Traffic Quality or Quality Traffic

In many of the articles on this site you will have seen me banging on about the quality of traffic or the importance of getting quality traffic. It is about time that I wrote a little about what we mean by quality traffic and how we can start generating that quality traffic.

What is Quality Traffic?

Depending on who you talk to or where you read, you will find that people have differing definitions for the quality of traffic, this can be based upon many factors such as the source, demographic, length of time that person spends on your site or if a conversion to a sale is made from that person. In reality it is probably a combination of these factors.

In the early days of my affiliate marketing, I purchased traffic from a company who placed adverts for your site on expired or expiring domain names; they sent me 2500 unique hits in one day, for the cost of $25, great! Or so I thought, the graph on Google Analytics flew up and everything looked fantastic until I looked at the time on site and bounce rate which said that on average those visitors spent 0.001 seconds on the site, clearly they did not stay about long enough to read anything on the site, so it was a mistake which I will never make again!

Having a huge amount of traffic may be impressive, but it it does nothing for your sales or profits then what is the point, your efforts have been wasted.

My definition of quality traffic is that the user is interested in the content of my site and eventually participates in the sites discussion. On this site I would not include anything about converting any of those into sales of any form as that is not that this site is about, on other sites converting to a lead or a sale would clearly be in the definition of quality traffic.

Generating Quality Traffic

Lets first consider the source of the traffic, clearly word-of-mouth will generate a great quality of traffic, personal recommendation, from one interested party to another has a high chance of generating good leads or sales.

If we compare this to search engine traffic or traffic from banner or text adverts all the user really knows about your site is what information you have included in your advert or in the description of your site that has been picked up by the search engine.

This is not to say that advertising can not generate good quality traffic. Placing your advert on a specialist site directly related to your own site is clearly going to generate a better quality of traffic than if your advert is on a general site. The reason for this is that the user is already interested in the subject and is more likely to be interested in your content.

Commenting on blogs which are in your niche is a great way of getting targeted traffic, again here the users are already interested in your subject matter and are firstly more likely to click the link, and secondly more likely to convert to a lead or sale.

Demographics is also important, if your site is selling goods directly targeted at the older generation, you want to try and generate traffic with a majority of people in this demographic. Although this may not always be the case, take a gadget site, one would immediately assume that the key demographic here would be 15 – 35 year old males, however although targeting this traffic would certainty be a good idea, you may also get good quality of traffic outside this demographic, women or older males would also be interested in this type of product.

The message I suppose is to consider where you are getting your traffic, especially if it is traffic that you are paying for, make sure that the traffic you are buying is targeted, interested in the subject of your site. Don’t be infatuated with the traffic graph; concentrate on the income/profit graph! This is much more interesting; after all, you can convert profit to beer!

Poor Quality Traffic is ok for Pay-Per-Click

No, no, no, no, no, It is a common misconception that if does not matter about the quality of your traffic if you are earning your money from pay-per-click campaigns as the user does not have too buy anything for you to earn. Remember that they still have to be interested in the subject of the ppc advert in order to click on it. For a long time with Super Proxy I struggled with PPC and earning from them, and more recently I have struggled with earning from AuctionAds. Although this is a slightly different point these failed because too small a proportion of the users were interested in the adverts content. This was not strictly quality of traffic but more a specific problem for Super proxy in that it attracts a very wide and varied user base who are all using the service for different things.

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Affiliate networks

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