Proof of Success

[margarita]

I run a real estate website in Hawaii. We are averaging between 800 and 1000 unique visits per day. I am looking for a way to provide management with some numbers that will prove to them that this is quite good for our particular island, but without having access to stats for competitor sites on our island, I am unable to provide any kind of concrete evidence.

Any of you resourceful SEO pros out there have ideas or helpful info you can share?

Thanks!

[rcjordan]

How many leads do you generate? That's all we care about.

[Affiliate Program Manager]

Contact Lin MacIntosh, chief executive officer of Hawaii Information Service, a Honolulu-based real-estate data company and tell her I sent you.

can?

Investment Associates Mainland Partner in the 90's

[margarita]

Well, you beat me to it, I already have a call in to HIS. Lin referred me to Beth.

Thank you for the reply.

[margarita]

How many leads do you generate? That's all we care about.

But that would make sense! I'd like to just say "what the heck is wrong with you, can't you see the leads are increasing despite the fluctuations in stats?" but I'll have to take a different approach with this manager. The number 1000 is stuck in her head and she is determined to make me adhere to this standard without any additional budget.

Oh well... this is really my problem... but I do thank you all for any advice given.

[Marcia]

I am looking for a way to provide management with some numbers that will prove to them that this is quite good for our particular island, but without having access to stats for competitor sites on our island, I am unable to provide any kind of concrete evidence.
To be honest, I'm not so sure it's at all possible to have access to stats for traffic of competitor sites. As the old saying goes: "Does Gimbel's tell Macy's?

I looked at that site, and to me it looks like a commercial service - they're telling where to find property stats (for a fee I assume) - but no information on stats of competitor's sites. In fact, though they provide paid hosting and MLS - if they divulged traffic stats of their clients, wouldn't that violate confidentiality as a web host?

I'm not familiar, which is why I'm asking. Is it normal or even ethical procedure to give or sell stats information to competitors? I didn't see that mentioned among their offerings, but I assume that's what's being asked for. It sure would be handy to have, especially if their logs for search terms were included.

[dannysullivan]

First, I wouldn't look to justify the site by comparing yourself to competitors, even if you could do this easily. After all, you have no idea if their sites are successful.

To measure your success, you have to know what your goal for the site is. Are you supposed to be generating leads online? More leads for follow-up phone calls? Sales online? As rcjordan said, in his case, it's leads that count.

I don't know the exact answer for you -- but your management needs to know what they want the site to be doing. Once you have that goal, now you can determine if you are hitting it.

Unique visits, I suspect, will mean little. So you get 1,000 visits? But did any of them turn into sales calls? Instead, you might have a form on the site where people can request info. Now you have something actionable/real to measure. Maybe you're getting 5 requests per week -- and tracking further, 1 of those per month turns into a sale.

Now management can look at the expense involved in maintaining the site and measure it against sales to decide if you are doing well, or not.

If you must have some hit figures because the management is pig-headed, http://www.alexa.com will let you find some very rough figures for your site and a competitor's site. I don't trust the figures much, but it's free and if it's in your favor, that make your life easier. If not, well, don't tell the manager :)

http://www.hitwise.com has a service that will give what I feel are much better stats on any site you are interested in -- traffic from particular search engines to that site, keywords used to reach it, referral links and so on. But it's pricey, starts at $50,000, I believe.

[seobook]

If you must have some hit figures because the management is pig-headed, http://www.alexa.com will let you find some very rough figures for your site and a competitor's site. I don't trust the figures much, but it's free and if it's in your favor, that make your life easier. If not, well, don't tell the manager :)
the figures can vary widely, so make sure you don't make it sound too important even if the #s are in your favor...else you may need to start spamming alexa to keep showing your are better. (spamming alexa is probably not all that hard though)

[margarita]

To measure your success, you have to know what your goal for the site is. Are you supposed to be generating leads online? More leads for follow-up phone calls? Sales online? As rcjordan said, in his case, it's leads that count.

Unique visits, I suspect, will mean little. So you get 1,000 visits? But did any of them turn into sales calls? Instead, you might have a form on the site where people can request info. Now you have something actionable/real to measure. Maybe you're getting 5 requests per week -- and tracking further, 1 of those per month turns into a sale.

Now management can look at the expense involved in maintaining the site and measure it against sales to decide if you are doing well, or not.

I agree with you 100%. Leads are what counts! We're still trying to determine what our goal is, exactly in terms of ROI. We've just established a Leads Coordinator position and that individual is taking care for farming out web referrals to the various agents in the company that are interested in taking web leads, as well as following up on them.

We've also set up a form for those site visitors interested in being contacted about purchasing property here, and we are getting several requests per day, some for people that are moving here in as soon as 6 months. So far, only a few of the leads we have tracked all the way through have resulted in sales, and since the site has been in existence this has not been tracked up until July 2004.

HitWise is definitely out of my reach budget-wise, but I've gone to Alexa and requested some of the free reports. One of them is generated in XML and I'll still have to figure out how exactly that should be interpreted.

Yes, my manager is definitely hung up on that number - 1000 - and it doesn't matter to her that the leads are coming in, and that the site is paying for itself. It's a long shot, but I'm beginning to think it might even be some kind of status issue for her? I find that odd... but it's got to be part of the old hit counter mentality that she's stuck in.

Another concern she has voiced is that when the locally generated leads through print, TV and radio ads start to dry up, she expects that the website will compensate for this downturn by reaching a larger audience. I agree somewhat but overall economic indicators are what we should be looking at.

It very well could be that job stability is a bit of an issue where I'm concerned, when it comes to that downturn... Yikes.

[rcjordan]

OK, tell her the 1000 goal is easy ...you're going to do a "Nude Realtor(tm) of The Month" section and she's the first covergirl.


>locally generated leads through print, TV and radio ads start to dry up, she expects that the website will compensate for this downturn by reaching a larger audience. I agree somewhat but overall economic indicators are what we should be looking at.

You can't alter the seasons w/ a website. But, OTOH, something like 70% of property searches now begin online (according to NAR) so one could argue that her expectations are somewhat in sync with where the traffic is really coming from. I'll add that it's likely that a good number of your leads are coming from the web but your office will not know it. Staff will have to actively and aggressively survey the incoming calls and contacts before they'll mention that "yes, my husband was looking on the web and gave me the 800# to call."

[creativecraig]

A good question to ask the lady would be: "what if the traffic dropped by 200 uniques a month but the sales doubled and it was all tracked directly from the web site?"

Very unlikely I know (well you never know). I used that on a client once to try and get them in the thinking that £'s and $'s are more important than how many visitor the site gets... it worked as well! Its all about ROI.

[Lance Housley]

Its all about ROI.

I don't know about ROI, but as someone who searches for information for my living, I do know about those highly annoying sites that crop up in the search results when they're not really central to you query - I hate them, because they get in the way of finding what you really want.

So I applaud the notion that SEO should primarily be about getting noticed by the people who really want what you offer, and not about raising your visibility among those who happen want something quite different. So bravo, Creative, for you comments.

Up till now, advertising has been about raising brand or product awareness among a target audience, so that the audience would remember you when they eventually decide they do need to purchase. A lot of work and money went into targetting as best one could the potential customer base. But when you can only advertise on TV or in magazines, targetting your potential customers meant inevitably that you would also hit people who would never be customers. You could think of it as a kind of "collateral damage" of advertising.

One way of reducing this "collateral damage" was to design your advert in such a way that it really only caught the eye of people who were interested in your pitch. You might include a pretty girl, a hunk, a wild landscape, a cute pet, or just a swirl of purple silk. Whatever your hook, it was aimed at that subset of readers / listeners / viewers who might be or become customers. It allowed others to skip over your ad without bothering about it. But that kind of approach is not open to websites that need to be found through SERPS. Consequently if you're in the SERPS but not relevant to the searcher, you're actually an obstruction.

It is becoming possible (I'm not saying we're there yet) to target your web-based advertising and your website more precisely, giving you a much better hope of reaching all those people and only those people who want what you have. So it strikes me as very strange that businesses should want to adopt a wider approach to hit people who have no interest in them, their service, their product or their website. It's directly equivalent to sending out spam email, and we know that's not popular.

I'm not saying that it would be spamming search engines. No, it's worse - it's spamming the searcher. As a searcher I don't want to be spammed, and I'm likely to be less than well disposed towards the spammer.

If you try to make me "collateral damage", expect me to be very, very angry. :eek:

[seobook]

It's directly equivalent to sending out spam email, and we know that's not popular.

I'm not saying that it would be spamming search engines. No, it's worse - it's spamming the searcher. As a searcher I don't want to be spammed, and I'm likely to be less than well disposed towards the spammer.

If you try to make me "collateral damage", expect me to be very, very angry. :eek:

its not our fault search algorithms are a bit "stupid." I sometimes rank rather well for "book search engine," though obviously I have not really tried to rank my search engine blog for that phrase.

perhaps if search engines shared a portion of their profits back with the general webmaster community as a whole then the webmasters would be a bit more considerate and could take the burdon for the search engines shortcomings?

[Lance Housley]

Hiya, book!

Sure, search engines are dumb. Computers generally are. I've no doubt at all that sites will always figure in search results where they are not totally relevant to the searcher's need - partly because search engines algos are not 100% efficient, and partly because most (all?) searchers are less than brilliant at knowing what to type into that search box. Fair enough. Searchers can be dumb too. I teach searching, but I can still do dumb searches!

What's really dumb, though, is spending loads of money trying to attract the attention of people who are struggling to find something totally different.

So, my argument is with anyone who claims that the purpose of SEO is to get high in the SERPS for searches which are obviously looking for something else. And that's why I applaud Creativecraig for wanting to focus on ROI rather than hits.

[AussieWebmaster]

I think you will find that most real se marketers will agree that ROI is the defining method of success.... to say otherwise is to support optimization without consideration of the need to incorporate conversion... beware the people who do not want to factor conversion... margarita if the boss wants the 1k visitors you can augment it from any small se that has 1 cent ppc... buy it... and forget the conversion.... do it for a couple of months and whenshe respects your skills tell her you need to lower traffic to improve conversion... not the best way to go... but it seems she is forcing your hand... use the breathing room to see what will work best for lead acquisition

[margarita]

if the boss wants the 1k visitors you can augment it from any small se that has 1 cent ppc... buy it... and forget the conversion.... do it for a couple of months and whenshe respects your skills tell her you need to lower traffic to improve conversion

Sounds cool but I'm not putting my own $ into this, as much as I might want to ease her mind about it. I've given her a lot of the information shared in this thread, installed a second stats program (one that gives more realistic visitor counts), and I'm working with the Leads Coordinator to find some historical data we can use to extrapolate and produce more ROI info.

I'm not going to back down from supporting the ROI as the best measure of success versus shakey stats data. After installing the additional stats program, I found that we never really reached 1000 anyway!

There isn't much doubt in my mind that we are getting an appropriate amount of unique visits to the site each day, I don't think that an average of 21,000 visits per month is a bad number for a real estate company our size. All together, we have 160 people at this company including administrative employees, but mostly agents.