I read a blog post today over at HubSpot entitled “How Many Visitors Should Your Site Get?” and it upset me that so many people are still just focused on visitors as the magic number for their website.
It reminds me of the late 1990s when people would brag about how many “hits” their site was getting. For those who may not know, a hit is simply a number that indicates how many times a piece of data was transferred from your website. So if your web page had some HTML code and four embedded images, one person looking at that page would equal five hits.
Or remember when counters first became popular? People would have that little GIF image on their page that would change every time you hit the refresh button. That page probably also had a blink tag on it somewhere. We were all guilty of using the blink tag at some point back then.
Who cares about the “size of [your] company, industry, and the type of product or service” you’re selling? Forget about the competition and what others are trying to do. Don’t get into the vain Facebook user mentality of “Look at how many fans I have! I’m a better Facebooker than you! Neener neener neener!” No one else can tell you what the goals of your business should be.
Small companies may have large numbers of visitors and large companies may have small numbers of visitors. And both may succeed or fail. Low traffic does not equal failure and high traffic does not automatically equal success.
Here at WorkSmart, I deal with website and social media analytics data a lot. And I always encourage my clients to look beyond the number of visitors they’re getting to more important questions like what are your visitors doing once they get there? Getting traffic is easy. You can pay Google for it. A clever marketing campaign can cause a spike in your online traffic. But if those visitors don’t sign up for your e-mail newsletter or don’t buy your product, don’t come into your store or do whatever other goal you’ve established for your visitors, then it’s worthless.
Which would you rather have:
- A website with 500 unique visitors a week where 5 percent were converting to the goals you’ve established for your website or
- A website with 100 unique visitors a week where 50 percent were converting to your goals?
How much time are people spending on your site? What’s your bounce rate? Where are your visitors coming from? Are they new or have they been here before? How many pages are they looking at? What percentage of visitors are converting and where are those visitors coming from? These numbers are a lot more telling than just the number of visitors coming to your site.
But even in these statistics, there is no magic number. No one can tell you how much time people should be spending on your site, what your bounce rate should be or what percentage of your visitors should be converting to your goals. That’s what your company must decide. Others can only guide you.
How many visitors should your site get? You’re asking the wrong question. Decide what you’re trying to accomplish with your website, use the data to track visitors as they move through the funnel on your site towards that goal, tweak the areas where people are turning away from your goals and then track your results.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree for the most part, but what if you when a typical media blog and sell ads based on impressions… Like techcrunch. Sure you still need to provide traffic to the website buying impressions on your site, but they are really paying you for eyeballs
Yes, impressions are a big deal for blogs that make their money through advertising. But even there, other stats such as the percentage of new vs returning visitors, time spent on site and average number of pages viewed are important stats that must be looked at.
If you have 1,000 visitors a week who each look at 4 pages on average, you’re doing better (in terms of page views and ad impressions) than a site with 3,000 weekly visitors who just look at one page and leave.
Not all sites are created equal. If a sites business plan includes revenue from ads, they better be thinking about the numbers.
Guys, this is quite topical for me. I am in the process of setting up a web based business offering weekly competitions with financial prizes for winners. The quandry for me is do i charge membership fees for all members and then charge for competition fees or do i just have free membership to drive numbers and sell advertising space as well as charge competition fees. BTW the compe fees will be easy to sell.
Further to previous note. Can anyone give me some indication of how many daily visitors would be attractive for a multinational company to consider using my site for advertising.