Defining Traffic Quality

In a number of past articles, I’ve spoken about the fact that traffic quality is entirely dependent upon the advertiser. If the traffic works for them then it’s high quality, otherwise it’s low. This has always seemed to make sense to me until I began digging a little further…..and now I think I could have been wrong...

Over the last couple of years ParkLogic has been experimenting with how to best define traffic quality. We’ve tried quite a number of third party services that are used by advertisers and what we’ve found is there seems to be a lot of smoke and mirrors bundled with some hefty fees.

The problem is that many advertisers rely upon these services to determine whether traffic they are purchasing is of a high quality or not. It’s the very sophisticated e-commerce website that attributes a traffic source id to a click and then tracks it right through to a purchase.

For those advertisers that wave the flag of Google Analytics then think again. If you think about it, Google is essentially in conflict with itself by wanting search traffic to provide awesome results so that the advertiser will purchase more traffic.

Not only that, advertisers who use Google Analytics are essentially providing Google with end-to-end data that gives them the power to influence the traffic auction process. So be careful with free services like Google Analytics because ultimately, they’re never free.

So in a fit of frustration, I decided that it was about time to build our own system so that we could quickly adapt to the ever-changing Internet ecosystem. After a huge amount of work over several years we believe we can now effectively score any domain as to the quality of the traffic going to it.

Have you ever wondered why a particular domain that receives huge amounts of traffic gets paid pennies? These were important questions for us to answer as we felt that as traffic managers we needed to get under what was actually happening. As always, our goal is to constantly improve results for both advertisers and subsequently domain investors receiving higher payouts.

So about an hour ago I turned on the latest incarnation of the Traffic Manager platform…..and voila! Data began pouring through that quicly became very illuminating. Literally within the space of a few minutes I could see why a domain that had received thousands of URLs was not converting. To be quite honest with you….it was pretty cool!

Next week’s job is going to be checking to make sure that all the numbers add up in a production environment. Everything’s looking good but it always does until it doesn’t. LOL!

I’m finding that we are now only a hop, step and a jump away from the ultimate goal of building a platform that allows domain investors to grow their revenue over time off the back of their traffic. This is when things will get REALLY interesting as it will show the true capabilities of domain traffic.

So watch this space.....domaining has never been so interesting!