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E-Marketing Performance Blog

The Value of the Visitor Metric

visitor metricIf you sell a product or service, tracking visits and visitors to your site has very little overall value as an independent metric. Where tracking visits does become valuable is in conjunction with other metrics.

Traffic metrics themselves can be easily manipulated. And many web marketers actually engage in practices that are designed to drive up visitor hits to the site without any consideration as to whether those visitors are the site’s target audience. For many, this is just old-fashioned SEO. Their job is to get rankings (and traffic), but it’s up to the business to convert that traffic into customers.

Unfortunately, this is an outdated SEO philosophy, and one that provides little value to the customer.

But there are avenues of web marketing, such as social media, that tend to focus more on traffic than conversions. But that’s because social media marketing is doing something altogether different. Again, like SEO, traffic is the result of a good social media campaign, but the real metric there is engagement. That engagement builds brand recognition which, in turn, drives targeted customers to the site.

It’s a bit more of a round about way, but effective–and important–nonetheless.

When focusing on bringing in potential customers to your website, the number of visitors you get from month to month can matter. Just be sure you understand the value of each avenue.

SEO does drive traffic but, along with social media, there needs to be a component of what happens once they arrive. Both SEO and social media can be hugely “successful” yet fail spectacularly if all they do is drive traffic. Both need a third component of having a website that meet’s visitors needs. Otherwise, traffic is just street noise.

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