Quality, not quantity - the end of blast marketing
| 19 June 2009
| It is the mantra that we hear time and time again, and we know that the optimal strategy is actually a balance of both. When using this philosophy as applied to web traffic, at some point the reduction in quality in favour of quantity becomes sub-optimal. The real question is, “how do you find that point?”
The best place to start is by actually asking that very question. It is surprising, but many people are still looking only at the quantity half of the equation – so it is unsurprising for them, that a large portion of their marketing dollars are being wasted. The worst part of this is that the marketer that hasn’t asked the question, “How good is all of this traffic?” but instead says “How good is all this traffic!” are completely oblivious to the fact that they are haemorrhaging marketing dollars. Once you have asked the question, given the right tools, finding out can be relatively easy.
For all websites, there is some sort of goal that it was created for. Usually, that goal can be ascribed some sort of economic value. If it is sales, then the value is the margin. If it is informational, then the value is what you would traditionally pay to get that information distributed and read. If it is sharing, then the value is what you would pay to get recommended.
Once you have established these values, and assigned them as “goal events” in your analytics package of choice – you can then start evaluating which domains and which keywords are sending you the traffic that is triggering your goals. So long as your goals are set up to be inline with how you define traffic quality, then a greater quantity of goal events per referral, equates to a greater quality of traffic. This then enables you to discover where your quality traffic is, and how much they are worth to you.
Once you begin to go down this path of constant refinement, by connecting together the marketing feedback loop, you will leave the mindset of striving for pure distribution volumes, and start down the path of identifying where your true followers reside so you can begin to capture and convert as many new visitors as you can.
This article appeared in Inside Retailing Online
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