RE: Hit Counting and what it will never tell you ...

From: ideas(at)creativegenius.ca
> With all of the recent posts being made concerning hit counting and
visitor
> tracking techniques I thought I would jump in and indicate that no amount
> of hit counting, visitor tracking, server log analysis will ever give you
> the only two stats you as web site owners should be tracking.

More or less the case, but somewhat of an oversimplification.  How about
cost per lead and cost per sale?  What if you have to pay for advertising on
Yahoo to get decent sales to hit rates.  Given the CPM costs, is it worth it
to buy advertising there?  It depends on volume and price of the product you
sell, and will be quite different depending on if you sell PC software or
cars.

I've done work on web statistics with a large manufacturing compaany, and
they were interested in a number of things about site traffic and how it fit
with their overall brand identity efforts, and didn't (couldn't) track lead
to hit information.

Being my size, I tend to be wary of one size fits all solutions...

Consider:

How about repeat business by marketing channel?  Certainly, business is
business, but if you see which channels yield the most qualified prospects,
you can see where to focus your effort.

What about brand identity as an aid in other sales?  I'd gladly pay for a
simple hosted site that could result in one sale being made by other means.
Given our project sizes and costs, I'd pay a year of hosting for one sale.

Don't get me wrong.  Considering leads per hit is a good first step, but you
need to be able to do a more full analysis of the cost of getting leads and
the profit model of your business to understand where your time and effort
investment in the web is a useful thing.  And you need to understand your
marketing and branding efforts to see how the web fits into that picture
overall.

> Simon Rolfe, Senior Partner

--
Chris Bickford - cbickford(at)sitebuilder.org - Director, Technical Services
http://www.sitebuilder.org/ - The sitebuilder.org Company
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