Getting to a definition of traffic quality is one of those elusive things that’s quite often difficult to pin down. It’s almost like discerning the difference between art and pornography…..you know the difference when you see it.
Advertisers pay huge sums of money for quality traffic and shy away from garbage. The question needs to be asked, “What’s quality?”
Some have answered, that’s easy! It’s real human traffic. I agree that we need to do as much as we can to remove all the automated bots but just having “human” traffic doesn’t necessarily define it from an advertiser’s perspective.
For example, let’s imagine I directed real humans from China to an USA based company’s website. My guess is the US company wouldn’t be too happy with paying for all the Chinese traffic…..why? The traffic didn’t convert for them.
Now we are defining quality as traffic that converts. Strangely, this definition means the risk associated with conversion is pushed back to the traffic provider and not the websiteowner. From our example above, if I’m now only sending US traffic to the US based company then they should be happy…..well, maybe.
Now that we are talking about conversion there are a whole host of issues at play. For instance, let’s imagine the website is trying to sell computers and I send traffic that wants travel. I imagine the conversion rates aren’t going to be that high.
The fact that the conversion factor is used also means that traffic providers need to rely upon how good the website they are sending traffic is at converting.
Ultimately, what ensues is a guessing game where the traffic provider keeps on trying different traffic and if the advertiser keeps buying the traffic then it’s a win for everyone. This assumes the advertiser will keep on paying and allow the traffic provider more time to make better educated guesses.
What’s missing from this equation? It’s really simple. What’s missing is conversion data. What the advertiser wants, is to sell more products and services and what a good traffic provider wants is to provide traffic that converts in the long-term. This will then allow both parties to build a solid good business together.
This all really makes sense until you find that most advertisers will not provide conversion data for the traffic. Their concern is that if they share conversion data then the traffic providers will use this information and increase the price of the good traffic. The result is a whole big mess where no one trust anyone, and the fraudsters end up making a killing.
For those of you that are thinking that “affiliate marketing” is the key to this problem…..think again. The aim of many affiliate marketers is to under report sales, take the customers and essentially disenfranchise the traffic provider. On top of this, getting paid from some affiliate marketers can be a lesson in futility.
I got so frustrated by this complete lack of transparency that I ended up building http://traveltrek.club to measure the effectiveness of domain travel traffic. This is a travel website that helped me measure end to end conversion data that highlighted the true quality of the travel-based traffic.
It was a really interesting exercise that has caused me to consider developing out many more market verticals just for the data.In fact, for the past couple of years I’ve been building an entire platform that attempts to accurately measure the quality of traffic. Every bit of traffic is scored in real-time and then conversion data is processed afterwards. I feel that evaluating traffic one of the domain industry’s biggest challenges and I think I’m pretty close to cracking the problem wide open on a mass scale. Wish me luck!
When someone questions the quality of your domain traffic I hope you now ask them to at least define what they mean by quality.