Figure 2-6. Time spent on the top content pages of Invesp.com
Right about now you are probably wondering: what is considered a good amount of time spent on a page?
There is no such thing as a good time-spent-on-page rate. Each page on your site will have its own ideal time for a visitor to interact with its content. Some pages, such as category pages, might have average time-spent-on-page rates of less than 15 seconds. Other pages, such as product pages, especially those full of product reviews, might require a visitor to spend two to five minutes on them. A visitor might spend 15 minutes on a well-developed and persuasive long copy landing page.
Figure 2-6 shows the average time spent on some of the top pages on our site, Invesp.com. This figure shows that a wide range of time is spent on our pages—anywhere from as much as 4:22 to as little as 35 seconds. We also have a few extensive resource pages on our site with an average time of 29 minutes.
The terms quality of traffic and quality of visitors are used in the online space to indicate how interested your website visitors are in the service or product you offer. These terms are mirrored in the offline world with the common sales and marketing term quality of leads. If you run an online advertising campaign to sell shoes, for example, you should drive visitors who are searching for shoes to your website. Although the majority of these visitors may not convert, they are well targeted for your particular product, which means your landing page is getting high-quality traffic. If, however, you drive visitors who are looking for furniture, these visitors will have no interest in what you have to offer. Your landing page in this case is receiving poor-quality traffic.
Quality has a direct impact on conversion rates, both offline and online. If your sales team has good-quality leads, they will be able to close more business. The same applies online. High-quality leads translate into more orders and higher conversions. This is an important point to keep in mind, especially when you pay for people to visit your website. So, how do you control the quality of traffic? Several factors impact visitor quality, including:
Websites receive visitors directly, through search engines, or by referring websites. Each of these sources will drive a different quality of visitors based on the specific product or service. The breakdown of the traffic will vary from one website to the next. Figure 2-7 shows how different sources of traffic drive different percentages of visitors for different websites.
Search engines provide a large amount of traffic for most established websites. With its firm grip on the U.S. market, Google usually delivers around 75% of search visitors. Other search engines, such as Yahoo! and Bing, drive an average of 20% of website search traffic.
The term referral websites means websites that link to your website. The amount of traffic these referrals send to your site will depend on the quality, authority, and number of visitors they have. Figure 2-7 shows how referring websites to a well-established website could be responsible for up to 50% of visitors.
Although we spoke here of conversion rates in general terms, we rarely do this on our projects. At a minimum, conversion rates should be tracked at the level of the different sources of traffic. General and unsegmented conversion rates do not tell us a whole lot about how well your website is performing. Table 2-8 shows a breakdown of traffic and conversion rates based on traffic sources. Let’s analyze some of the metrics from this table. For this particular website, search engines drive 84% of the traffic, direct visitors drive 9.5% of the traffic, and referring websites drive 6% of the traffic. The low percentage of both referring websites and direct traffic indicates that the site is still new.
