How To Assess B2B Website Traffic Quality

Leads are the lifeblood of most business-to-business (B2B) websites. If you’re selling a complex, deeply integrated solution to enterprise customers, you can’t offer a 14-day free trial (no credit card required!). Your sales team is dependent on a flow of high-quality demo requests.

So what happens when those leads slow down or even stop flowing?

For most marketers, our first instinct is to look at the site itself – particularly the pages with lead forms on them. Has something changed? Is my messaging wrong? Is there a bug? We can waste hours trying to optimize a landing page which is already totally acceptable.

Instead of jumping straight to “fixing” your site, assess your site’s analytics and diagnose the most likely causes of your drought in leads. In this article, we’ll be covering the various ways to assess your traffic quality.

How to check your website traffic quality

It’s easy to fall into the trap of skimming surface-level stats without digging deeper. Remember, not all visitors are created equal. All too often a big spike in visits to your site doesn’t correlate with a proportional spike in leads.

Here’s how to check the quality of the traffic hitting your site:

• Log into GA4 and click on Reports:

• Select Acquisition (If you don’t see Acquisition, see the section below on enabling reports):

• Select the sub report, Traffic Acquisition:

• Verify that you have a sensible date range selected (as seen in the top right-hand corner). For assessing something like traffic quality, you want at least 30 days. Sixty or 90 days is even better to spot new trends or anomalies.

• Scroll down to the table view of the Traffic Acquisition data:

• For now I’m going to use the default channel group (technically the “Session default channel group”) since this is a good way to assess all of the visits to the site in the period (irrespective of return visitors).

Understanding the Traffic Acquisition Report

If you’re not sure about what each column means, here’s a quick primer:

• Sessions are all the visits to the site over the selected period, regardless of whether the user stayed 1 second (i.e. left immediately) or 1,000 seconds.
• Engaged sessions are those visits where the person:
  • Spent more than 10 seconds OR
  • Visited more than one page OR
  • Triggered a key event (conversion)
• Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that became engaged using the engaged sessions criteria above.
• Average engagement time per session is how many seconds people spent (on average) interacting with the site (scrolling, clicking, viewing videos, etc.) This timer is only active while the person has the site in an active tab or window.

One of the quickest ways to assess the quality of traffic from different channels is to compare engagement rates. For our B2B clients, I’ve used an industry benchmark of 60% to assess whether pages need improvement, but this is highly dependent on the purpose of the page and which channels are driving the bulk of the traffic.

Remember that different industries have different personas, with a wide range of what counts as “typical” behavior. For B2C sites, these benchmarks can vary widely depending on the industry and type of site. A dating or social media website would expect a >90% engagement rate for example.

A Quick Note on Enabling Reports

Not seeing anything under Reports or any data on your login page? Chances are high that you haven’t set up a data stream yet in Google Analytics. To do this, you’ll need a Google Analytics property and admin access to the property.

While you can turn on a data stream directly in Google Analytics without enabling Google Tag Manager, we recommend developing a practice of using Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager is the place where you will want to configure key events by defining which actions users take on your website are the most meaningful (like filling out a form).

We recommend following Google’s instructions outlined here.

Assessing the Traffic Acquisition Report: An example

Let’s review our example report and focus on Engagement rate:

Both Search channels look fairly strong but Paid Social is badly underperforming. In my experience this usually means one of the following:

• Your paid budget is attracting the wrong audience – people not truly interested in or suited to your content or offer
• Your ads are sending people to a page that isn’t a good match for the messaging in the ads or is badly designed
• Your site is not well optimized for mobile (Social channels tend to skew to mobile visits 99:1 versus other channels)

Email also looks fairly sad compared to Search, but email is (in many cases) a naturally lower engagement channel. Emails tend to encourage clicks (far more readily than display advertising) but visitors are also more likely to leave a page quickly compared to Search or Referral. We’ll see in our next section that engagement is only part of this picture.

What about Direct? It’s the largest channel for most sites, and often the poorest performer. “Direct” actually means GA4 cannot determine where the traffic came from and so it assumes the person must have typed the URL in the browser directly or clicked on a bookmark. We all know this is highly unlikely, so it’s best to think of Direct as GA4 (and other analytics platforms) saying 🤷‍♂️

Next let’s look at Average engagement time per session. These durations may seem very short (and, indeed, some are) but remember that they are an average, and not a median. The distribution of site visit durations tend to have very “fat tails” – lots of people who stay for only a couple of seconds, but also relatively large numbers of visitors that stay for 15 or 20 minutes.

In our example, notice how closely engagement times tend to correlate with the engagement rate. Organic Search, for example, is our highest engagement channel and is tied for first place in engagement time. This makes intuitive sense – higher engagement channels tend to contain people that stay longer.

I always look for any significant mismatches between average engagement time and engagement rate. A channel with low engagement but high engagement time (or vice versa) is a sign of untrustworthy traffic.

Next, let’s scroll across in the table to reveal the other metrics on the right hand side. Now, we can assess these metrics starting with Events per session and Event count:

These two metrics are a fairly deep topic, but a good rule of thumb is that higher event counts mean more interactions (and thus more interested and engaged visitors). Notice how higher engagement channels have higher average event counts per session.

As with engagement duration, it’s useful to look for outliers. For example, notice how Direct has a higher count despite having one of our lowest engagement rates. This is because the sheer volume of Direct visits has some very highly engaged visitors who drag this average up.

Finally we look at Key events (AKA “Conversions”) and Session key event rate (AKA “Session key event rate”). In general for both these numbers bigger is better. You want both more conversions, and you want a higher percentage of your visitors to convert.

What’s particularly useful here is to cross compare Engagement rate against Session key event rate. For example, notice that Email has a much higher Session key event rate (1.63%) compared to other low engagement channels like Direct and Paid Social. This is simply because visitors who have chosen to opt into your emailers are naturally more likely to convert when they visit your site.

It’s also worth noting how much higher the Session key event rate is for Organic Search compared to Paid Search, despite their very similar engagement rates and session engagement durations. This is the norm, because people clicking on organic results tend to have higher and more specific intent than those clicking on paid results.

Finally, notice that Direct, which looks so woeful in terms of Engagement rate, brings in the second highest total of key events. This is a great example of the “base effect”. Because the Direct channel has so many people in it, the people who are highly likely to convert are a very small share of the entire channel, and thus their Session key event rate is “diluted” by all the “drive-by” visitors who stay only for a few seconds.

In summary:

• Organic Social, Organic Search, and Paid Search have our highest engagement rates and have good engagement rates compared to other channels.
• As expected, Organic Search also has the highest session key event rate. Organic Social and Paid Search lag considerably in this category when compared to Organic Search. But they’re still quite strong!
• Direct brings in our highest volume of users with a high number of key events, but low key events per visit. This is the “catch all” that Google uses when it’s uncertain where a visitor originated from.
• While Paid Search is performing well, Paid Social leaves a lot to be desired and is our biggest opportunity for improvement.

Using the traffic acquisition report, we’ve identified the channels that may have a mismatch between what we are promising people and what people are getting out of the content when they click through to our website.

We also may have an audience mismatch with paid social. Sometimes, we anticipate a lower engagement rate if we’re experimenting with a brand awareness play, but the long term goal for advertising campaigns is to continuously refine our messaging and targeting to optimize for engagement and high-quality conversions.

The next time you’re tempted to overhaul your page layout, copy, and visual designs, take a minute to assess your page using the Traffic Acquisition report. You may discover that specific channels need to be optimized rather than focusing on a page overhaul.

And if you ever need help understanding your website analytics or setting them up for maximum impact, hit us up!