What is Good Website Traffic and What is a Waste of Money?

There are many different ways to get website visitors to your site. If you are not tracking your results, you will never know what is good website traffic and what is a waste of money. Even if you do primarily free advertising methods, you are investing your time and need to get the best return back for the amount of hours that you are spending.

One thing I found helpful to understand what good website traffic is, is to install the Google Analytics code on all of my web pages. This provides a tremendous amount of information about the visitors that are coming to your site.

For example, you know where a visitor comes to your site from, how long they spend on your site, how many pages they visit, and much, much, more.

This is extremely valuble for the following reasons.

You'll see ads all over the Internet where you can buy 10,000 visitors for $30. Generally, these are not worth the $30 that you spend on them and here is why.

If you have Google analytics on your pages you will see that the average time that these type of visitors spend on your site is less than five seconds. Now that may not be true for every company like this, but you can do your own survey and see if this is even remotely resembling quality traffic or not.

On the flip side of that, traffic that comes from the search engines will spend anywhere from a minute to two minutes on your site if you've got a decent page for them to look at. The reason for this is you're getting targeted traffic from the search engines and you're getting non-targeted traffic from buying thousands of visitors.

You can see the same results in various other forms of traffic too. For example, traffic that comes from a well written article may spend two to three minutes on your site and visit more than one page. In that case, it is worth writing a good article and getting it onto some of the top article directories.

Other methods of advertising that do produce quality traffic include forum marketing, and social bookmarking a blog post. I know I can say this for a fact because I've seen firsthand the results for this traffic.

You need to find out what is good website traffic for your site. The quality of traffic is much more important than the quantity. Ultimately you are looking for positive responses from your visitors and a quality visitor will give you more of those.