General Best Practices - Qualifying Your Audience

Advance Use Case: Qualifying Your Audience

Target only your best, highest intent customer to grow your audience using Retention.com's Identity Resolution

What Does Qualified Traffic Look Like?

In a somewhat basic but general explanation, qualified traffic is the type of traffic that produces tangible business results. While the definition of “qualified traffic” varies from company to company and industry to industry, across companies and industries it is the type of traffic that has the potential to produce ROI from your marketing efforts.

Since the definition of “qualified traffic” will vary by industry, company, and business objectives, the best place to start is to know what qualified looks like for you. What does the typical buying journey to find your product or service look like? Knowing your buyer journey will help reveal the types of keywords, questions, and intent qualified traffic uses when searching for your solutions.

Measuring Qualified Traffic

It is important to understand how to measure whether or not traffic is qualified. With the help of analytics software like Google Analytics, you can gain metrics important to qualifying traffic during the three stages: Visitor, Lead, and Customer. Using these metrics, you can calculate the following:

• Visitor to lead (VTL) conversion rate:  Using the content on your website, you are able to tell how many visitors convert to leads. If you have the proper conversion opportunities to turn your visitors into leads and move them down the funnel on your website, but you don’t see visitors converting to leads, this is one sign that traffic isn’t qualified.
• Lead to customer (LTC) conversion rate: The real bread-and-butter in performance is the lead to customer conversion rate which tells you how many of your leads convert to customers. A low LTC rate may be a symptom of poor quality traffic and leads, but it can also mean that the bottom of the funnel is not doing its job to close the deal. To investigate further, speak with your sales team about the quality of leads, ensure they are following up, and if needed, implement systems and tools like lead scoring that help with the marketing and sales hand off.

Ways to Qualify and Segment Your Traffic

Targeting your best users by using Retention.com' Identity Resolution alongside your current marketing is one of the best ways to reduce wasted marketing spend! Segmentation doesn't have to be complex. They don’t have to include multiple criteria, either. They can be very simple and straightforward:

• By Engagement
  • Why?
    • See how well your content is appealing to your audience
  • How?
    • More than x pages
    • More than x seconds
    • Scroll Depth
    • Events such as Add to Cart
• By Content Viewed
  • Why?
    • To get insight into their onsite behavior
  • How?
    • Category pages
    • Product pages
    • Product detail pages (PDPs)
    • Cart Pages
• By Traffic Source
  • Why?
    • To get insight about where are they coming from and how are they finding you
  • How?
    • By traffic source or medium such as:
      • Social
      • Paid Social
      • Organic
      • Direct
      • Referral
      • Affiliates
      • Paid Search
      • Programmatic

You can always get more advanced with how you segment, but segments allow you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and patterns, find reliable revenue sources, and provide the guidelines to improve where you’re falling short. Anything you can do to better understand your audience behavior and acquisition is time well spent.