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Google Analytics & Usability: The Myth of "Traffic=Profit"

Written by: Mark Brimm

Article Overview: Probably, most of your site's visitors are just browsing your site for the heck of it, or worse yet, are mere spider bots, and you'd be better off with as little of that kind of traffic in your analytics Data as possible. There are ways to clear away the loiterers and invite targeted traffic that will buy.

Google Analytics & Usability: The Myth of "Traffic=Profit"

Qualified traffic is created in just a few ways, solid keywords that attract real sales, and well-positioned ads on sites where your potential customers herd together each day. Are you working both of these, or niether?

To be perfectly honest, there are uses for inflated site traffic numbers, but it really doesn't impress anyone anymore. Most people know that it's easy to psyke people into going to a site for something that's not really there. It's another thing to make any money form those visitors.

I'm not saying traffic is bad per se, as long as it is targeted traffic. Definitely, if your site is entertainment based, maybe you're going to do okay with just a pure stream of traffic, but in most cases you'll need targeted traffic to get anywhere. To get targted traffic, you'll need to watch your Analytics closely. Watch what kinds of keywords result in conversions. Build out from these with business-owner psychology. If "conceptually adjacent" synonyms come to mind, try those out as well. Some complimentary products or services can also of course be divulged from this kind of keyword traffic scrutiny.

If you are getting lots of traffic for unwanted keywords, you can always weed those out of your content. Usually, however, this serves little purpose for B2C sites, because everyone is potentially your customer, even if they didn't come just for that thing you sell. For B2B, however, you're going to want to get rid of phrases that are opposed to the kind of searches you're wanting to attract.

Sites are made profitable by monetizing your article content, thoroughly optimizing the site for targeted natural searches, connecting your site up with social media channels, and by making compelling conversion funnels from your landing page to your conversion page. A bee-line is better than a vague shuffling around, right? After all, you'd prefer those targeted visitors to all just jump onto the train to conversionsville, wouldn't you? And they will, if you call onoly the chosen and herd them along correctly. Face it we all want to be herded when we're on a website. Life is complicated enough.

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Article Tags: google, myth, targeted traffic, usability



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