You could say it was a good thing that we reached the goals set in last January’s post about unique visitors. But in truth, it was merely an illusion. We shouldn’t have rested on our laurels and expected that things would work automatically through the nature of the internet.
As you can see in the graph below, we not only reached our modest goal of 50,000 Unique Visitors, but surpassed it by 7.5K. Hooray! Okay, that’s about where the celebrating ends.
You see, we figured that if the traffic came, then so would the sales… that it was just the natural law of statistics. That even if we got 1% of those visitors to make a purchase, we’d be fine. *Insert the Family Feud Big Red X here*
Obviously, that did not happen as sales were down in 2006 despite the higher unique visitors. Luckily, since we are still a completely independent and self-sustained website, no shareholders will bail on us, no employees will quit in January after they get their Xmas Bonus, and no limits are in place that can stop us from rewriting our Constitution.
Indeed, change for 2007 is already in the works and we are optimistic that this will help us turn the “tiny site” corner. So let’s keep raising our goals and say 100K for 2007, which we already know will be tough based on the consistency we experienced through 2006. But hey, why play the game unless you are trying to win, right? Even minor victories are still victories. And so it is said.
More on the site changes to come very soon. Cheers.
DJRadiohead Says:
January 19th, 2007 at 5:43 pmVisit DJRadiohead
Which traffic monitor do you use? I’m just curious. I have one set up for TheMondoProject and DJRadiohead. DJRadiohead is more than a year old, but I never bothered monitoring traffic until 2006. TMP began in 2006, but I didn’t start monitoring traffic right away.
My plan for TMP goals will be to get a full 12 months of numbers and then develop more specific goals. I think, at present, Magic Junk is kicking our traffic ass.
Mark Sahm Says:
January 19th, 2007 at 10:33 pmVisit Mark Sahm
We monitor our traffic stats through our hosting plan with Netfirms. If you’re looking for a new host, they’re pretty good. I’ve used them since 2000 when I originally bought MagicJunk.com, so it has had time to saturate with search engines and so on.
However, ask yourself: what is the point of a traffic goal? Unless you are offering a service or selling a product, it doesn’t make sense to invest much money in monitoring. But If it is purely a pride thing to see your site grow, then by all means go wild.