How to measure the quality of your website traffic

by

Whether we are talking about PPC traffic or organic traffic, many companies believe that an increase is an indicator of a great marketing strategy. Whilst this is true to an extent, the calibre of the traffic to your site is arguably more important than volume.

With blackhat tactics like clickbait, buying visits and spammy search term implementation still popular choices amongst some of the more shady SEOs out there, manipulating traffic numbers to smash a volume target is simple and easy. Whereas driving quality traffic to your site is a more worthwhile – and difficult – task.

What is high quality website traffic?

High quality website traffic are visitors to your site that are genuinely interested in the product, service or news article you are providing. 

The best way to know whether traffic to your site is valuable is to set up event, goal or eCommerce tracking within your Google Analytics account.

How to measure the standard of your website traffic

However, the time it takes for a user to discover your site and make an investment varies from company to company. For some, the conversion window can be less than a day whilst others can be months. 

With that in mind, how can you know that your agency is driving quality website traffic without having to wait months and risk your revenue targets?

Below are several ways you can use your Google Analytics data to analyse the calibre of your users. We recommend combining them to build a picture of the quality of your site traffic.

Monitor bounce and exit rates

Bounce rates measure the percentage of people who landed on a page and then navigated, or “bounced” off your site without looking at any other pages.

Exit rates highlight the last page people looked at before navigating to another website.

The aim is to keep these metrics as low as possible. If they are at 50% or above, there is either an issue with the audience that is coming through to your site or there is a problem with your website.

To ascertain which is the case, keep an eye on the other metrics mentioned within this post.

Keep an eye on return visitors

Return visitors are coming back to your website either to gather additional information or to make an investment. 

Either way, if your return traffic is increasing alongside your overall sessions and unique visits, chances are your marketing team are doing something right.

Don’t forget time on site

Using the pages per session metric can also give you an idea of whether your audience is of a high standard. If they are engaged with your site and are taking the time to read and browse, they must be interested in what you have to offer.

However, be aware that if time on-site is particularly high, this could be a hint that your users are struggling to find what they are looking for.

There’s also pages per session

Depending on the size of your site, you can use pages per session as a metric for discovering if your audience is high quality.  

Similarly to time on site, a high number of pages per session could be a warning that your audience are struggling to find what they are looking for.

Watch conversions

Finally, conversions and goal completions are the best measurements of whether your marketing team is driving quality website traffic to your site. 

Once optimisations have been carried out and your conversion window has passed, you should be able to gauge whether your increased traffic is of a good standard. 

If goals and conversions are increasing alongside your traffic, then you know you have struck gold.

How to drive quality traffic to your website

Gauging the quality of your website visitors takes a lot of in-depth analysis, particularly for companies with a wide conversion window. 

In addition to this, increasing quality traffic to your website takes time and dedication. You must understand who you are marketing to, research the best ways to communicate with them, implement site changes that will meet the needs of your target audience and guide them through to a conversion with an effective remarketing campaign. 

At Sweet Digital, our stats speak for themselves:

  • We have increased our clients SEO traffic by 78%, with a revenue ROI of 24:1
  • We have reduced cost per click for PPC campaigns by 58% with an average ROI of 14:1
  • Our CRO efforts have improved basket abandonment by 6% and increased conversion rate by 72%

If you would like to discuss how we can drive quality traffic to your site, we would love to help.

Want to know more?

Let’s Talk

Latest Blogs