by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: July 28, 2010   Last Updated: August 07, 2010

Unless the business model of your website is displaying ads to your visitors, recognizing the difference between traffic and conversions is key to have a website that makes more money, instead of just a more popular website. 

To key to understand the difference between traffic and conversions, is understanding what a goal is and how it's defined. A goal is an action or sequence of actions performed by your visitors that have relevance for your business model. A goal can be something simple, like registering for your newsletter, or reflect directly into sales, such as finishing the checkout process. You probably have been thinking in terms of goals when you were designing your calls to action, and making sure the critical processes such as the contact form were perfect. A conversion is a visitor that has performed those actions and succesfully finished a goal, while traffic means the number of visitors that come to a website.

If you have a very popular website, but nobody contacts you to inquire about your services, your website traffic won't make you any money. At the end of the day, what matters is how much of that traffic became clients or subscribers or converted in any way defined by the website goals. At the same time, a less popular website that has a high conversion rate will benefit much more from increasing the amounts of qualified traffic it receives.

Recognizing the importance between traffic and conversions will allow you to improve your traffic and conversion strategy, to get higher quality traffic that converts. By identifying sources of traffic that bring highly qualified visitors it’s possible to invest in increasing the traffic coming from those websites instead of wasting time and money on traffic sources that just inflate your monthly visitors numbers.

The conversion rate of a specific keyword or target web page is also crucial to increase the ROI of a pay per click marketing campaign. If a campaign is getting its budget used by visitors who aren’t interested in fulfilling the website goals that money is being wasted. Carefully evaluating the value you receive from each click will help you fine tune your PPC and other advertising campaigns, selecting the keywords and publishers that bring better quality traffic to your website and removing those that are just a drain on your resources.

While having a high amount of natural traffic is never a bad thing, if you need to invest time or money in search engine optimization or advertising you need to be aware of the difference between traffic and conversions. Paying in any way to get traffic just to increase numbers is just a waste of money, and that money would be better spent increasing the conversion rate or looking at sources of high quality web traffic for your niche. Unless that increase in traffic also reflects into an increase in conversions chances are you are not getting what you paid for.

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