As a professional involved in the creation and promotion of web content, you may have developed an obsession for the amount of traffic you are getting on your website. But is the number of visits the only data to look at when trying to assess how well a website is doing?

The answer is no. Traffic on a website doesn't generally reflect the intrinsic quality of web content, but rather the popularity of the topic, the domain authority of a website, and other SEO factors.

Traffic, in most cases, should not be the ultimate goal of your web strategy.

Take a look at the analytics of these two websites for the same period of time:

If you are looking at the visits only, site A is getting more traffic than site B. Therefore, you may think site A is a more successful website than site B. While site A probably does a great job of bringing visitors to the website, they have all left before even a minute has passed. Most of them have not browsed through the website more than two pages, and many never clicked any link to another page. These 44 seconds are probably the time it took them to realize site A does not have the information they wanted in the first place and leave. The bounce rate--the percentage of visitors leaving the website almost instantly-- is a staggering 68.9%. Also, as it appears, most visitors have never been to that website before, and we can deduce they are unlikely to come back.

With only 34% of site A's visits, site B seems far inferior to site A. But the fewer visitors there stay longer, browse through many more pages and roughly 35% are coming back to the website. Fewer of them leave the website instantly after getting in. This probably means site B does a better job at providing what visitors expect than site A.

Depending on what you want to achieve with your website, the importance of traffic varies greatly. Imagine that both site A and site B are selling a similar product. Judging from the bounce rate and visits/pageviews ratio, site B, while driving less traffic, may very well sell more of its products than site A. Obviously, the brains behind site A need to improve their conversion rate and rethink the global web experience they have created.
Even if site A's main goal is to generate revenue from ads, better design, content, and usability would improve the overall quality of the website and retain visitors.

While we don't have enough data to draw a precise conclusion on these two websites, we already know that site B does, proportionally, a much better job at retaining its visitors and bringing them back later on.

Traffic is a secondary success factor for most websites. While it may help, it is better to have less, yet interested and active visitors than a large number of visits with low interest and potential for conversion. Interested visitors are more likely to be pro-active on the website (post comments, ...) and help you spread the word with viral marketing (shareThis, ...) than a large number of users bouncing away from your website.