blogNot long ago I spoke with a CEO about his goal of offering a software service through an ecommerce channel. Our conversation focused mainly on the specific market this would serve and the company website. At one point he beamed about regularly checking Alexa, and seeing the site ranking steadily climbing.
In that instant the little yellow canary inside my head dropped dead. The fumes of misinformation and general cluelessness KO’d the poor bird.
First, Alexa is flawed. So please stop quoting it. More importantly, stop focusing on website traffic. It’s not a useful metric, unless you’re earning money from ads in which case impressions do matter. No sane owner smiles at the amount of foot traffic their retail store had that day, they’re happy with the cash in the register. Diddo for your website.
What should you measure? Nielsen said it best, the formula for website success is:
B = V × C × L
Where
- B = amount of business done by the site
- V = unique visitors coming to the site
- C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers); note that the concept of conversion applies not only to ecommerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do. For me it’s people subscribing to my feeds and downloading my PDF resume and visiting my LinkedIn Profile. You can apply a dollar value to these actions.
- L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business)
Everyone is trying to increase traffic, this is evident in the number of articles showing you how to get your writing on the front page of Digg. So, if everyone is gunning for volume you can win by better persuading your visitors to take action and providing a reason for them to return over and over.
Focus on conversion and increasing loyalty. Please stop glorifying traffic. If not for yourself, for gods sake, do it for the canaries.
