Quantity vs Quality of your campaign strategies
It is a topic of daily discussion among us, be it over a coffee with a colleague or over a discussion while reviewing the latest performance report — How to increase traffic volume & increase conversions while keeping the cost down.
On one side we identify inventory and content which can drive right traffic to our site, on the other side we try to analyze the intent these might have, and the kind of conversion expected. And all of these while keeping the cost lower.
Everything at the end boils down to your cost per acquisition (CPA) while scaling the reach as much as possible. In this hustle, measuring the quantity of traffic is super easy. But what do we have at present to measure the quality & intent of traffic? (The quality which determines the engagement of your traffic with respect to your site & business and determines the conversion you will have along with the CPA). Most of us answer this question by looking at the bounce rate and final conversion KPI. Some of us go a little deeper and try to monitor engagement metrics like dwell time, avg. page views per user, depth in the funnel, etc.
Though the quality of traffic plays the most important part in our strategy, there is hardly any solution or dedicated metric till now which can help us measure the true quality & intent of traffic we drive. Metric which correlates strongly with conversion and truly helps us identify sources likely to convert. Wishful thinking — a solution that can, not only help optimize but allows us to identify relevant high-quality sources & strategies quickly.
Quality of Traffic: Philosophy, hypothesis & solution
Keeping user experience as the core of our marketing philosophy is very important. Google is very clear and transparent about it and so are many other internet giants. It is also reflected in a lot of their recent updates and product roll outs. If we look at latest Google search updates in 2020 — it shouts loud about their focus on user experience. Neil Patel covers this very nicely in this short video.
Doesn’t matter which industry you operate in or the product you are selling, “user experience” is the key to success. No doubt about it!
At a very high level, this is a function of –
- Driving users with the right intent and interest
- Keeping onsite journey crisp and clear
While we have a lot of solutions which help us solve the 2nd point on “How to improve UX and site experience”. But hardly there is any comprehensive solution for the 1st point. Something which measures any granular source of traffic and tells us the quality and intent. It doesn’t matter how much we improve our UX, our bounces will never go down unless we can drive traffic with the right intent.
But why don’t we have a comprehensive solution till now to measure this? The answer lies in the complexity of the problems itself. Simply put, it is not easy to understand the intent and interest of humans. Leave along making a solution that is industry and brand agnostic. And works for users from any geography and demography.
But thanks to the latest advancement in computational power and machine learning, both combined are now able to understand humans and mimic us to a good extent. This with precision measurement can truly measure the intent & quality of each user we are driving onsite.
The core philosophy of the solution is very simple — Users with a need and right intent, engage with our site very differently than other users. It is the content they spend time on, the attention level during their visit, or simply how long they are actively engaged that differentiate the high-quality user from rest all.
How can Traffic quality measurement help in marketing optimization?
Let’s break down your marketing funnel by taking a simple example. In a typical scenario, the marketing team will have an omnichannel strategy to reach your audience. Focused on Natural search & few affiliates while running PPC & Display ads. Out of all other, these are likely to be 4 main channels for a business unit marketing a category within your brand.
In this sample scenario, this team has multiple strategies focused on awareness of conversion. Within each channel few campaigns and within each campaign few target groups. Apart from optimizing the targeting, the team continuously tries to find the right messaging and creatives to attract quality visitors.
Now coming to the challenge the marketing team faces while trying to analyze the relevance and quality of traffic from these sources — Granularity & Statistical Significance.
Go Granular – Go Precise:
In the sample scenario above, the team could have 2000 different sources, if we look at the end to end combination of the campaign to creative. Typically, the team breaks down the funnel by different sources and look at the CPA along with conversion rates to find out the right sources. But this is what limits their ability because they can take a call only after looking at the final conversion rates.
Depending on the rate of conversion, the team can only create broader segments to get any meaningful data volume. And arrive at the decision with confidence or run a statistical significance test. Alternatively, wait longer to get data at a more granular level to understand the performance of granular sources.
This is where a measure of the Traffic Quality Index can solve this problem. With TQI team can reach statistical significance in less time and take a call for traffic sources with volume as low as 30-50 users.
Take Content testing for example. Consider a simple A/B test in the PPC channel using two ad copies. Where you might have multiple keywords in the ad group driving traffic. With the TQI metric, marketing can take decisions and learn the performance of each creative broken by each keyword. And find the right creative for the right Adgroup in a much shorter time. You are only limited by the UTM parameters you can pass in the URL and not by the traffic volume anymore.
I will talk more about this in my next article on how TQI (Traffic Quality Index) can be used to find the right placements in a display ad, find the right keywords, simplify creative testing, and identify correct ones. I will also share some of the case studies with data points.
I want to leave you here with a simple thought — How can you transform your marketing strategy if you have precision measurement & AI to measure Quality of Traffic? I will love to hear your thoughts and questions
We at Entent.io, have associated with some innovative companies to study intent metrics. If you want to be part of these new innovative methods in web analytics, contact us at https://entent.io or email to customer @ entent.io