Total unique visitors: Who cares?

Been having some interesting discussions with web managers for b2b companies.  All of them start talking about their web traffic and SEO results.  I always step into the discussion with a series of questions that ends up stumping all of them.


"So.  Who are all of those people visiting your site?"


They stare at me blankly for a few seconds and then respond, "Why they're our customers, of course."


"Like who?"


"Well, we don't know who they are specifically..."


"Then how do you know they are your customers?  Maybe they're your competitors."


"They might be..."


Then the stumper:  "So if you really don't know who it is visiting your site, why does it matter how many there are?"


It is possible to determine if the right people are visiting your site, but the problem is that most marketing managers never ask that question and so most web site managers never take the time to dig deeper into the numbers.  They just say how many unique visitors and how many referrals the site got and everyone is happey... except when they look at the sales numbers.


This is not to say that unique visitors and referrals aren't important numbers... if you are an online media company.  After all, a media company is in the business of getting as many eyeballs as possible on the site to make sure they can justify their advertising rates.  But if you are a b2b company the volume on those numbers is meaningless unless you are driving current and potential customers to engage with you.  That's why it is more important to know that the one customer you really want visits your site than the hundreds of thousands of people that found your site through a search.

Comments

  1. Bill BarronSeptember 23, 2011 at 1:58 AM

    Lou,
    An interesting side issue is the fact that many marcom managers today really don't care about the audience publishers serve as much as you might think. I have had several conversations recently where marcom managers openly admit to me they don't care who clicks on their ads and don't even look at the reports just so long as it's a high CTR rate to show management in order to get more budget.
    The fact is improvements in reporting is great but if folks lose sight of the fact it is about selling something at the end of the day we are all in trouble in the long term.

    ReplyDelete
  2. loucoveySeptember 23, 2011 at 7:23 AM

    That's an excellent point, Bill, and one of my concerns about the social media industry, as well. Everything becomes a number, but we are talking about relationships not clickthroughs. I had a colleague tell me about meeting with a VP of marketing who was beating him up over lead generation. The guy reached into his desk and pulled out a fistful of leads from his last trade show and said that was what he was looking for. My friend asked, "Why are those still in your desk? The show was over 6 months ago."
    He said he was only tasked with gathering leads, but the sales team didn't want them because their feeling was there were only two kinds of leads: "those they already know and useless ones." He explained all he needed to keep his job was show all the leads he garnered, not whether they turned unto sales.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Diamond Core DrillNovember 14, 2011 at 6:11 PM

    Hi..I think most of the marcom managers do not even care about their ads..And in that case you are too prompt..I have to appreciate for that..

    ReplyDelete

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