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KristineS
08-13-2008, 12:11 PM
Probably because my title is Director of Marketing I get a lot of spam ads promising me millions of visitors to my web site if I just sign up for this free service. I wonder how many people fall for that and how many fail to realize that just any traffic isn't going to get the job done. The traffic needs to be targeted customers who are interested in what you have to sell.

When it comes to the traffic on your web site, do you prefer a smaller number of people from specific population segments that will be interested in your product or a large number of visitors from anywhere?

billbenson
08-13-2008, 05:27 PM
Targeted with a credit card in their hand :)

vangogh
08-13-2008, 07:13 PM
A small group of targeted traffic should always be preferred, unless your goal is to get people to leave the site right away through an ad. In that case maybe you're more concerned with numbers.

Traffic that leaves as soon as it arrives is generally just a waste of your bandwidth. I think a lot of people run into problems with their marketing and seo because they see traffic as the end goal. Traffic is an intermediary goal not the end goal.

Oh yeah and your targeted traffic should have their credit card in hand.

orion_joel
08-14-2008, 12:16 AM
I would much prefer a small number of targeted visitors ready to buy then a large number of random visitors that leave almost straight away. If you have a small number of visitors, and can work out the conversation rate, then there is a much better chance that you can replicate that rate if you can increase the visitors on the same demographic. However if you have a large number of visitors that are not targeted, there then is a good chance that by increasing visitors the conversion rate is not going to match this increase.

vangogh
08-14-2008, 12:40 AM
One of the things I see a lot online is people focusing on the traffic as though it's all they need to be successful. You can tell that many of those same people having nothing in place to actually make a sale, but even assuming they I did, I bet many wouldn't have anything in place to handle all the orders. Business can fail because they take too many orders that they can't deliver.

KristineS
08-14-2008, 04:43 PM
I hear that all the time when people pitch advertising to me. Well we have x number of visitors. Great, how many of those visitors will be influenced to buy based on what they see on your site. How many clickthroughs do you get? What are the demographics of your visitors? Half the time the people trying to sell me advertising get offended when I ask. It's nuts. Why do I want to advertise somewhere that can't give me targeted traffic or information about how many of their visitors act on what they see?

vangogh
08-14-2008, 05:56 PM
One of the things I've said a few times in response to people seeking traffic as the end goal is that if they're willing to pay for my time I'll be happy to develop a robot that will visit their site and let them show whatever numbers they want in their stats.

Of course I give the caveat that my robot doesn't have a credit card and won't click on your ads, but if all you want is traffic numbers I can easily provide them.

The idea of quantity vs quality in traffic is why most of the traffic exchange services you see are useless. People get traffic by visiting other sites in the network. You visit a site someone visits yours. But most people who join those networks do so because they want traffic back to their site. They only visit yours to earn the credit to get someone else to visit theirs.

The numbers may look good as far as visitors, but it's all really fluff since none of the traffic served any purpose.

Harold Mansfield
08-15-2008, 09:39 PM
One of the things I've said a few times in response to people seeking traffic as the end goal is that if they're willing to pay for my time I'll be happy to develop a robot that will visit their site and let them show whatever numbers they want in their stats.


And that is exactly what they are giving you. When I first joined this forum I worked with a group of developers, designers, and such.

There were quite a few people who came to me through forums for traffic, full well knowing that it was just numbers, not actual visitors.
The game is, to add bot traffic onto already existing traffic for the purposes of :

Selling the site
Selling Advertising on the site, based on number of visitors
Sell Links on the site (Traffic + Page Rank)

Traffic is the most valued commodity on the web. No one is going to "redirect" real traffic to you, and even the "big boys" fudge the numbers a little bit to keep ad revenue up.

This only works on people that gauge success on visitors, pr, and alexa ranking and assume numbers mean sales. They do not.

When you have those things naturally, over time, of course you then have a grip on your target market, but there is no quick fix (outside of a nationwide advertising campaign), that you can buy that will get you there.

You have to build and cultivate your market.

vangogh
08-15-2008, 09:57 PM
But bot traffic is just faked numbers. Anyone who know what they're doing isn't going to buy a site based solely on inflated traffic numbers. They're going to want to see revenue.

I'm not saying what you're doing won't work, but it only works short term and on people who don't know what they're doing. If advertisers see no one from your site every converts into a sale they'll pull the ads. Selling links based on PR is not a sound business model since Google can and has shown a willingness to reduce your PR if they think you're selling links based on it.

Again I'm not disagreeing that you can make money with faked traffic numbers, but it's not a long term business model and in the end you're just selling fool's gold to fools.

I disagree that traffic is the most valued commodity on the web though. I think it was, but I think more and more businesses are coming to understand that traffic that doesn't convert is essentially worthless.

yankeerudy
08-19-2008, 12:48 PM
Funny, we were talking about analogies in another thread... In this case, though, a literal comparison helps illustrate the point.

Online businesses need to take a cue from their brick/mortar counterparts. Stores with lots of traffic but no sales don't last very long. Likewise, sites with non-converting traffic just waste time and money.

Years ago, when we started our College-Cram.com (http://www.college-cram.com) site, we took out an ad on the college humor website. It had a large following and promised at least 10,000 clickthroughs. Well, we did get over 11,000 visits. Unfortunately, all the visitors were college students (mostly male) looking for porn/jokes, not educational resources like we had. So we ended up with 11,000 visits with something like 98% bounce rate and an average time on site of less than 5 seconds.

Lots of traffic? Yep. Big waste of time, too.

vangogh
08-19-2008, 07:10 PM
Fortunately you stuck it out since you do have a good site. For most of us traffic by itself is irrelevant. It's not an end goal. We want people to take some kind of action whether that means buying something or subscribing to our blogs or just bookmarking the site for a later visit.

Traffic that leaves as quickly as it arrived is pointless unless you're looking to sell something based solely on the traffic numbers. Even then any gains will be short lived.