associates. Despite the imense quantity of traffic the big and expensive company sent to her site, the quality of traffic was seriously lacking.

Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you how many hits their site gets. First thing to ask is how that translates to unique visitors (since "hits" are pretty meaningless for marketing). Then ask what sort of results they're getting from all those visitors. Are they converting those visits into sales, referrals, phone calls, etc. They may not even know for sure.

As Dr. Phil would say, "How's that workin' for ya?"