TRAFFIC IS A SCAM —?Why Your Favourite Metric Might Be Your Least Important
Traffic is the least important metric you can afford. The amount of people who you pay to have play on your website doesn’t mean jack. Yea, I said it. And you’re going to agree with me by the time you finish this article.
If reading those words scare you because your main KPI for digital advertising is based on the amount of traffic that they generate — Arrêtez! That's a little playful French for you, and for any mono-linguists out there who don’t speak the French language, it means ‘Stop’. And you dang-well should, unless you don't care about quality results; in that case, you do you, pony boy.
"But Alex," you might be thinking with a twisted face and turned up nose, as if 30 seconds earlier someone had let a silent stinker go in a room without windows, "Is it not important to drive potential customers to an website?" And with a smug look of condescending satisfaction stretched across my round-eye and pig nosed face, I would reply, "Hahahah, no! It's important to drive YOUR potential customers to YOUR online website.”
Let me put it this way — I could provide 1 million new users to your website every single day for a small amount of spend! That’s the easy part...
There are 7.4 billion people in the world and 3.2 billion of them are online (and that last figure was from 2015, so by now it’s probably a few million more). But what good are 500,000 visitors from Bangladesh going to be if you sell hot tubs in Northern Alberta? How many users from Tokyo will be interested enough to fly to Vancouver for a local deli’s daily special? The answer to both of these questions is “None”.
The amount of traffic that you are getting is a false indication of how well your advertisements are doing. Let’s break it down real quick: If you have 1000 new visitors, but only 1% care about what service or product you are providing, you have an audience of 10 potential customers to work with. But if you gain a smaller, more specifically targeted audience of 100, and 20% are interested in what you’re selling, you’ve doubled your real audience and most likely provided a higher ROI.
Now, of course not every potential customer is going to purchase right away and there is always more opportunity available if you have a larger audience, but without digging into the analytics of who is visiting your store, you are literally throwing digital money into the advertising platforms very deep and murky well and hoping that these new customers continue to turn into sales.
And that ignores the benefits of online marketing! Print and television ads can be segmented into locations, but generally they can’t be specific to interests or behaviors, or other distinguishable characteristics that online advertising platforms offer. You can avoid wasting money on people who don’t like the flavour ‘watermelon’ when selling your Watermelon Flavoured Popsicles, or you can target women in their 30’s who are married with children when trying to entice people to a local attraction or event, like a fair or Nickelback concert (do 30 year old married women with children like Nickelback?).
You can provide the world with oysters — scratch that, you can provide oyster lovers with oysters, and stop wasting money on people who don’t like seafood.
And the best thing is, even if you have been focusing on Traffic, that’s great! You have collected a lot of information. Start focusing on those customers that create sales, build audiences based off of their characteristics, and spend your money more smarter. More smart? Most smartly!
TL;DR? It’s time to start focusing your funds and spend your money with purpose.
Traffic is a fair way of knowing that your ads are bringing people to your website. But if that is where you plant your victory flag, or if that is what you have been told is the way that you will find victory, you’re going to lose out and, in the long run, waste more spend than you have to. Once you have people viewing your website, the real work begins. Website analytics, A/B advertisement testing, and landing page adjustments must work together to create a funnel that will push your engaged audience into a conversion or sale. To do this properly, you have to learn their behaviors, learn why they are interested, and then deliver them your product or service in the most easy-to-do way. To simply focus solely on the amount of people who arrive on to your website will leave you with many more costly questions than profitable answers.