On my way back from TRAFFIC I couldn't help but spend time dwelling on the problems associated with quality traffic. The whole concept of "quality" traffic annoyed me for a number of reasons and I decided to do some in depth thinking around why seeking quality traffic is ultimately a failed strategy.

For a start, quality is a really strange concept that is supposedly being driven by advertisers so that we can provide traffic that converts better. It makes no sense for a domainer to be held accountable for the conversion of traffic delivered to an advertiser's website. Domainer's can't influence how the traffic converts, that is in the hands of the advertiser. If they have a terrible ecommerce process then expect to get low conversions, if they have a great process expect to get higher conversions.

What domainers CAN be held accountable for is whether the traffic is targeted correctly. For example, placing "loan" keywords on a games domain will likely mean that any link clicked on will still be largely untargeted traffic.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is often then used as a measure whether the traffic is targeted or not. The problem is that if I place "sex" as the keyword on a domain I can almost guarantee that the domain will have an increased CTR but the traffic will be untargeted for what the domain actually means. With this type of keyword we may be able to divert a users attention into the topic of "sex" but it was not their intention when they first navigated to the domain.

I believe that the only measure that a domainer can use in determining "quality" is RPM (Revenue per Thousand Visitors). Since we are rewarded for our efforts on RPM our definition of quality is the traffic that pays the most. RPM reflects an advertiser's willingness to pay, CTR combined with the volume of traffic. Until Google/Yahoo release conversion data then it's in all domainers interests to ignore the "quality" argument and pursue RPM.

In the next article I'll explore the more in depth reasons why pursuing quality traffic will ultimately fail and why Google and Yahoo both want lower quality traffic.

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