What is Visitor Value?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Visitor Value

Visitor Value is the amount of money you make on average per visitor to your website.

There are two reasons why Visitor Value is an important measure of your website's effectiveness as a business tool. First, it's clearly better for you the more money you can make from people coming to your website. That's like saying that if you run a shop, the more money you can get your average customer to spend the better.

The second reason is just as important and it relates to your ability to buy targeted web traffic using PPC or other traffic.

Suppose I said to you, look, you've got a visitor value of $2.50, would you be interested in buying in web traffic that cost you 80c a visitor?

Your answer is going to be "Yes" because you'd expect to make $2.50-$0.80 profit per extra visitor, or $1.70. In fact if I made you this offer, you'd be foolish to turn it down.

You can very easily buy this sort of web traffic from Google AdWords, Yahoo and Microsoft and this process is a key element of this course.

Is it worth buying traffic that loses you money?

Now let's just look at a situation when you can buy in traffic but where it costs $2.60 a click instead. At that price you wouldn't be interested in buying it because on average for each visitor you got, you'd lose 10c.

But what if your competitor had a visitor value of $3.25? They'd be able to buy in traffic and this means that on the big search engines, they'd hoover up potential new business whereas you wouldn't be able to afford to.

Perhaps surprisingly, there is a very strong and easily accessed market place for this type of web traffic and it is very competitive. This really does mean that you need to maximise your Visitor Value to stay in the game. To do this you need to increase your conversion rate.

But there's another benefit too, a big one.

When you buy in traffic from search engines, in simple terms, the more you are prepared to pay for it, the more you'll get. This is because the more you bid for traffic, the higher up the page your ads will appear and in general higher ranking ads attract more clicks.

So a site with a strong visitor value can afford to bid for traffic more aggressively which means its ads will be higher up the page and get more traffic. It will convert this traffic into profits effectively because it works well as a sales lead generator. Conversely, a site that has a low visitor value will not be able to bid aggressively for traffic, will get fewer and fewer clicks and so make less and less money.

You can see now why Visitor Value is such a key performance measure of website performance.

So what can we do to boost visitor value?

There are three techniques.

• Sell to more people when they land on your site by increasing your overall conversion rate
   
• Sell more things to customers using upsell techniques 
   
• Sell additional products to them later on, a process known as back end selling.

Many businesses recognise that the lifetime value of a customer is what really matters. This is the amount of business they expect to get from a new customer over the lifetime of a business relationship.

Provided they have done enough analysis and are confident in their forecasting, many businesses are prepared to spend very aggressively to get new customers to the extent that they make a significant loss on the first business contact because they know that over time, they'll recover all their costs and more by continuous back end selling.

You've doubtless seen examples of this where magazines offer you a free subscription for a period in order to get you to subscribe on a paid-for basis later on. They invest money up front to provide you with free editions in the expectation that you will buy from them in the future.

If you can generate backend sales to your existing and future customers you will significantly increase your visitor value which can put you in a very strong position when it comes to buying in web traffic.

To generate back end sales, you really need to put in place mechanisms that will keep in touch with your customer base automatically, nudging them repeatedly to remind them to spend money with you. Because this can be automated with an autoresponder you can continue to increase the visitor value over time.