Quality v Quantity Trade-Off in Attracting Website Visitors

1/11/2006 by paul

I am often asked 'How do I increase the number of visitors to my website?'. I could suggest paying people to go there, giving away your products for free or launching a huge TV advertising campaign, but for most online traders, these aren't sensible options. Often, the problem is actually not in attracting more people to the website, but in converting those visitors that are already there, and, even more importantly, in ensuring from the start that visitors to your site are high quality. I.e. they are highly 'convertable'.

New websites take time to appear in the search engines and even with professional search engine optimisation (SEO) it is very difficult to appear high up in the search results within an established industry. A more immediate and measurable way to advertise online is with a pay-per-click (PPC) service, e.g. Google AdWords. Using paid advertising services such as AdWords is commonly known as search engine marketing (SEM) and is different from SEO as you're paying to appear high in the results; SEO is about maximising your chances of appearing high by being attractive to the search engine crawlers when they visit your site. Using my limited marketing vocabulary, SEM is based on a qualitative approach; SEO should adopt a quantitative approach, at least, over time.

Many commercial online marketing tools and services are designed to increase the quantity of traffic to your site, but with no regard for the quality of those visitors. When you're paying for each visitor via a PPC program, you don't want to be paying for low quality visitors that are unlikely to convert. Depending on your business, you might also prefer to avoid visitors who are very early in their buying process (more on this later).

When developing a new SEM campaign, it is important to consider each advertisement in isolation. These should be designed to individualby attract a very specific set of visitors to the website, perhaps by advertising a single product/range or specific service. Using generic terms within SEM is not advisable, particularly for a new campaign, because they can often attract a large volume of unconvertable visitors who quickly leave your site (before registering your name and products for future use even), leaving you to foot a large PPC-bill. The fact is, no matter how good your offer, prices, or marketing message, if people are not in the market for what you're selling then you're simply not going to convert them and are likely to end up paying for their visit again when they are! The goal, therefore, is to ensure that visitors are in the right place (they are looking for your products or services), at the right time (they are ready to commit to a purchase/a subscription/further contact).

The beauty of SEM is that you can very specifically target your desired market using precise keywords, you only pay for 'what you use' and can measure the return on that investment very accurately:

• How many people clicked on this ad?
• How much did that cost?
• How many sales/conversions did we make?
• Was it worth it?

Increasingly, the PPC company (e.g. Google) will help you measure your advertising effectiveness with detailed analytics, testing of different ad content, and additional keyword suggestions.

Keywords :  customer targeting, quantity v quality, Google AdWords, SEO, SEM, search engine optimisation, optimization, search engine marketing, keywords,