A high volume of web traffic that converts is the holy grail of every online business. Marketing budgets focus on bringing visitors – traffic – to our websites and social media profiles.
Visitors can be human or pieces of code called bots. A pay-per-click site that gathers revenue from visitors that click on ads might use bot generator software as well as strategies that bring in human web traffic. A sales-based site doesn’t want bots but people willing to pay for the product on offer. Generating web traffic can be expensive.
When you create strategies to increase website traffic, return on investment is important. If you spend thousands to bring in hundreds of visitors that purchase one or two low-cost items, your return on investment (ROI) is too low to be profitable.
The most important marketing acronym in terms of improving your ROI is CR – conversion rate. Your web traffic should be doing something to attain your business goals and should cost (much) less than what the visitors pay you. But conversion rates do not necessarily mean sales. Different conversion rates can bring a potential customer closer to a sale through smaller actions.
For example, you invite anyone to take a look at your website just to get people to recognise your logo. This is an important strategy for businesses that deal with international clients who want to operate for the long-term. Any web traffic that sees your logo and knows what your business is about is a conversion.
As your brand becomes better known, your next goal might be to set up a mailing list of interested parties. You might want your web traffic to fill in a couple of details on the form. This information tells you which groups have the most interest in your product or service. Anyone who fills in the form is a conversion.
While you gain insights about the most interested web traffic – your targets – you can start to change your page design and services to suit them. Targeted web traffic – as long as your product is reliable and you offer competitive prices and excellent customer care – is more likely to buy something from you. If your targets buy a product, they provide the ultimate eCommerce conversion.
There are many different ways to get more web traffic. The most common method is search engine optimization (SEO). People who type in specific terms (keywords) on search engines like Google and Yahoo are given a long list of related websites. These lists can be pages long. The more web traffic you want, the higher your business description needs to be on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Another way to increase traffic is to buy it either as undifferentiated (non-targeted) or targeted visitors. This is the quickest way to get thousands of people to your website; the ultimate conversion rate with paid web traffic tends to be low, but the high volume and low cost per visitor make up for this when your website and offering is relevant and attractive.