Good Traffic vs. Bad Traffic

I was just reading Seth Godin’s blog (if you don’t read his blog on a regular basis, you should) and he had a very interesting post on website traffic today.

While I agree with him that it is important to get relevant traffic to your website, I believe that large amounts of untargeted traffic can still be good for your site. Untargetted traffic can be good if your site is set up to account for it.

Let’s say someone comes to your site and they don’t find what they are looking for. Most people will click the back button, unless…

You have contextual advertising on your site that looks like it might answer their question. Then that visitor might click on the ad, bringing you money and the advertiser targeted traffic.

For instance, let’s say that I wrote a post where I included the words, “how”, “foot”, “in”, “a”, “mile” somewhere in the text of the post. And someone asked the question, “How manty foot in a mile” in a Search Engine. They come to my page and it doesn’t answer their question, because they got to my page by mispelling the word “many”, with my last name of “manty”. They would know quickly they were in the wrong place and want to leave.

What if that post had a PPC adverisement that looked like it answered their question?

Chances are good they will click on the pay per click ad to get them to their answer. So untargetted traffic actually paid off for me in that case.

Ideally I want traffic that will return time and time again to my blog, not just people accidently stopping by. So while not ideal, untargetted traffic can pay off if you are using contextual advertising (like Google Adsense) on your site. If you are not using contextual advertising, then untargeted traffic is for the most part a waste of time.

BTW - For those wondering there are 5280 feet in a mile.