The number of visitors that a web page receives. For a website to be successful it needs traffic to be driven to it from various sources. This traffic, however, needs to come from people who will be interested in buying your product or service and in order for this to take place you need to target people within your niche. In the past website traffic was the primary metric for determining the importance and value of a site, but that is no longer the case. While traffic is still important – you can’t have conversions without traffic – the conversion and profitability metrics are far more important when valuing a website.
Web site traffic x conversion = Profitability
The success of a site cannot be simply judged by the amount of traffic it receives. When a visitor visits a site, they will often simply bounce back out of the site; the percentage of visits that do not convert into clicks onto more of your content is known as the bounce rate. A high bounce rate, or a short time-on-site metric often points to problems in converting traffic, and since most traffic has some cost, whether that cost is monetary or some other resource such as time, it’s beneficial for every website owner to maximize the conversion of the traffic received on their site.
