Geoff Hadley's Blog

Now that you’ve got your site up, you’re only loving that rush of traffic you’ve been getting so far. Your marketing plan looks very effective with your hits increasing consistently. Now you think you’ve hit it bull’s eye with your fail-safe marketing strategies and consistent tracking software. The question is, is all that traffic useful? Sadly, maybe not. That’s because not all traffic will give you sales. The kind of traffic you need is the one that converts to a sale and to build up on this, you need to distinguish between good traffic and bad traffic using your statistics and a web traffic analyzer. Telling good from bad traffic begins with visitor tracking or hit counters. An ad tracking software or service will bring you more information than this such as where your visitors are located, which web pages they frequent, the length of their visit and the forms and images they download. If you know how significant analyzing your traffic is, you’ll value all this information that will be made available when you track your ads. For example, knowing where your visitors are will give you an idea how to effectively customize your services. If you’re getting very little traffic from your international or out-of-town clients, you might want to lower your shipment rates to make them more interested. In terms of Internet marketing, knowing from which search engine your visitors are will give you an idea how to adjust your strategies to perk up your ranking on the search engine where you’re presently not that successful. If you know which pages are viewed the least, you can improve their design or add more engaging content to make them perform better. If you home page rarely gets clicked, which means you barely get visitors to check out the rest of your site, then it’s clearly not doing its job. As a result, good traffic is traffic that converts into a sale while bad traffic is that which does not bring anything that the site or company it represents can benefit from. It doesn’t mean, however, that a visit that does not convert into a sale is automatically bad. One thing that may be considered is whether a visitor is there for the first time or for a specific number of times. If a first visit does not bring about a sale and is not repeated, then it’s probably bad traffic. But if a visitor has been in and out of the site without necessarily purchasing anything, it could be that he is still considering his options. This traffic obviously has good budding for turning into a sale and could, therefore, be considered good. Get to know your website statistics and invest in website optimization to boost your business performance.