It’s not enough just to have a great looking website. You need people to come to your website, love it and—hopefully—pay you.
That means you need traffic to your site.
The only problem is, all traffic is not created equal. Some people are interested in your site, but others show up seemingly at random. They peek around you site, maybe check out a couple of pages...and then they leave.
This can be frustrating, but if you happen to be paying for your traffic, it can be an incredibly expensive way to get eyeballs on your site.
For most of us, we have a website to make money. That means we need people to do more than just look at our site—we need them to do something specific that helps nudge them towards becoming a customer.
Depending on your business, that may look different to different people. Maybe you want them to sign up for your newsletter...or click on an ad...buy a product...hire you or your company...the list is endless.
But, regardless of what specific action you want them to take, you need them to convert.
The Frustrating Thing About Traffic
Unfortunately, it seems like most people come to your website and leave without converting. It’s frustrating. After seeing hundreds or thousands of people hit your site and bounce, it can be easy to start wondering, “What am I doing wrong?”
And so, like a love-starved teenage girl, you start changing things. Makeup...hair...content...call to action...but you never take the time to ask the most important question:
Is this even the right guy...er, traffic?
The fact of the matter is, even a perfect website won’t convert the wrong traffic.
Does Your Audience Make Sense?
Often, you might be trying to reach one audience, only to have a very different audience show up on your site.
For example, I run an digital marketing agency. One of the main ways we drive traffic to our site is through our blog.
Back in October 2013, we put out a blog post called “6 Killer PPC Branding Tactics Even Freddy Krueger Loves!”
Within days of publishing the article, we began to get tons of traffic to our site.
In fact, that blog post drove more organic traffic to our site than any other page (including our homepage).
At first, we were excited about all of this extra traffic...and then we discovered a problem. None of that traffic was converting.
Yes, you read that right.
Despite hundreds of clicks per day, we weren’t getting any conversions.
In fact, after 2.5 years, we still haven’t seen a single conversion from this post.
What was the problem?
We do PPC advertising. The post was about PPC advertising. The title was about PPC advertising and it was showing up in the top spot on Google.
People who clicked on our article should have been interested in PPC management, which means that someone should have converted.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the post was showing up as the first result on Google...but not when people searched for “ppc”, “ppc branding” or even “ppc branding tactics.”
It was showing up when people typed in “freddy krueger tactics”.
Now, don’t ask me why someone would type in “freddy krueger tactics” and then click on a post about PPC advertising, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t convert.
It didn’t matter that we had a lot of traffic. We were showing up for the wrong keyword, so audience was wrong (and possibly homicidal…).
Paying for Traffic Isn’t Always the Answer
You can see same sort of problem with paid traffic, too.
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post called “How to Spice Up Your Love Life With Google AdWords”.
The post was a clever breakdown of the parallels between marketing and romancing that I expected would drive a lot of clicks and conversions.
To get it started off on the right foot, I decided to promote it on Facebook.
Now, this wasn’t the first time that I had promoted a post on Facebook. I’d been doing it for a while and I had identified what seemed to be the right audience for my content.
Based on my prior experience, I figured that this post would drive a lot of traffic to my site.
And, it did.
I got a lot of clicks. But, I didn’t get any extra conversions.
At first, I couldn’t figure out why. Normally, more clicks equaled more conversions, but in this case, I was getting additional traffic without additional conversions.
What was going on?
In an effort to nail down the problem, I took a look at the demographics of who was clicking on my post.
To my surprise, most of my clicks were from 55+ year old women.
Yikes.
In my experience, the 55+ year old crowd usually isn’t all that interested in hiring a digital marketing agency. Previously, that lack of interest had prevented the Baby Boomers in my target audience from clicking on my promoted posts.
This time, however, the whole “spice up your love life” angle seemed to be grabbing their attention.
Unfortunately, they were interested in spicing up their love life—not in working with a marketing agency.
After I figured out what was going on, I excluded the 55+ age group from my targeting. As a result, I got less clicks, but now I wasn’t paying for the wrong clicks.
Targeting the Right Traffic
Regardless of whether or not you are paying for your traffic, the key to running a successful website is to drive traffic that converts.
The question is, how do you make sure that your website is getting the right traffic?
Here are 3 things to consider:
- Which pages are generating conversions? If you know which pages attracts traffic that converts, you can focus your efforts on getting more out of those pages.
- Where does your high-converting traffic come from? If most of your conversions come from a certain set of organic keywords, try to improve your page’s ranking on those keywords. If you get most of your conversions from paid advertising, identify the audience that converts and focus your efforts on getting the most out of that traffic.
- Which demographics convert the best? For this, you’ll have to get into your analytics data. The better a demographic converts, the more you should focus on designing your website (and ads, if applicable) for that audience.
If you want your website to make money, your site needs to do more than attract traffic. It takes a little extra research, but putting the right traffic on your website will ensure that you get both clicks and conversions.
Conclusion
There isn’t much point to building a beautiful website if nobody sees it. However, it’s not enough to simply get traffic to your site...you need to get the right traffic on your page if you want to make any money.
You’ve heard my two cents, now it’s your turn.
How does the wrong traffic affect your website performance? Have you ever had a web page that drove a lot of the wrong traffic?
Download your free printable traffic worksheet.