You use analytics to keep track of traffic — the number of visitors — to your site, but how can you know whether you have a good amount of traffic or not?
Hubspot shared a set of traffic benchmarks a while back. However, they filtered out all sites with fewer than 5 visits a week, and they also only included their clients — by definition, people working on increasing traffic. Nonetheless, the numbers can give you an idea of where you stand in comparison with comparable businesses. Is that enough to tell you what your traffic goals ought to be?
Yesterday I was talking with a client whose site we’re redesigning. She’s happy with the amount of traffic she currently has, and many other people would be, too. We see lots of sites with fewer visits than hers, and we’d be happy with her numbers for many of our clients. For this client, though, I want to see an increase in traffic. The data for her site indicates that increasing traffic will help her reach the goals she has for her company.
Here are the factors to consider when you set your traffic goals:
- What’s your site’s job? This is probably the most important question. If your site is mostly intended to serve as your resume for people to whom you hand your business card, a few visits a day might be plenty. We’ve done some sites for companies selling products or services with high levels of complexity and exclusivity and matching high price points who really don’t need much traffic. If you sell environmental waste management machinery and one client a month is your goal, then a dozen targeted visits a day is fine. If you, like my current client, have e-commerce for a modestly priced item, then you need hundreds a day.
- What’s your conversion rate? If everyone who visits your site calls you, you need fewer visitors than you do if most visitors take advantage of your free resources and 4% actually buy. We have affiliate marketing set up at our lab site. We know that about 30% of our visitors will click through to the affiliate site, and that we have a typical 4% conversion rate once they reach the site. In practice, that means that we need 300 visitors to be sure of a sale. You need to set up goals in your analytics or otherwise track conversions to know how many visitors you need to reach your goals for your site.
- Is your traffic increasing? At our lab site we’re seeing about a 9% increase in overall traffic each week. You may be seeing monthly increases, or an increase compared with last year. If you’re seeing that steady increase combined with the total traffic numbers you need for your site’s goals within your business, then you don’t have to see huge increases. If your traffic is stagnant, though, or decreasing, then you should be thinking about making changes.
Read our post on Website Traffic to learn about some other aspects of this metric that you should consider when you set traffic goals or decide how satisfied you are with your current traffic. If you decide that you’re not satisfied, be ready to make some changes.
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