While a high number of website hits looks nice on paper, numbers do not necessarily lead to sales. In fact, many visits to a website may simply be bots, which have zero intention of purchasing the company's product or services. As industrial marketers work to drive traffic to their website, the focus should be on quality over quantity.
Bots are taking over
Bot traffic has skyrocketed in recent years. Research from Distil Networks found that nearly 60 percent of web traffic in 2014 was automated code. Out of those bots, 23 percent were targeting websites maliciously. Such bots are designed to perform illegal actions such as skimming credit card numbers or copying portions of blogs for use elsewhere.
Other bot visitors are helpful. Google bots, for instance, crawl websites in order to index them so they can be searched by internet users. Facebook bots reduce long articles to an image and a snippet so they can be easily shared on the social media network.
Regardless of the purpose of the bot, their traffic to a website does not constitute quality traffic. Any evaluation of analytics based solely on quantity fails to account for these bots. This lack of consideration results in over-inflation of the numbers, leading a company to believe it is performing better than it actually is.
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Filtering out bots
Dealing with these bots has historically been difficult. The only method was to determine the behavior of each bot, then blacklist it from analytics. Even then, past hits would still affect future analysis.
Fortunately for those who choose to focus on the quality of visitors instead of the number of hits, Google Analytics has a solution. Back in 2014, it added a feature that automatically excludes spiders and bots from figures by checking a single box, allowing companies to see the portion of their traffic that is generated by actual humans.
Quality humans
Even once bots are filtered out, the goal is still not just to drive traffic. Focusing on quality traffic - people who are likely to actually buy the product or service offered - is better for most businesses. Websites that earn income based solely on ad revenue go for quantity, as more visitors results in a higher number of ads viewed and clicked.
Most businesses, however, use their website to bring in new customers. For those businesses, visits from 10,000 people are meaningless if not a single one of those people are interested in the company.
A website that attracts only 10 highly targeted people in the same time frame, of which two convert, is far more effective at building a profitable company.
Finding that traffic
The problem lies in finding those 10 people and getting them to your website. Advertising on a site like IndustryNet solves this problem by guaranteeing high-quality leads and interested buyers.
IndustryNet specifically focuses on placing quality over quantity, and,is a "blocker-free" space for you to reach thousands of U.S. industrial buyers looking for products and services like yours. (For more information on the pitfalls of banner advertising, read our report on why you should rethink banner advertising in 2018.)
IndustryNet's team has optimized the reporting systems to weed out bots, crawlers, spiders and other "junk" traffic simply looking to harvest data.
The Activity Reports now show lower search figures, but the overall effort has yielded accurate analytics reports of the real humans who are searching and finding relevant companies using IndustryNet.
If you are looking to drive industrial buyers like these to your site, learn more about IndustryNet's marketing solutions.
