Increased Website Traffic but it is Quality Traffic
In desperate times website owners get tricked into purchasing snake oil website traffic. We all know small businesses have busy and slow times throughout the year. Whether it’s an election, end of financial year or Christmas, different businesses are impacted by external factors – positively and negatively.
We have a new customer who was sold a 12 month package from another company back in June just after the Federal budget was released. At the time the website owner’s website traffic had slowed down and their sales were pretty low as people were not spending money.
They were told that if they signed up to a package for less than $100 per month, than they would increase their website visibility by over 1,000 times. Now this sounds like an awesome deal for under $100 per month you will increase your website visibility by over 1,000 times – surely you will get more sales. Well, maybe not 🙁
Quality Traffic Not Quantity
The poor website owner has increased their website traffic from 2 specific sources. One is prweb.com.au and the other is a domain name very similar to their original domain – but it is a .net
Eg CustomersDomain.com.au
The traffic is coming from CustomersDomain.net – I’ve hidden the customer domain. But I’m sure you get the idea.
But more importantly is the customers getting any more sales?
If we look at the Google Analytics report looking at Acquisition and All Traffic the following traffic sources are shown.
So between the PRWeb.com.au and the CustomerDomain.net traffic accounts for 395 visitors of the total 1,111 visitors for the month. And of these 2 traffic sources in red there is 382 new users or unique visitors.
The problem starts when you look at how long they spend on the website and how many pages they view. They view just over 1 page and spend at the most 5 seconds. When I look at this information I think that these people are not engaged with the website and are not really interested in purchasing anything from the website owner.
do not use Google Analytic in web spam. Not only do we not use it in webspam. I promise you my team will never ask to use Google Analytics data
Mat Cutts
Google has stated that they do not use bounce rate or Google Analytic data.
Now this customer has been tracking their own keywords rankings for a long time and there appears to be little impact to their rankings for most of their keywords.
There are a few keywords that have bounced around, but in general their rankings have not really moved that much. So this indicates to me that Google is not counting bounce rate. Now Google may not be in this instance considering bounce rate – but give it time and Google will make this a ranking factor that have a fare influence on your organic listings. As Google is always saying that they want o provide the best user experience.
And without all the Google Analytic data I would say with a bounce rate like that that maybe the website is not providing the best user experience.
