The number of visitors is a vague metric when it comes to understanding if your site visitors are qualified or not. Since not all visitors are created equal, how do we determine if your site is getting a qualified traffic to your web site?
The answer will be determined by what you consider as success within your web site's goal. In this entry, I would like to look into this by approaching from transactional site.
Non-transactional site will be posted shortly in near future.
Transactional Site
In transactional sites, qualified visitors are easy to depict, and easy to analyze the qualified visitors. Since assigning dollar value to your metrics can be done easily, analyst can work within that context of qualified visitors better than non-transactional site. Such example would be assigning your revenue or costs to your KPI's and analyze your ROI. In this entry we are more interested in determining qualified visitors from higher level.
High-level breakdown for you to determine different types of qualified visitors in transactional web sites would be listed below. It will allow you to understand your visitors so that you can allocate your time, budget, and set up strategies to shift your visitors into visitors who convert.
1. Number of visitors converted within certain time frame.
Ideally this is the kind of qualified visitors you want, 100% of the visitors buying and converting. However, real world is not that simple and easy. To find out how many visitors have converted is not that difficult.
- Conversion Rate: Number of visitors who converted over total unique visitors. This percentage tells you the volume of your qualified visitors.
2. Number of visitors who didn't converted, but is most likely qualified or has the potential to convert.
You might have a lot of these visitors. Example of these types of visitors would be people who know what they want, but comparing sites for better deals (price, shipping, etc.). Unlike the qualified visitors defined above (1), these visitors are much trickier to determine. Some analyst would say visitors who stayed more than 10 sec are pretty much qualified. However, it takes more combinations of different metrics to really give a better understanding of these types of visitors. Such metrics are:
- Visitors, total visitors to the site minus total number of converted visitors. This includes other non-qualified visitors as well.
- Visitors who had site visit duration of more than minimum desired time, and less than 25 min (at the most). Every web page has different level of volume of content for visitors to consume. Use your judgment to see the least number of times for the visitors to consume the page information. Maximum time is set to 25 min due to typical session definition. The better you estimate that time will narrow down your chance of defining qualified visitor.
- Bounce rate (single page visits/total site visits), use the bounce rate to determine the visitors that arenft bouncing to the volume of visitors you are working with.
This process of picking out the non-qualified visitors out of the visitors, who didn't converted, will most likely leave you with better number of qualified visitors for you to start analyzing with these types of qualified visitors.
3. Number of visitors who didn't converted, and is not qualified at all.
The short cut of to determine this visitor group is to take total visitors minus both #1 and #2 visitors.
Total visitors – (#1 + #2)
This metrics will be a good benchmark since your future strategies would most likely have the interest to reduce this type of visitors and shift them into qualified visitors.
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