Website Traffic vs. Conversion: What is More Important?

Finding out which one is more important – website traffic or conversion – is a long debate that every business owner considers. You can work on both, but you want to know which one is better to generate more sales and revenue. You want to know this in case you needed to focus on only one for, let’s say a month. Truth is – this is a trick question because both are important. But if it’s a simple answer you are looking for, remember this – visitors don’t make sales, only customers do.

Why Website Traffic is Important

Website traffic has a huge impact on your business. Three things make traffic critical for your website:

• The more visitors you have, the better your website is.
• Not all traffic is good, so you need to improve the quality of your traffic.
• The better the quality of your visitors, the higher your conversion rate can be.

In generating more website traffic, you need to engage the local audience. It’s one of the tactics that’ll help you have better opportunities to add new customers. With that, you’ll also have more chances to generate qualified leads to nurture.

The goal is for this to lead to the sale of a product or service, so you can ultimately gain a new customer or capture lost customers. Of course, your business doesn’t only need website traffic to grow. However, it does play a big part in your success.

After all, the more visitors you have, the higher conversion numbers are as well, particularly if you improve the quality of your traffic. It just means that you have fewer new visitors to maintain, so you can focus on creating a stronger bond with existing customers.

Why Conversion Rate is Important

Another part of the sales funnel that’s equally important to focus on is improving the conversion rates. If website traffic is the number of visitors to your site, conversion rate tells you the number of people who took your desired action.

For instance: this entails the number of people who bought a product from you and become a customer. The conversion rate is, no doubt, the most vital metric in digital marketing, more so than website traffic.

They are both essential, but having many visitors doesn’t do you any good if they don’t buy your products or services. You want to make a sale so that you can earn more profits and you can only do that by increasing your conversions.

Besides revenue, the conversion rate also has numerous other advantages. They include:

• Telling you if your business strategy is a failure or success.
• Showing you if your strategy is working, leaving you extra cash to try other marketing tactics.
• Improving your website, campaigns, and sales processes by creating an in-sync sales funnel

In increasing your conversion rates, often you automatically improve the different aspects necessary for leading prospects down the sales funnel. However, keep in mind that these numbers aren’t always reliable.

They can be deceiving if you only blindly believe in a high or low conversion rate. You need to learn to evaluate data. This way, you can get an accurate reading of what your conversion rate really means for your business.

Where Does Traffic and Conversion Intersect?

A lot of people get confused as to which one to focus on – website traffic or conversion rates – mainly because they both help bring more customers. The thing is, you usually don’t need to choose one since the two intersect.

More specifically, the traffic to your website can lead to more conversions. As mentioned before, you have more opportunities to gain more new customers if you increase the quality of your traffic.

It also leads to more conversion, if you keep in mind that traffic is not just about the number of visitors, but also how ready they are to buy from you. Still, only having many visitors won’t do your business good.

That makes focusing on conversion rates more critical. By doing that, you concentrate more on targeting the right audience instead of blindly bringing visitors to your site. Your number of visitors will likely drop, but then their quality will significantly increase.

Conclusion

Won’t it be better to have loyal customers than visitors who don’t make a sale? That being the case, it’s better to focus on increasing your conversion rates as it means you’ll have more targeted campaigns for a higher chance of success.

Meggie is a data junkie with more than six years of experience in the field. Aside from being a marketing nerd, she loves taking her life to the extreme with bungee jumping and skydiving when she needs some freedom.