It is easy to buy traffic. It is hard to buy the right traffic. The gap between those two sentences is where most marketplace budgets quietly leak.
Traffic is a vanity number until it converts
A spike in sessions feels like progress. But sessions that don't match intent inflate your costs, depress your conversion rate, and — on Amazon and Walmart — teach the algorithm to show you to the wrong shoppers next time.
Every poorly matched click is a small, compounding instruction to the marketplace about who you are for.
How to read the signal
- High traffic, low conversion usually means a targeting or framing mismatch, not a price problem.
- Low traffic, high conversion means you've found a pocket of intent worth scaling — carefully.
- Both rising together is the only combination that compounds.
The discipline
Spend against conversion quality, not session volume. Cut the keywords and placements that bring motion without intent, even when the click is cheap. Cheap clicks that don't convert are the most expensive thing you can buy.