by iakul

Created on: August 07, 2010   Last Updated: August 08, 2010

Traffic is simply the volume of visitors to a site. Conversion, on the other hand, means the number of people who actually click your ads, buy your product, or subscribe to your list. In a brick-and-mortar shop, traffic would be the number of people who step into the shop or pass close by the shop, and conversion would be the number of people who buy something.

Since it's actually impossible for conversion to happen without anyone visiting a site, conversion is usually measured as a percentage of traffic. For example, a 5% conversion rate would mean that a site with 1000 visitors a month is getting 50 sales or clickthroughs monthly.

The main reason why people get confused between the two of them is because the two of them usually go glove-in-hand. Simply increasing your traffic will result in more conversions for you, assuming the conversion rate stays the same.

There are some instances where this is not the case though, which occurs when you get "bad" traffic, or traffic from a source that won't buy anything. The most common case where this occurs is a traffic exchange program. Traffic of this sort doesn't accomplish anything, and only serves to eat up your bandwidth. In th event that you are running an ad program where you get paid for every visit to your site, you are simply passing the buck on to them, and making your problem theirs while profitting from it. Which still leads to repercussions in the long run.

It's also possible to work on increasing conversions without touching your site traffic. Things like making it easier for visitors to buy from your site by reducing the number of clicks required for a successful sale, changing the placement of your ads to a more prominent spot, or getting a good copywriter to rewrite certain pages of your site. All of these work to improve your conversion rate, and result in more conversions for you even though traffic remains at the same volume.

To put it in a nutshell, traffic on its own doesn't serve any purpose, and having traffic without having conversion is actually a bad thing, but there still needs to be traffic before conversion can occur. One can work on increasing traffic to increase conversions, or work on increasing conversion without touching traffic. Most webmasters do both, and find ways to both increase traffic and the conversion rate.

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