5 Overlooked Benefits of UNTARGETED Traffic

Yep. Oh, btw. Going dofollow and joining Bumpzee can be a great way to get more Alexa traffic because those doing Dofollow are disproportionately montetizing, and they generally install Alexa toolbars. Yes, Alexa is worthless as far as accuracy goes– but it’s used by TLA, PPP etc.

Bizarrely, people also glace at Alexa and make judgements about authority. Heck, I do it and I know it’s a wretched tool!

Just curious…how long do the stumbleupon visitors stick around? My impression is that they click through rather quickly. Do the stick around long enough to complete the action you want them to take? Also, doshdosh recommended a Teaching Sells ebook that I think you’ll find interesting. Some of the points in the ebook are items you’ve brought up here.

Have you determined why they are coming in from StumbleUpon?

What I mean by that is something similar to this - If you use a tracker like Statcounter, you can see why some people are ending up on site from searches Google. They may be searching for a keyword that you didn’t intend to use, but it has some relevance to what you wrote (long tail?). Knowing that, you may be able to turn that unintended traffic into targeted traffic by tweaking some keywords in you content.

I haven’t found yet where StumbleUpon gives you that kind of information.

Nice example for publishers selling advertising, how about a list for ecommerce sites. For those, untargeted traffic usually means a reduction in key metrics like conversion rate, per visit value, etc …

Here’s one to get started: If you can establish what is bringing that traffic to your site (pretty hard for people stumbling), you could modify your landing page content to cater to them more. This could also mean better retention or higher conversion of your targeted traffic.

I suppose there aren’t any negatives to having free traffic of any kind, unless you are running into technical issues serving your content.

you are at 118 now ;-) Nice post.

@Lucia, Yeah I’m always checking my alexa traffic against other blogs :-)

@Debora, Good question. I’ve just had a look at the SU stats for October. Average time on site is 1:32, which is not bad with a bounce rate of 33%. Actually I may have to alter my stance there as I am starting to see jumps in RSS these days.

I’ve tried to download that book twice now, it never comes through. I’ll have to email Brian.

@Don, No with StumbleUpon it’s discovery so we don’t know if they are looking for something or have just randomly clicked the Stumble button (more likely).

@Zachary, I don’t really know anything about ecommerce :/

@45n5, Cool! I see you added thumbnails to the list, how do I get one of those?

I get them using the alexa api, so when you get a thumbnail in alexa you will show up on the list when the script runs again.

Caroline, I can vouch for having very high rankings for one of my niche sites and conversions being very low. This would be untargeted traffic. Finding keywords that bring visitors who are along their way to purchasing (qualified traffic) is the way to go if you can dig deep and find those keywords. Many times they are not what you think;)

@45n5, ahh ok I’ll add that to my todo list then!

@Mike, oh yes I still believe that targeted traffic is the way to go, but thought I’d point out that all is not lost if its untargeted.

Caroline, your talk about untargeted traffic is very interesting. All over www people are talking only about targetted traffic. This is the first time I read something different. You thought completely differently 180°. Great!!

@Shams, Thanks :)

I think that if your primary motive is to derive untargeted traffic to your blog, that’s bad luck for your sponsors. It’s like saying spammers have the right idea.

@Rob, No of course the primary objective is not to drive untargetted traffic but it is a fact of life. I’m just pointing out the benefits. Big difference.

Hi Caroline,

Totally understand. I get tonnes of untargeted traffic - we all do. I just think that the benefits are debatable as being benefits. I think it’s more a question of the value of the traffic we receive.

As an example, I run a site called 3gnmedia.com and we get roughly 300,000 page views a month, sure it’s a lot of traffic, but the traffic doesn’t convert well. We don’t earn much money from the traffic.

Even though a site gets a lot of traffic, it doesn’t always provide value. In the long run, I believe it’s in our best interests to engineer win-win situations. What are your thoughts on the value of traffic?

Do you think that untargeted traffic is justifiable if it is almost as valuable as your current site’s traffic?

Looking forward to your response,

Rob

PS. Apparently StumbleUpon delivers users that are very sticky.

@Rob, many people get despondent when they see that the majority of their traffic is untargeted and doesn’t convert into sales etc. My aim with this post was simply to point out that there are other benefits other than the obvious conversion that can still be valuable.

Alexa in Germany is not so well known,
How important do you think the Alexa rank really?
Greetings from Germany
Bernhard

@Bernhard, none of the metrics that I talk about in this post are terribly important - I just wanted to point out that untargeted traffic isn’t all bad. I wouldn’t worry if Alexa isn’t big in Germany.