Traffic is a Metric, Nothing More
Note from the editor: These next few days, we will be re-publishing note-worthy content from the Wisdump archive. This particular article was originally posted by Paul Scrivens on November 10th, 2006.
The Web 2.0 world seems to have a problem regarding traffic. It seems to be the measure of success for a website and because of this many sites either get unnoticed or their true value doesn’t really show. On the other hand you have sites the receive a large amount of traffic yet really do nothing for anyone so how does traffic play in these situations? Finally, there is no end-all solution for measuring traffic so anyone can throw out some numbers and who are we to call them out on it or not because it wouldn’t be too hard to find a program that makes those numbers look realistic.
Let’s explore a couple of scenarios.
1. You have a site that gets 10,000 uniques per day, yet you generate no revenue and almost no discussion. Does the site have the same value as the person doing 5,000 uniques per day and making $1500 a month along with having some great discussions?
2. 2 million uniques a month is nothing to sneeze at, but what if you breakdown what those 2 million uniques really mean? What if those uniques were distributed over 150 sites? When you first think about it, it still seems like a big number but look a little deeper.
- 2,000,000 / 150 = 13,333 uniques per month per site
- 13,333 / 30 = 444 uniques per day per site
Now how many sites do you know do at least 444 uniques per day? I was able to make the 2,000,000 into 444 through two simple calculations. That doesn’t mean the 2M isn’t an important number, but you have to be careful of how you use it.
3. One site does over 2 million pageviews a month. That is a ridiculously high number for a single site whether your ego wants to admit it or not. However, what if I were to tell you that over 1 million uniques visit the site every month as well, would you still be as impressed? Again, 1 million uniques is nothing to sneeze at, but you would hope that a site can do more than 2:1 ratio when it comes to PVs and uniques.
Now take into account another factor with example #3. There are plenty of sites that do more traffic, but do those sites pull in an average of $60,000 per month? Looking at that stat would you take a site that does 2M uniques and 5M PVs or the site above that does half that and pulls in the money?
9rules isn’t known for throwing our members millions of visitors a month, but we are known for giving them quality traffic that sticks around and many times subscribes to their sites. You can get on Digg one day and jump up 20,000 pageviews and the next day its all back to normal again because the quality of the traffic is meaningless.
Traffic should be used as a metric to view how well your site is doing against your own expectations and how it can be improved. Throwing out random numbers doesn’t always mean they are worthwhile, yet we have put ourselves in an age where the size of your traffic is the only thing that counts (insert size isn’t everything joke). Traffic does have meaning, but don’t make it the theme of your site.
Related reading:
Great post. Not only that, but you really have to dive into your metrics to get a clearer picture. What if you got 2M visitors, but they all exited after visiting once? What if they don’t stay on a given page very long? This is why you have to monitor a bigger picture. As you said with digg, it isn’t quality traffic. It’s exposure, but it isn’t all quality traffic. It has potential (depending your audience) to boost your unique visitors.
Metrics, in the larger scale, simply can’t be taken at face value. One of the sites I work on is an example of what you mentioned. It gets about 14K unique a month, but there is no interaction on the site (due to executive decisions). Therefore, we hold consistent traffic, but what is the REAL value of our site?
I think it could be maximized by giving even small bits of interaction to the site – and eventually bring in revenue through e-commerce and such.
Ok, I could ramble on about metrics. You hit the nail on the head when you said ‘Traffic should be used as a metric to view how well your site is doing against your own expectations and how it can be improved.’ Otherwise, its all just numbers without context.
By Nate K on November 10, 2006 5:49 pm
I agree but most site owners (or, stakeholders) do not understand site metrics. They are incredibly pleased when their site’s “index/home” page gets 90% of traffic with few site paths taken. I seldom – these days – explain that that number is useless if the rest of the site receives 10% with few click-paths eslsewhere.
90% of 2M on index/home page + 80% site exit doesn’t seem much to them.
2M visitors makes good PR. (Page Rank/Public Relations/Press Releases)
By Sean Fraser on November 10, 2006 6:32 pm
When you crunch the numbers like that it really makes a person think. As a new blogger, most people look for traffic to just role in and get discouraged when they’re not pulling those numbers, soon after they’re out the gate. Higher number doesn’t always mean better, it’s nice to see a breakdown the way you did. Great post.
By Kory Twaites on November 10, 2006 6:49 pm
Agreed, and a lot of people still confuse hits with visitors, whether its through ignorance or for bragging rights I wouldn’t like to say ;)
But what about traffic with respect to brand? Even in the bad cases you use, wouldn’t 2M people having seen a site, or being Digged for 20k uniques in a day help build the brand?
The tricky part being how to use that increased awareness…
By Steve Williams on November 10, 2006 9:05 pm
Good article.
Nate, the time people spend on a site is one of the most inaccurate statistics in the world. The reason is that it is calculated by timing how long there is between looking a page 1 and page 2. if people then only visit a single page, the duration of their visit is calculated as 0 (since there is no end time).
Also, we all know that there is a difference between page-views and unique visitors. But there is also a difference between “unique visitors” and “absolute visitors”. Unique visitors is calculated based a specific time frame. In the old days, when statistics was measured based on server-logs this was 20 minutes.
This means if you visited a site a 9am and again at 10am – looking at 3 pages each time, you will have 6 pageviews and two unique visitors. Today this has been much improved by a great deal – but in a test I did about a year ago there was a 60% difference in unique visitors being reported over the same month (by two different statistic packages). Absolute visitors will only count you once.
Finally we got all the non-persons – like RSS readers, bots etc. These all needs to be filtered out, and the statistic packages varies greatly in how they do that.
By Thomas Baekdal on November 11, 2006 6:08 am
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By RetortaBlog » Web - Traffic is a Metric, Nothing More on November 11, 2006 7:52 am
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