The Key Metrics on How to Drive Massive Traffic to Your Website

Struggling to get more website traffic?

It happens to us all, but sometimes the reasons for the problem aren’t so obvious. You may believe you’re doing everything right, but your efforts for generating website traffic just seem to fall flat.

You’ve created a stunning website, and you’ve been spending freely to get website traffic through Google Ads.

And yet, your website is a digital ghost town.

What gives?

For newcomers to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, you must remember that traffic is the second step in the PPC process of Google Ads, after impressions.

Before we move on to showing you how to get more website traffic with your advertising, make sure you have the foundations set.

Do you already have everything below?

• Strong, High-Value Keywords
• Great Ad Text
• Relevant Content
• Compelling Content
• Competitive Objective

If you’re missing even just one, you need to read on. In fact, even if you think you have all of those but you’re still not getting the traffic you should be, this blog is for you.

Let’s find out what’s going on, and discover what you can do about it.

It’s not as easy to build a popular site nowadays. Even if your site is a creative masterpiece that is easy on the eye, it won’t get the attention it deserves if it’s all style and no substance.

Here are some key factors you must consider:

1. Irrelevant SEO – The content is irrelevant to the user search terms
2. Improper Targeting — Your target audience does not find your content interesting or engaging
3. Low-quality Content — Perhaps your content is thin, poorly formatted or proof-read, or it lacks supporting evidence to really carry weight or establish your brand.
4. Wrong Metrics — You aren’t tracking the right metrics to measure the traffic of your website.

While all these factors are important, the last one is instrumental to your success.

Many people don’t use analytics on their site at all, while others set it up but have no idea how to monitor it.

So, how can metrics for traffic improve your website performance?

To novice analysts, metrics may be a bewildering concept. They’re more than just numbers and fancy graphs, as they provide marketers with something truly valuable:

Insights on your site visitors and customers.

For example, if you look at the metric of average time on site, and discover that people are only staying for about 5 seconds, you can learn quite a lot. In relation to the factors above, a low value for average time on site could mean any of the following:

• Irrelevant SEO — perhaps they searched for “clocks” and found your website only sells watches.
• Improper Targeting — You are running an ad for cheap watches, but it’s being displayed to users that are searching for high-end watches.
• Low-quality Content — Typing errors, poor grammar, long blocks of text

Therefore, if you want to get the most from metrics, you need to understand the significance that each one offers, and how to learn from the insights.

Okay, so now you know the main reasons you’re not generating website traffic, and the crucial role that tracking the right metrics has.

That brings us to the question:

What are the right metrics to measure for more website traffic?

Here are the four major metrics all marketers should be keeping a close eye on to monitor the performance of their campaigns:

As you create more engaging ads, more users will click on them to visit your website, therefore:

Clicks = Traffic

Even the most incredible site can suffer from a lack of traffic. It’s no use having a million impressions if you get no clicks.

By monitoring the click metric, you can see if your ad is relevant or engaging enough to attract your target audience to click, which brings us to the next metric to measure…

The click-through rate (CTR) is defined as “the proportion of site visitors that follow a link through to a particular website.”

It is calculated by the following formula:

CTR = (total clicks/total impressions)*100

The average CTR is just 1% or above on Google’s search network, and 0.6% or above for the display network. A low CTR value indicates that your ad is not relevant, or just not good enough to attract clicks. Unless you want to be wasting money on advertising, you need to make sure your ads and landing pages have great content that is both compelling and relevant to your target audience.

This is actually a key performance indicator (KPI) that you need to keep a close eye on. As market trends and customer interests change, keyword relevance is constantly changing.

Because of this, you must update your keyword lists regularly to avoid becoming outdated.

You can gain key insights on keyword performance with the Most Significant Keyword Report from PPCexpo

Imagine you have the broad match keyword, “leather bags”. The Search Term report shows that your ad was displayed when a user searched for “ladies leather bags in Amsterdam”.

Now, if you’re selling ladies bags in Amsterdam, you can add the phrase to your campaign as a keyword. Conversely, if you aren’t selling in Amsterdam, you can add the phrase as a negative keyword.

While this will filter out some traffic, your CTR will actually improve as your ads become more relevant.

By continuing to update your search terms, you can refine your list so the traffic that arrives on your site is more qualified, and therefore will be more likely to convert.

Want more?

Here are a few more metrics for traffic you can learn from:

• Traffic source — It can be organic, referral or through paid search.
• New vs. returning visitors — Show how your ad is helping to generate brand new traffic.
• Average time on site — The average time a user spends on your website.
• Bounce rate vs. exit rate — How many visitors leave after the first page vs. how many don’t.

When you start to measure website traffic through Google Ads, it takes a little time to get acquainted. Once you understand what each metric can tell you, you will gain the valuable insights that allow you to make smarter decisions about your advertising campaigns.

As you get familiar with the major metrics for traffic, you can start experimenting with more confidence, and will soon see the benefits of this analysis as more qualified traffic arrives on your site, and stays there longer.