Hits don’t mean a thing

It never ceases to amaze me when I read in a magazine or newspaper about a company boasting of how many hits its Web site has had. Do they not know how inaccurate it is to measure traffic that way? It’s time to set the record straight.

If you have a Web site through a major provider such as Channel Blade or Marine Web Services, or even thru an independent provider, you should have access to traffic reports. Some companies charge extra for them, but they’re critical for evaluating your online success.

Of course, once you have access to this information, you must also understand what it means and how it can help you. Some of the things you can learn from your traffic reports include: How many visitors have been to your site, what they looked at, how long they were there, how they got to your site and where they are from.
Let’s look at some of the different tracking categories and examine what, exactly, they do:

Hits: The total files viewed on a Web site for a set amount of time. Your hits for the last month may be 1 million, but that number is useless as far as a tracking measurement. Here’s why: For each Web page you have, there are multiple files per page. Let’s say you have 10 files on your homepage. Every time someone goes to that page it counts as eleven “hits,” 10 for the files and one for the page itself. Keeping with that 10-files-per-page example (with all your pages counting as eleven hits) if a visitor looked at 10 pages that would be 110 hits. If your Web site averaged 400 visitors a day, it would count as 44,000 hits a day, or 1.3 million a month.

Visitors: The number of people who have looked at your Web site during a set time frame. The issue with using visitors as a tracking metric is that each visit counts as one visitor. If the same person goes to your site three times in one day, it would count as three visitors.

Unique visitors: This is how many individual times your Web site was visited. If you were on the same computer the three times you visited the site, that only counts as one unique visitor. If, however, you went to another computer and visited, it would count as two unique visitors.

Bookmarked: This is how many people have saved your homepage as a favorite. It is important because the potential buyer probably has looked at multiple business sites and, for some reason, yours is important to them. As a boat dealer in a sometimes seasonal market, you want to pay attention to this number. Shoppers start looking in the off-season for the upcoming season.

Total page views: This is how many pages were looked at on your site and is relevant because the more pages visitors have looked at, the more interest they have in your company.

Average visitor time: This is how long visitors spend on your site. If people aren’t looking around on your site, there maybe a functionality/layout issue. Once someone lands on your homepage, you only have three to four seconds to keep his or her interest.
So what are the most important categories for you to track? I would suggest total visitors, unique visitors, total page views, bookmarked and average visitor time.

This can be done monthly in an Excel spreadsheet and the reports given to people throughout the company.

To paraphrase a scientific term known as the Hawthorne Effect: When something is measured, it improves, and when something is measured and reported, it improves exponentially.

I’ll leave you with another helpful hint from someone who was part of an Internet department that did just under $11 million in Internet sales. If you want to see your numbers really increase, along with your leads, put all your inventory on your Web site.

I have looked at hundreds of boat dealers’ Web sites, and they are missing out on leads by not doing this. Internet customers know that if you carry new boat lines, they can get one specific model ordered. Potential buyers will continue to search multiple dealer sites until they find a dealer that has what they want on their lot.
Many dealers just list all the models of a specific brand with stock photos. This is a huge mistake. Get photos of every boat you have in stock and put them online. You know the next thing the customer is going to request, and that is photos of the unit.

Speaking from experience as someone who has had to take and post photos of more than 200 units in stock, it is a time-consuming process if done right. However, effective photos and a thorough description will help you make the sale more quickly.