Traffic Planning

Growth of an ecom site

[David]

If you have a new site that starts off with all its traffic coming from the search engines. Lets say service and product are good. What kind of repeat traffic (bookmarks) should one plan for ?
I can take a new Brick and Morter business and nail it pretty darn close. How much different is the web?
Any feed back and or a place to research website growth would be appreciated.
David

[Mike_Mackin]

You read in many places that 80+% of traffic will arrive via SEs & DIRs. This may be a little out of date but can be used as a guide. Therefore 15% to 20% may visit as a repeat, referral or from off line sources, etc.

ihmo

[Mike_Mackin]

Now on the other hand I just read this:

Dec 22 2000: According to the latest figures from StatMarket, search engines account for less than 7 percent of global referrals. ...........

[nua.ie...]

That can't be right except MAYBE if they are counting page visits as opposed to site visits.

[David]

Thats kind of what I am tring to figure out. If the traffic generated by the search engines and directories remains static, lets say we get 1000 visitors a month and sell 100 of them. If 20% of them return at the end of a year we would have 1200 new customers and 240 repeats. After 5 years sales and total traffic would double while not increasing the monthly new traffic.
At some point in time you would not be dependant on the search engines but with all the people on the web it would take along time to get search engine traffic down to 7%(unless you spend huge add dollars).
At the same time a static 20% repeat doesn't work if your repeats repeat(and they should).
Well I have confused myself, I am just tring to set goals and benchmarks to be able to grade sites by.
David