So our last post on Why Traffic Doesn’t Matter (kind of) got some great traction and got some super interesting questions! We thought we would expand a little further on why traffic shouldn’t be a “raw metric” as to whether or not you should consider a site to sell your content.
Now firstly, we need to start off by saying the traffic of your page (not the site) depends on how much advertising you as the creator does – this goes for every single platform out there. Website traffic as a whole doesn’t matter, but yours does. We also need to point out that a site with less creators is going to have less traffic – of course it is, right? Less people advertising to that site, less traffic overall. However, you could have a site with 1,000,000 visits and 1,000,000 creators, and you’re creator number 1,000,001 – unless you advertise, you wouldn’t get any traffic – even on the like of OnlyFans because they don’t have a FYP page or the likes (and there “Suggest Creators” is taken up by the 1,000,000 other creators).
Now, this next part is going to get a little number heavy (not like that section above wasn’t right?!). Let’s say you have a site that has 1,000,000 visits per month, and a second site that has 500,000 visits per month. Most creators out there at the moment will go “Well I want to be on the 1,000,000 visits per month site. It has more traffic.” Ok, but why? Those users are already going there to see the creator(s) they have subscribed to. Not to yours (unless you’re already there AND advertising). But now let’s bring some other metrics (measurements) into play that actually matter.
1. Bounce rate.
Bounce rate is the rate at which a user visits the site, looks at one page briefly then goes away from the site. For example; you put up your link, 10 people click it, and 8 of them close the window and don’t subscribe. This would be a bounce rate of 80% – this is very important to understand in addition to raw traffic.
2. Page Views.
This is another great metric to explore. Some sites may have a large amount of traffic, but the users only visit 1-2 pages (log in page and one other). If sites have a higher page view count, that means users are more engaged and are looking around. To put this into an example, imagine you have a site that has an average of 2 page views for existing users. The log in page and the home page (or direct to creator’s page). This shows that the user isn’t looking anywhere else – you’re not going to be getting any existing fans over to your page – the site experience may not encourage that behavior. If the site however has say a 5 page average view, that means the user is more than likely checking out other creators (potential for you to score a new fan).
3. Let’s combined it all.
Let’s take 2 sites – A and B.
Site A has 1.6 million views per month and Site B has 790,000 (just under half of site A). Now let’s bring the bounce rate into play.
Remember, a user “bouncing” is viewing a page and then taking no action but leaving. Let’s say Site A has a bounce rate of 60%. This means we can “remove” 60% of their traffic as it’s just people visiting and leaving (they aren’t actually paying fans). Then let’s give Site B a 45% bounce rate.
Site A now has an effective traffic count of: 640,000
Site B now has an effective traffic count of: 434,500
Site A is still winning right? For now. Let’s look at page views.
Let’s say Site A has an average of 2.66 page views and Site B has 4.13.
How do these sites now compare?
Site A now has 1,702,400 page views per month
Site B now has 1,794,485 page views per month
Site B now is a busier site than site A, now that relevant factors are taken into account. These figures are not made up by the way. This is Fan-Topia (Site B) against another very prominent site (Site A), and this data is publicly available if you look for it.
As a further point, Site A average time on site is 1 minute 28 seconds. For us here at Fan-Topia it is 4 minutes 58 seconds – meaning our users explore more and spend more time on site – making our traffic more engaged and higher spending.