Often traffic is associated with the success of the website. A content based website often gets a lot of traffic due to incoming links and higher visibility to search engines. However, generating revenue from content only websites is often difficult. It relies mainly on ad publishing as the revenue stream. With advertising rates so low these days, only a very high volume website (more than 1 million page views per month) can make substantial money.
On the other side, generating traffic for an e-commerce site is very costly because of associated advertising costs. Not many sites want to link to an e-commerce site and therefore, search engine rankings are low. However, profits for a successful e-commerce site can be very high. Even if a website makes an average of 20 sales daily with an average margin of $10 per sale, the yearly profit is $72,000.
Traffic can be related to ad publishing revenue for content based websites because higher page views generate more ad revenue. However, for e-commerce sites, if the traffic consist mostly of people who are searching for information and not ready to buy, page views do not convert to sales. The quality of traffic matters in this case. Turning internet surfers into buyers is what makes a website successful.
Comment by RObIN — December 14, 2009 @ 4:19 pm