Telling Good Traffic from Bad

by Alex Ang on 27/08/08 at 1:00 am

Every day that goes by you can bet that any serious website owner is enquiring how to acquire more traffic to their web site. This acute desire to generate more clicks makes literally any online entrepreneur easy prey to many of the traffic schemes and scams that pervade the Internet.

Wild promises of high volume traffic and big money often separate even the most savvy business individual from their money because they want to believe the promises made by these traffic hucksters. The problem is that high volume does not necessarily translate into a high sales rate.

The visitors who come to your website as a result of a desire to find out more on a specific, niche topic, not as a result of exit traffic or membership in a safe list where members merely pitch each other.

Good traffic comes from people clicking links on topics targeted to their interests and getting directed to website carrying information they want and anticipate as a result of clicking the link. The bottom line is that when you get right down to it the best and most reliable sources of targeted traffic come from links that people click.

Being able to find out which clicks really result in sales is critical. To track conversions from click to sales, depending on the type of shopping cart software package you are using, you can then create a customized order confirmation page – i.e. the page that is displayed once the transaction is complete. This is very simple to do if you’re using a payment processing service such as PayPal.

It’s well known that each search engine and each web site has a particular type of user (age, interests etc.), and they’ll all have different triggers leading them to purchase. All of these things are significant for you to know so that your advertising dollars will be spent in the most appropriate places.