Are your ads sending quality traffic to your website? There’s a way to find out.
Misleading Results
Ads Manager results can be misleading. When running Sales ads, we tend to focus primarily on sales and revenue numbers. But when sales aren’t happening, it can be difficult to diagnose the problem.
Advertisers tend to obsess over Click-Thru Rate and Cost Per Click in these situations. They think that if those numbers are good and sales aren’t happening, the problem must be the landing page.
But that makes the classic assumption that we’re sending quality traffic in the first place. There’s a way to verify it.
The Custom Metric
I created a custom metric called Quality Traffic Percentage. It starts with a custom event that tracks when someone spends at least 15 seconds on the page (here’s how to create a similar event). This is done using a timer trigger and GTM.
What you use for this “quality” definition is up to you. Don’t get lost in isolating bottom-of-the-funnel actions. My main priority with this metric is to eliminate immediate abandons and bots that could potentially be blamed on optimization or distribution issues.
I then find the percentage of total landing page views that result in a 15-second visit.
You’ll need to use the compare attribution settings feature to isolate 1-day click and first conversions before finding the percentage.
Otherwise, this number will be inflated. Unlike a purchase or lead, an action like a 15-second visit might be performed repeatedly. We don’t care about any of these conversions after the first one.
Using the Percentage
The percentage, by itself, doesn’t have much meaning. It gains meaning when you begin comparing campaigns, ad sets, and ads. You’ll start to find that some ads never had a chance because of the low-quality traffic that was going to your website.
I highlighted this metric a few weeks ago when discussing the low-quality traffic sent when optimizing for landing page views (despite the Meta AI Business Assistant claiming the opposite).
In that test, I found that the Quality Traffic Percentage was similar, on average, for my ad sets optimized for purchases and leads. But they were 7X higher than the Quality Traffic Percentage when optimizing for landing page views.
