5 Million Hits. 70,000 Visitors. Who Cares?! It’s Qualified Visitors That Count

You hear figures like this bantered around all the time - “We’ve had 8 million hits this month!” or even, “Our traffic logs show we had 50,000 unique visitors!” I say, that’s all well and good, but if the visitors to your site aren’t qualified potential new customers with money to burn, (”not invited to the party,” in my book) then WHO CARES?!!

High unique visitor counts are fine if your web site’s primary purpose is to attract traffic to justify charging for advertising. However, if your web site was designed to sell or market product, then attracting people who aren’t interested in what you sell is completely worthless and potentially, a waste of your marketing dollars.

Targeting Your Visitors

Getting the “right kind of visitor” to your web site begins with its construction. At best, many web sites deliver ambiguous marketing messages. When I come to a web site’s home page, I want to immediately know that I belong there. I don’t want to have to wonder what it is that this company does, what products it sells, and what the site is all about. If you can’t define your own marketing message, no wonder you’re having difficulty attracting qualified visitors.

Constructing the Message

If you do not have a handle on your marketing message, try asking yourself these questions:

1) What is it that we do?

2) What is it that makes us better than or different from our competition?

3) Who EXACTLY are we trying to attract?

4) What are our company goals?

Once you have honestly answered these questions, you pretty much have your marketing message?. Now, PUT IT ON YOUR SITE!!

After the Message, the Rest Will Follow

Your marketing message is important not only to communicate to your visitors once they get there, but it is also a way TO get them there.

With a clear, precise marketing message, backed up with some substantive information adding credibility to your message, you will automatically make your site more visible on the World Wide Web.

As a result of your efforts:

• search engine spiders crawling your site will find those critical words used to describe your business and index them;
• human guides at search directories like Yahoo, About.com, and Lycos will have an instant understanding of what your site is about and categorize you accordingly, and;
• when you go to undertake your site linking efforts, fellow site owners will clearly understand the value in linking to you.

Attracting Targeted Visitors

Once you’ve got your site prepared for your targeted visitors, it’s time to get the bees to the honey. Keep your mind on the mission: targeted message = targeted visitor.

Where does your prospect “lurk” - are there vertical web sites focused on your industry that accept advertising, editorial contribution, distribute an email newsletter, or have bulletin boards to which you can post?

Scout out discussion groups, mailing lists, or community chats where your potential clients might also congregate. Subtly mention your products, services, or past experiences in your postings, and never forget to also coincidentally leave your URL.

Use powerful “metasearch” tools like Dogpile, MetaCrawler, or Savvy Search which serve up multiple search engine queries at one time. Type in some of the critical keywords to your industry and see what results are served?and what marketing opportunities may lie in those results.

Now you’re really cookin’.

Evaluate

Before you begin your newly refreshed marketing efforts, you need to take a look at your conversion rate, the percent by which you convert visitors into customers. Simply divide your unique visitor count by the number of unique orders you received. This will be your baseline.

After you’ve begun your new marketing campaign, measure your conversion rate again, and continue to do so on a regular basis. The goal here is to see it increase through your more targeted marketing efforts.

You might also want to begin to poll your site visitors. Set up a small one or two question survey box on your home page through which you can ask visitors questions that give you a better handle on the kind of people coming to your site. Don’t be afraid to ask them for feedback either - their advice is oftentimes the source of the best ideas for site improvements.

Refine It

You’ll know you’re attracting the right kind of visitors by both an increased conversion rate and results from your visitor surveys. Now you can look for areas of improvement:

• Analyze your traffic logs to see which pages are the most popular ones (are they the pages that you’d like them to be?) and from which pages visitors are most likely to exit. Ideally, you’d like your visitor to exit from the order confirmation page on an ecommerce site or a “contact us” form for a lead-generating site.
• If you have a shopping cart on your site, review how many users abandon their shopping carts without ever checking out. Seek to find out why and make improvements.
• Would you like to increase your average order size? Look for cross-merchandising opportunities that can take advantage of the impulse buy.

Most of all, you want to keep the lines of communication open between you and your web site visitor. With a happy, qualified visitor, you won’t have to worry about bragging anymore because they’ll be doing it for you!

© 1999 Hollis Thomases, Web Ad.vantage, Inc.

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