A Massive Traffic Boost Isn’t Always a Good Thing. Here’s Why.

You did it. You finally did it. You went viral.

You woke up to a massive spike in traffic.

It's a great feeling, and there's nothing else like it in the world.

You should be proud of yourself. You've accomplished something wonderful.

But there's some bad news, and it's this:

At the end of the day, all that traffic still doesn't guarantee that you're going to make more money.

Traffic itself is a vanity metric.

What really matters is traffic that converts.

In his latest blog post, Neil Patel explains how you can use your Google Analytics data to evaluate whether your traffic spike is going to bring you an increase in profits.

Beware of falling for vanity metrics

Let’s say your traffic just exploded overnight.

A blog post goes viral when you least expect it. Your Google Analytics shows 100,000+ pageviews.

You feel like an SEO mastermind. The Zuckerberg of keyword research.

But the truth can bring you back down to Earth.

Traffic and pageviews are vanity metrics. Surface-level data like this can’t dictate your marketing decisions.

They’re fun to look at, like window shopping on 5th Avenue in NYC.

But at the end of the day, their beauty is only skin deep.

Why? Those metrics don’t tell you what drives ROI.

Landing 100,000+ hits in a single day can make you feel awesome. Unfortunately, however, the numbers don’t matter if none of those visitors converted.

Any marketer who checks their analytics will head over to “Behavior,” and “All Pages” to sort their traffic by “Source/medium”:

[image source: Neil Patel's blog]
Then they’ll check out which pages are doing well to see what’s working and what’s not.

[image source: Neil Patel's blog]
Just when you think you’re the next Zuckerberg, you look a few boxes to the right and notice that something’s wrong.

[image source: Neil Patel's blog]
The bounce and exit rates show the truth on this page.

The harsh reality is that, while pageviews have shot through the roof, nobody’s sticking around.

All that traffic you worked so hard to get was nearly worthless (except for bragging purposes).

The main focus should’ve been on what that traffic was doing once it hit your site.You just spent hours, days, or even weeks on developing that piece of content.

Here’s one trick to avoid falling prey to vanity metrics.

Instead of treating these vanity metrics like the end-all, be-all finish line, focus on events, goals, and conversion actions.

Start by heading over to “Behavior” and then “Pages.”

Here, you can click on each page and see what conversion events happened on that page.

[image source: Neil Patel's blog]
Depending on your own Google Analytics setup, you can also get goal conversions here.

You can even get granular with this information to see which form fields or CTAs on the same page performed best.

Moving past vanity metrics is just the first step in a long journey.

The next step is to figure out why your phone is ringing and where the call is coming from.