Just do It! Stop thinking of your traffic in terms of number of visits or visitors. That metric sucks! All that matters is potential buyers and actual buyers. Everything else just inflates egos.
So instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point.
There are 3 types of visitors who can come to your website:
1. Buyers – you know who they are because they converted to a sale or lead.
2. Potential Buyers – these are visitors who are in the market for what you offer, but for any number of possible reasons, don’t buy. They may be at earlier stages in the buying process, doing research to sell it internally, not adequately persuaded, driven away by bad usability, etc. The upshot is, there are countless number of changes/improvements you can test and make to bump these visitors from potential into actual buyers.
3. Disqualified Traffic – these are visitors who wouldn’t buy no matter what (maybe they arrived to your website by accident – they typed shingles and were looking for the medical condition not what you put on roofs, or maybe they don’t have the type of budget your product or service needs, etc.).
On a typical website, 3% of visitors are Buyers and the other 97% is distributed among the Potential Buyers and Disqualified traffic.
You should be asking yourself these 2 key questions:
1. Of your non-buyers what percent are potential buyers? And how can you increase those?
2. What marketing efforts are bringing ample amounts of traffic, but with poor quality traffic – i.e., what’s driving a disproportionate amount of disqualified traffic?
Your marketing analyst should be able to tell you the answers to these questions.
The opportunity to increase revenue is in:
- understanding that 97% of non-buying traffic better,
- bringing in less Disqualified traffic and more Potential Buyers, and
- More effectively turning those Potential Buyers into Buyers.
Do you have a plan for doing so? If not, will you continue to target ineffectively?
P.S. if it helps to think about it, GoDaddy.com Super Bowl commercial drives lots of traffic to their website to see the continuation of their ads (well maybe not this year – sorry Joan), how many of those are not qualified buyers?
That's where most people get it wrong. They write content that gets traffic, and that's great. The problem is, most content geared towards traffic isn't necessarily the traffic you want, as you suggested.
Now I know you know everyone at TheGrok knows this, but I'll say it anyway. You could rank for something like Britney Spears, and get a ton of traffic from Google. However, you'd be much better off with Britney Spears CD or Britney Spears Tshirt, or better yet, Buy Britney Spears CD. Sure, it won't send as much traffic, but the traffic that it does send, will most likely convert to a sale.
I'm totally aligned with this. There is this whole other world in SEO called "conversions."
Sure, SEO is necessary, but conversions, that's critical! Copyblogger links to this article at a good time for me as I am engaged in conversion optimization on one of my sites as we speak. Great article.
interesting article, thanx
i believe a weekly newsletter is a good way to establish a relationship with the 97% potential buyers
some people need to feel they know you before buying
and it's a good opportunity to ask them what their problem is