Hissingsid - 10:03 am on Mar 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Our conversion rate (to sale) is about half of what it was pre Panda, pre Instants. Traffic is down a bit but the quality of what we get is way down. Previously Google (including Adwords) gave us hot leads now it seems to be giving us a mix of hot leads and people who are in the right broad target market but not in buying mode. The balance is skewed way over to the aimless wanderers.

Last week I really drilled down in Adwords and switched of broad match and phrase match on all of my campaigns. So far the number of conversions has remained about the same but the conversion rate has shot up. I can't believe that I let Google sell me crap for so long.

The same is happening with Organic search. If you look at your Analytics data you will see that you have hundreds perhaps thousands of terms in your long tail that are 100% bounce rate and that spend less than 10 seconds on the page, many less than a second. As a result my bounce rate has gone up from less than 25% overall to over 40%. I don't want crap traffic and carp traffic doesn't want me.

Sid