Startup Marketing (continued): Nine Traffic Quality Levels

We continue to translate the article by Rob Walling . In his previous works, the author has already managed to highlight a number of important issues (the client who disappeared at the bottom of the funnel and why paying too much attention to traffic is dangerous for your business). He discussed the fact that you first need to “plug the funnel” in which visitors flow, then work on the conversion rate, and only then work on attracting the maximum amount of traffic to your website. But we didn’t talk about the role of traffic quality in determining conversion rate. I think this particular material did not interest me alone. I hope he will benefit many !.

Traffic quality

In this case, by “quality” I mean the following: how close is every visitor to your site to the image of your ideal client, and how much trust these visitors have for your site.

So, high quality traffic means that every visitor is as close as possible to your image of an ideal client, site visitors know you and trust you.
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By the way, this is why TechCrunch traffic does not bring any benefit to startups. Such traffic is completely untargeted (only if your market niche does not constitute other start-ups), and the attracted audience does not know anything or knows little about your product. So her level of trust is low. Using our definition of quality traffic above, we can determine that such traffic is extremely low quality.

This becomes apparent when you first distribute your list of contacts to people you have been in contact with for a period of time. The conversion rate in such a situation will be astronomically higher than your standard traffic (at best, 10 times, at worst - still 2-3 times higher). This is because the quality of traffic is much better.

In Academy, I regularly observe changes in conversion rates by 200%. They are based on the source (and, therefore, on the quality) of traffic.

Awareness of the importance of this factor helps you to understand where to direct your efforts when attracting traffic. If people on your mailing list affect your conversion rate 5-10 more efficiently than traffic from Google, you can spend 5-10 times more effort on expanding your email list. This is more effective than SEO, which allows you to just be at the break-even point.

Similarly, if you see a huge amount of traffic brought in by SEO, you should know how many of these visitors buy your product. Without this knowledge, you move at random and do not have the opportunity to properly distribute their efforts.

Fortunately, there is Google Analytics, which can greatly facilitate this task. You will immediately see that some traffic sources do not increase conversion at all. Thanks to this, you can calmly redirect your efforts to the categories of traffic that increase conversion.

An example is the Bidsketch product created by a member of Micropreneur Academy. A few weeks ago, I was creating a detailed case study about the launch of this project.

When I looked at the traffic statistics, I noticed a huge jump in mid-November, due to a number of reviews of this startup in web-2.0 blogs. At the same time, the number of conversions remained the same as compared with the previous week, that is, the conversion rate (number of sales per visitor) dropped sharply.

Is it bad? No, as long as you know why this is happening. The point is definitely in the quality of traffic.

Get rid of excess

My next step was an analysis of all visitors who stayed on the site for more than 5 seconds, which automatically excluded 67% of the traffic. In other words, 2/3 of people were on the site in less than five seconds. It was obvious that they were not the target audience and got there by chance. Taking these visitors into account when calculating conversion rates would be a mistake. To assume that you are very lucky that you are mentioned in any blogs is also a mistake.

Of course, it’s good when several thousand people visit your site, but if they don’t affect your conversion rate, there’s no point in visiting your site. And do not think that you are creating a brand - you are not Coca-Cola. After a few seconds of being on your site, these users will erase you and your site from their memory forever.

General rules

It is impossible to unequivocally say which type of traffic is better for each individual site, but with experience in creating and updating 20 revenue-generating websites, I noticed a certain regularity between the quality of traffic and its source.

Here is my list of items, in order of decreasing quality:

1. The list of contacts to send (users who have confidence in your site).
2. Your blog (users who have confidence in your site).
3. The referral link from the target website with positive feedback about your product.
4. Direct traffic (this usually means that someone heard a podcast about your product, read about it in a print publication or in an online article (no links) or this person is your repeat visitor who remembers your URL).
5. Organic search by the name of your product.
6. A referral link from a non-target site, or from a site that does not contain reviews of your product (for example, TechCrunch).
7. Other organic search results (assuming that this is the user's first visit to your site).
8. Google AdWords.
9. Banners and other advertisements.

I can point out exceptions to this list, but in general it fairly accurately reflects the trend.

findings

To attract high-quality traffic, create and maintain a blog, create an RSS and email list for distribution. Participate in discussions on other blogs and give interviews for podcasts (paragraphs 3 and 4). You should always pay attention to the SEO optimization of your page, as this simple step will allow you to move higher in the list if you have already exhausted the possibilities of several levels of attracting high-quality traffic.

Focus your attention on attracting high-quality traffic, and then this traffic will focus on you.

Good luck!