You can be receiving a lot of traffic but unless it’s quality traffic… it’s just taking up bandwidth and server resources.
Every website is different and so quality traffic is different for every site. There are no absolutes.
Determining quality traffic is something that occurs later on. You’ll want to know what average for your site is and set that as the benchmark.
When conducting new campaigns you’ll want to get nothing less then what you’ve set as your benchmark.
Quality traffic is essentially traffic that spends a lot of time on your site and will check out a lot of pages.
What you want is a high avg. time on site plus high page views per visit.
Determining And Applying Benchmarks
Google Analytics give you the option to set goals (or benchmarks) so you can easily see if a campaign is working effectively.
Benchmarks can be set as high as you want but you should set them realistically. I like to set my benchmarks slightly higher than average for a particular metric.
Find the average for each metric and set that as the benchmark.
You should also set a benchmark for customer loyalty which is essentially how often users keep coming back to your site and how often they buy products from your site.
After you’ve set all your benchmarks, set them up in Google Analytics.
Once you set all the goals with Google Analytics, you’ll be able to know what referrers are performing effectively.
By setting the avg. time on page benchmark you’ll be able to know what page on your site is performing the best. Take a close look at the page and if you can replicate it with similar content.
Bounce Rates
A bounce occurs when someone leaves your website.
The bounce rate it the percentage of people who visit a webpage that then leave your site without exploring your site further.
It’s a good indicator of how sticky a web page is. If it’s interesting users will click around and explore your site further.
If a user looks at a page and then leaves your site… it’s safe to say they lost interest.
If you have an ecommerce site or a site where people have to register, checking the bounce rates of pages leading up to the sale or registration can tell you where people are getting turned off and where there’s a bottleneck.
Fixing bottlenecks is critical if you want people to do a certain task.
People leave mid way during a registration process or purchase for a variety of reasons, it could be because the process is too complicated or there’s a trust issue. By knowing that people bounce on a certain page… you’ll better be able to diagnose the problem.
Key Performance Indicators
Also known as KPIs, they are the metrics that indicate how well your business is doing.
KPI’s can be measured in many ways but for the most part they’re measured in terms of conversion goals.
There are success KPIs and warning KPIs.
Success KPIs are metrics that if they increase indicate that your business is doing well and they can include such things as:
- Conversion rates for sales
- Conversion rates of leads
- Number of email newsletter signups
- Number of sales
- Number of leads
- Revenue
- ROI (return of investment).
Warning KPIs are metrics that if they increase are signs that your business may not doing well and they’ll include such factors as:
- Bounce rate
- Cost per sale
- Cost per lead
- Complaints