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March 2, 2003
Forget the traffic
By QBlog in
Stats. Stats. Stats.
I recently read a blog comment questioning the validity of Quixtar's apprarent boasts of extremely high site traffic. Well, this is something that I know a little bit about and now seems like a good time to share what interests me about Quixtar's site traffic.
Newspapers and magazines track readership and circulation to set advertising rates. Excluding demographics, the higher the number of readers the better rate the publication can charge advertisers. This is true of television too. And radio. And Web sites. Actually, it's only true of SOME Web sites.
See, not every Web site sells ads. A site that does sell ads is extremely interested in traffic but a site that depends upon product sales or services (such as Amazon.com or PressPlay) is not as interested in those numbers. Yes, they are interested but for different reasons and the traffic numbers are less important than the product sales or subscription numbers.
And this is what has always perplexed me about Quixtar. When we first got in I heard almost daily about the HUGE number of visitors that Quixtar got and how it was such and such rated site on the Net. Since I'm in the industry these numbers never impressed me. I didn't doubt whether they were real or not but they never impressed me because I knew (as does anyone who has ever taken a stats course) that using numbers is the BEST way to "distort" the truth without actually lying.
The Point: I have no way of knowing exactly what Quixtar's site stats are so let's assume that every number they quote is real. My question is this: So what? Who cares if 50 billion people visit your site every day, if they don't buy anything that traffic is meaningless. And, if they DO buy something, that's what you want to talk about...not the traffic they generated before the purchase.
However, that's not the only thing that perplexes me about the Quixtar traffic. Quixtar.com, as you know, greets all visitors with a log-in page. What this means, practically speaking, is that every visitor to the site is a member or IBO. This also means that as a business there are virtually no casual browsers poking around the site. Where Amazon.com might get many people casually browsing the items, Quixtar.com, by its very design, discourages this practice.
Argument: But the stats MUST prove something you say. Well, no they don't. Example - The U. S. Government has an intranet page that is the required default home page of every government employee. Each time any government worker, from the President to the postman, logs onto a computer at work this government Web site is displayed. The stats for this site are HUGE. Traffic is outrageous. Records are broken. But does it mean anything? No. It means nothing. And Quiixtar is essentially the default home page (figuratively speaking) for every IBO and loyal customer.
Thanks for reading this. Yawn.
That was the most pointless blog ive ever read.
Posted by: Jeremy | April 7, 2006 4:28 AM