Many digital marketers operate under the misguided notion that amassing high volumes of website traffic is the key strategy for online business success. However, bigger is not always better when it comes to attracting visitors.
Oftentimes, marketers who focus narrowly on inflating traffic statistics struggle to convert those visitors into sales.
Website Traffic: Quality Over Quantity
There are more nuanced approaches to maximizing the value derived from one’s audience.
Rather than an emphasis on quantity, today’s savvy digital entrepreneurs instead prioritize website traffic quality. They deploy targeted customer acquisition strategies designed not simply to drive large numbers of visitors, but to deliver motivated buyers primed for conversion. This is achieved via two core optimizations: visitor targeting and call-to-action efficacy.
Optimizing Visitor Targeting
The Internet provides access to billions of potential customers. However, very few businesses can viably serve every possible demographic and psychographic subset within that vast pool. Digital marketing is most effective when it speaks directly to one’s ideal buyer personas.
The true value of website traffic lies not in its aggregate size, but in the business outcomes it enables. For most commercial websites, the desired actions are sales conversions, newsletter sign-ups, content downloads, or other transactions.
High volumes of untargeted website traffic seldom facilitate these goals as effectively as lower volumes of qualified visitors.
Targeted website traffic aligns with one’s specific buyer personas across attributes like demographics, purchase intent signals, content consumption habits, and past purchase behavior. Such qualified visitors arrive at a website essentially pre-sold, requiring less conviction to drive the desired action. They enter already resonating with one’s brand purpose and offerings.
A number of proven customer acquisition strategies exist to attract targeted visitors efficiently, including:
- Content marketing (e.g. blog, video) optimized for search and topics of interest to buyer personas
- Affiliate partnerships and joint ventures with contextually relevant marketers
- Social media engagement within communities aligned to one’s niche
- Pay-per-click campaigns focused on razor-sharp audience qualifications
- Retargeting platforms to reconnect with past visitors
Optimizing Calls-to-Action
Beyond building a highly targeted audience, online business profitability also relies on persuading visitors to take intended actions – aka “converting traffic.”
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Conversion rate optimization focuses on spurring visitors already within one’s sales funnel toward transactions. Generally speaking, the more qualified the visitor traffic, the higher its conversion tendency. But even highly targeted audiences can fail to reach their conversion potential without compelling calls-to-action.
For example, take an e-commerce store with a 1% conversion rate. For every 500 ultra-targeted visitors, this store completes around 5 sales on average.
However, by optimizing copy, layouts, incentives and reducing friction in its checkout process, it lifts conversions to 3% – resulting in 15 sales from those same 500 targeted visitors.
Common optimization tactics to improve conversion rates include:
- Accelerating mobile/desktop site loading speeds
- Simplifying and clarifying navigation menus and layouts
- Crafting easier-to-consume content via headings, chunking long-form copy and highlighting CTAs
- Offering guest checkout options and flexible payment methods
- Bundling products or highlighting their unique benefits
- Testing alternate versions of copy and designs to identify improvements
Conclusion
In summary, online business profitability relies not solely on quantities of traffic, but on the quality of visitors delivered to one’s digital assets – and the efficacy of those assets at motivating intended actions thereafter.
Savvy digital marketers focus less on inflating traffic for its own sake, than on attracting and converting qualified visitors aligned to their business goals.
Those who implement rigorous optimization across both visitor targeting and call-to-action performance stand to maximize the revenue potential within their website traffic.
