Simple Way to Identify Percent of Qualified Visitors

The term “Qualified Visitors” is a word thrown around a lot by marketers and analysts. To me, it is something that has to be defined by you and your business.
To give you a better sense of what it would mean to you and your site in context of web analytics, qualified visitors are site visitors that you identified as a desired target or lead.

Depending on your role and how you definite the business objective/goal of your site, qualified visitors could mean differently.

For example, if you’re a webmaster, your qualified visitors could mean those who didn’t hit the error pages. If you’re a sales/acquisition manager, then number of leads or registrations acquired through the site could mean qualified visitors.

Now, the objective of this article is to explain how you would assess and analyze that qualified visitors, and obtain that percentage of qualified visitors on your site. This is what you need to do:

Create a visitor segmentation on your analytics tool
You need to understand what makes your traffic qualified, and come up with a rule so you can bucket those visitors into this segment.

Define a time frame for your data
This is important, because you’ll be able to gauge your qualified traffic’s trend against different seasons, marketing efforts, etc. The trend in both raw values of your qualified traffic and percentage of qualified traffic against different time frame will give you a well rounded understanding to the traffic trends.

Take the ratio between qualified visitors to overall site visitors
This is pretty straight forward… Not sure why I even highlighted this section…
So eventually, if you successfully segmented your traffic and capture all the necessary data, you’ll be able to arrive to a chart like this. (This chart is based on some random data made up by myself)

In this case, it looks like the site acquired higher qualfied traffic around summer. Setting up a benchmark around overall average would be great start to see if the site is acquiring qualified traffic during a specific month.

Also if you can call out the marketing initiatives, you could probably contribute your efforts against the acquisition of your qualified traffic as well.

So this was a quick and simple method to gauge and assess your site visitors who falls under your rule of “Qualified Visitors”. If you have any other ideas to obtain such insights, please feel free to share that with me.