Traffic quality comes down to one key result: conversion.
When domainers talk about “traffic quality” they usually talk about the quality of the visitor. Here are four common types of visitor:
1. direct type-in
2. typo type-in
3. referral link from web site
4. search visitor (rare for pure parked pages)
5. paid traffic
This is certainly important. But it’s only part of the equation.
At the end of the day a quality visitor (or quality click) means that the person is more likely to convert for the advertiser than other visitors.
Let’s say you have the same exact visitor. In one case he may turn into a low quality click and in another case a high quality one. How can this be?
It depends on what they clicked on and their mindset when getting there.
Back in the day some parking companies let you set your keyword to whatever you wanted. So you might have a domain name about baseball, but fill it up with links for mortgages since it’s a high paying keyword.
Some of those visitors to that baseball page may click on the mortgage ad. Some might be genuinely interested in mortgages, and a small number might convert for the advertisers. But the users weren’t actively looking for mortgages at the time, so their likelihood to convert is lower than if they were on a mortgage domain name.
The quality of this visitor to the advertiser is low if the ads are unrelated to his or her intent at the moment they visited the site.
Another example is the misled consumer. Let’s say they visit a domain like 2percentmortgages.com (made up). The first ad reads “Get a free mortgage quote now!”.
When they click on that link they’re going to be disappointed to see quoted rates between 3%-6%, and are less likely to actually convert.
So the quality of your visitors is made up of a number of factors. At the end of the day you should ask yourself, “will this visitor convert for the advertiser?”.
Olney says
This kind of article is much needed. As a person who works at the Agency level managing paid search campaigns you said what I’ve really want to write. We are the ones who supply the ads in parking.
Also type in traffic is because IE6 used to redirect the domain to the dot com. Some browsers still do this but that needs to be general knowledge.
The savvy marketing directors & managers will ask “what is direct traffic”? The answer is usually a browser redirect UNLESS it is a well known brand.
Clicks does not automatically equal quality traffic. In 2011 conversions equals quality traffic. No parking company supplies that information.