Is Traffic too Basic of a Metric to Measure?
Traffic
Traffic, specifically number
of visits, is a fundamental measurement of site reach and growth. It’s helpful because
you can tell if your marketing efforts are working, and it also helps to give an
overview of your site’s performance.
There isn’t an “industry standard”
for how much traffic your site should see on a daily, weekly or monthly basis;
it’s all dependent on your business, the amount of advertising or exposure your
business has and even affinity partners. The better question to ask about traffic
to your site is whether or not it is quality traffic.
In the “Google Merchandise
Store” used for our Google Analytics training, for the week of 8/20/17 -8/26/17
there were 17, 641 users that visited the site with over 15k being new users. Digging
into those numbers could help to reveal a lot more information about the type
of traffic, whether or not it is of high quality – meaning they either
completed a CTA or spent time on pages that had relevant content. Comparing the
site average and performance will help to illustrate this even more.
The goal for traffic should be
to do better than you did last year but ask why you want to grow your audience
and what you want them to do at your site. Your goal shouldn’t be to grow based
on arbitrary numbers but rather to attract customers that support your business
objectives (Bischoff, 2015).
Traffic gives you a nice
overview of the health of your campaigns and can help you to quickly identify
if there is a problem. For example, if you see an unexpected drop in traffic
overnight, this will give you a BIG clue that you need to investigate your
sources to see what went awry. In a healthy, steady campaign, you should expect
your total number of visits to grow steadily (DeMers, 2014). Plus, according to some estimates, “it costs at
least five times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one.”
That being said, return visitors are costing you less in the long run.
Traffic is one of the
foundational metrics we should look at to understand our site. While there are
other metrics and ratios needed to build the full picture of our traffic, it is
still a key indicator for the site. Since The desired end game result of Web
analytics is to track fiscal ROI, which will help a company justify its digital
marketing budget and/or to optimize that budget by supporting activities that
have the most impact on revenue (Tietbohl, 2017) the fundamental number,
traffic, is the crucial base.
References
Bishcoff, B. (2015,
October 31). 7 Website Analytics Metrics That Matter Most - Spinutech Blog.
Retrieved from
https://www.spinutech.com/blog/digital-marketing/7-website-analytics-that-matter-most/
Burns, E. (2016,
October 21). 5 Web Traffic Metrics You Should Keep Your Eyes On. Retrieved from
http://www.commonplaces.com/blog/5-web-traffic-metrics-you-should-keep-your-eyes-on
DeMers, J. (2015,
August 15). 10 Online Marketing Metrics You Need To Be Measuring. Retrieved
from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/15/10-online-marketing-metrics-you-need-to-be-measuring/#3588473d76c1
Tietbohl, M.
(2017). Week 1 Lesson: Intro to Web Analytics and the Basics of Web Analytics.
In West Virginia University eCampus. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_88807_1&content_id=_4063421_1&framesetWrapped=true
I think it is super important to measure traffic. The question always will be though, is the traffic the type of traffic that will lead your company to sale. If you have 20,000 people visit your site and no one buys anything, who cares. I think a lot of the metrics that we can track all rely on on another to help true define an issue, if there is one.
ReplyDeleteGreat point, Abigail. I agree. It needs context :)
Delete