Your ads are live and working. Visits are going up and the analytics dashboard looks healthy. So why aren't more of those visitors turning into customers?
The usual answer is that a visit is not a buyer. Web analytics counts clicks, sessions and time on page. It can not tell you whether the person on the other end wanted to buy from you, wandered in from a game, or was a bot. When you pay per click, that difference is your budget.
Illumea now answers that question for you. We launched Traffic Source Quality recently. It shows, channel by channel, how many of the conversations each source brings are real prospects and how many are junk, so you can put your money where the buyers are.
What does Traffic Source Quality Show?
On your Analytics page, every channel that brings visitors to your chat gets one row:
- Channel: Where the visitor came from: Google Ads (Search, YouTube, or Display and apps), organic search, AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, social, referral sites, direct, or your own campaign tags
- Conversations: How many chats that channel started
- Junk: The share of those chats that were gibberish, tests, small talk or requests for things you don't sell
- Buyers: Conversations that showed real interest in buying
- Leads: Visitors who left their contact details
Click any channel to see what sits behind it: the referring websites, the campaigns and the landing pages. Illumea also flags the problems worth acting on, in plain language. For example: "Google Ads Display and apps: 85 conversations, 95% junk and no buyers. Consider excluding these placements or moving budget to Search."
The same findings appear in your Intelligence Report, with recommendations, so they reach the people who manage your ad budget.
How it works?
We got the idea for this feature while analyzing our own data. We were running Google Ads, and our chatbot was busier than ever. When we looked at where those conversations came from, the picture split in two:
- Google Ads — Display, YouTube and app placements: A lot of conversations were junk
- Google Ads — Search, and a targeted banner campaign: 77% of buying signals were from here
The display ads were showing on gaming sites and in mobile apps, and every click landed on the signup page. To Google Analytics, those were simply visits. Traffic Source Quality showed us for what they were: spend that would never turn into a sale. With the numbers side by side, the fix was clear: exclude those placements and move the budget to Search, where the buyers were.
How it helps your business
- Stop paying for clicks that will never buy. See which placements, sites and apps send junk, and exclude them before they eat next month's budget.
- Back the channels that bring buyers. When one campaign brings most of your real enquiries, you can see it, and move spend there with confidence.
- Judge campaigns by outcomes, not visits. Compare channels by buyers and leads instead of clicks, so a cheap source of traffic doesn't look better than it is.
- Fix the page, not just the ad. The landing pages behind each channel show where visitors arrive confused or off-topic, so you can change the page or the ad that sends them there.
- Spot new sources early. Visitors arriving from AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity get their own channel, so you can see how much this new kind of search is already bringing you.
- Give your agency something concrete. The Intelligence Report puts the findings and recommendations in one place to share with whoever runs your ads.
Getting started
Traffic Source Quality is on the Analytics page of every Illumea plan, and it starts filling in as soon as visitors chat with your bot. On Growth and Scale, its findings and recommendations also appear in your Intelligence Report.
Two tips for the clearest picture:
- Tag your campaigns. Add UTM tags to the links in your ads and emails, so each campaign shows up under its own name.
- Give it a few weeks. A channel with only a handful of conversations can swing either way. Illumea flags a channel only once it has enough conversations to be sure.
The figures cover visitors who chatted with your bot, so they won't match Google Analytics, and they aren't meant to. Analytics tells you who visited. Illumea tells you who wanted to buy.
Ready to see which of your channels bring buyers? Start your 14-day free trial, or book a demo and we will walk you through it on your own traffic.