We manage 100’s of web sites these days. Our team has the unique privilege to study web stats from many different industries over long periods of time and note trends. Here are a few of my observations from 2008:
- A majority of our clients web traffic comes from search activity. Google is by far the biggest. For ecommerce sites, Google brings the sales. Focus your time getting listed on Google.
- Sites that have good rankings (organic or not) on the first page and in listed in positions 1-5 get much more traffic and sales then others. If you have to, buy the top spot in Google Adwords for the short term!
- Offline marketing is next-to-dead! Slim down your budgets in 2009. Converting visitors from a print ad to a web site is next to impossible unless it is very targeted publication. We see newspaper and radio guys selling ads all the time. They instruct their clients to add their web address to the ad for the highest exposure. A good sales idea….. but in reality very little people read a newspaper ad and walk over to their keyboard. Online advertising = Web Traffic. Consider your own habits…. are you reading ads and typing URL’s into your browser these days?
The overall concept to take away from this is that you need to get into online advertising if you want to change your website from an expense to a profit center. Traffic equals opportunity.
Ian Hartten
