Site Traffic ≠ Outcomes
Website traffic is a crucial metric that businesses and marketers track religiously. After all, the number of visitors to a website seems like a direct measure of success, right? Well, not quite. While site traffic is undoubtedly important, it’s essential to recognize that it is merely a touch point along the path to achieving meaningful outcomes. In this blog post, we’ll explore why site traffic should be viewed as a touch point rather than an ultimate outcome in your digital marketing strategy, and emphasize the value of connecting advertising to real business outcomes.
1. Understanding the Purpose of Website Traffic:
Website traffic serves as an important indicator of how many people are visiting your site, and it can offer valuable insights into user behavior. However, it’s crucial to remember that the purpose of driving traffic to your website is not just to accumulate large numbers but to engage and convert those visitors into customers or achieve other desired outcomes. Website traffic is the starting point, the initial touch point where the real work begins.
2. The Quality vs. Quantity Dilemma:
Focusing solely on increasing website traffic numbers can be misleading. It’s the quality of the traffic that matters most. It’s better to have a smaller number of highly targeted and relevant visitors who are genuinely interested in what you offer, rather than a massive influx of random visitors who have no real intention of engaging further. It’s important to consider factors such as audience targeting, demographics, and user intent to attract the right kind of traffic that is more likely to convert into desired outcomes. Website traffic is easier to manipulate and easier to mis-measure. As a result, we consider website traffic a gross or rough estimate for activity; not suitable on its own to assess the effectiveness or efficiency of a campaign, or refined enough to be used alone as a signal to match with other (e.g., off-line) signals.
3. From Traffic to Outcomes:
To achieve meaningful outcomes, it’s essential to look beyond website traffic and consider the subsequent actions visitors take on your site. These outcomes - usually called conversions to differentiate them from traffic - could be diverse, ranging from making a purchase, filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter, or engaging meaningfully with your content. By focusing on optimizing your website for conversions and tracking the desired actions, you shift the emphasis from traffic numbers to the outcomes that truly impact your business.
4. Engagement Metrics and User Experience:
While traffic numbers can provide a high-level view of visitor interest, engagement metrics provide deeper insights into the user experience on your website. Complexities such as bounce rate, time spent on site, pages per session, and ultimate conversion rates are necessary to filter gross traffic to net traffic. Improving these metrics requires attention to user experience, website design, content relevance, and navigation, which ultimately leads to better outcomes.
Simpler still: connecting to outcomes cuts through those other analyses, by focusing on business goals.
5. Aligning Metrics with Business Goals:
To truly measure the success of your digital marketing efforts, it’s crucial to align your metrics with your business goals. Consider what outcomes matter most to your organization—whether it’s increased sales, brand awareness, lead generation, or customer retention—and establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that directly reflect those outcomes. By focusing on the metrics that drive real results, you can gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts more accurately.
C3 Metrics uses website traffic as gross or rough estimate for activity; not suitable on its own to assess the effectiveness or efficiency of a campaign, nor refined enough to be used alone as a signal to match with other (e.g., off-line) signals. Website traffic is too rough a metric to be considered an acceptable substitute or proxy for a business outcome.
Website traffic is undeniably important, but it should be viewed as a touch point rather than an ultimate outcome, and there are major hurdles and stumbling blocks if website traffic is used as a proxy for outcomes in measurement programs. By shifting the focus from traffic numbers to user engagement, conversions, and other desired outcomes, measurement programs can connect more directly with business and marketing strategies.
