Also called cold audience
Cold traffic is visitors who arrive without prior knowledge of you, as opposed to warm traffic from people who already follow or bought.
The temperature metaphor describes how much has to be established before an offer makes sense. Cold traffic needs to learn who you are, why the problem matters and why you are credible, all before price is relevant. Warm traffic needs none of that.
This is why one page cannot serve both well. A page that opens on a price converts warm visitors and loses cold ones; a page that opens on a long explanation converts cold visitors and bores warm ones into leaving.
Cold traffic is also where every rate looks bad by comparison, which regularly leads people to conclude a good offer is broken.
In practice
The same €149 course page converts at 4% from an email list and 0.3% from cold ads — both numbers can be healthy for their source.
Common mistake
Comparing conversion rates across temperatures. It leads to abandoning offers that work and channels that would work with a different page.
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