Forum Moderators: phranque
Yeaterday was my best day yet, but I expect I will beat it today.
18 Nov 2002 - visits: 407, pages: 7212, hits: 10404, transfer: 93.37 MB
Brett's article refers to getting up to 15k hits a day, is that refering to number of visitors, page views, or requests?
What are decent numbers for a small online business or a medium bricks and mortar business?
I want to start bragging to my friends at the gym, but I need to be sure it's safe first.
>>I want to start bragging to my friends at the gym,
They do fly fishing? ;)
There is no comparison possible between 2 sites on different topics. It's all about market.
Some sites I care for sell 10 deep sea oil rigs a year and some sell a million movie seats a year. Both clients are satisfied.
Some sites barely make 300 megs logfiles a year and others make 1.5 gig a month. Again, both clients are satisfied.
We use to brag on common grounds, are you making money yet?
>>page views, or requests?
Nobody counts hits, nowadays.
>typos found fixed
[edited by: Macguru at 3:08 am (utc) on Nov. 20, 2002]
The fact is that choosing to ignore any particular bit of data, is at least as foolish as giving it too much value in your planning.
How about the number of pages per visit? Do you also consider that unimportant? It seems to me that it might be a good indicator of whether or not your site is worthwhile to the surfers?
I figured out the money thing a long time ago, do it for the fun of it, and the money will come easily enough. Worry about the money any die young and unhappy.
I'm not asking for a definitive guide on the numbers for specific fields, just wondering what sort of traffic drives some small commercial websites. Not places that sell millions of dollars online a month, but places that are able to keep a few people employed.
Want to increase your hits? Add some needless graphics. A page with 30 graphic images and a css will give you 31 "hits" per unique vistor. Serious folks don't count hits. They count uniques and page views. Right up until they learn that it is conversion rates that matter.
Seriously though, 407 visits, (I'm assuming uniques) means different things to different folks. A client has a section of a website (3 pages out of 960) that average 3800 unique visitors a day. (tracked by IP and entry page) The entire site averages around 30,000 unique visitors a day. He doesn't sell anything, and he's happy with the traffic.
Another client averages around 4k uniques a month, and sells around 21k worth of product every month. He's happy too.
Apples and oranges. If both of them were bragging in the gym, which one could brag the most?
Oops! Sorry I miss read.
I am convinced a good SEO don't count hits. If they do, they dont use it as a comparison for different sites. I care for some sites that are extremely 'chatty' by their design. Some of their pages generate a lot of hits. Web designers using spacer cells or pages with tumbnail pictures are good examples. This is why 2 different sites cant be compared with hits alone.
>>How about the number of pages per visit? Do you also consider that unimportant?
On the oposite, I consider it is a very important clue on the overall 'healt' of a given site. But again, you can't use it to compare 2 different sites. Content, topic and volume of info weight in. I would be very satisfied of 6 page views per visit on 10 pages corporate site and I would be very sad of 30 page views per visit for a 1000 pages real estate site.
Lets use WebmasterWorld as an example. It is a site with tons of info. That is what visitors come in and back for. I would expect more page views per visits that a site selling a single blue fluffy widget.
The ammount of traffic a site gets heavily depends on the topic. There are some topics with more demand than others.
I use search engine positons as a meter of success. When I get some site in # 1 spot for a keyword with more than a million competitors, then I feel like bragging.
You can always cheat the count if you want, just like with fly fishing. For the record, I have 2 images total till you get down to the content pages, 1 CSS file, and return 304 if the page is not modified. I also understand that different stats programs count hits and pages different.
My goal is to increse my "traffic" not my hits. but it is useful to get honest numbers to compare with.
Now it wasn't all that hard to provide a couple of websites with a range to consider, was it? That's all I asked for.
Well, that is rather difficult to do when you are only online for 3 months. My best #1 that I have found so far is on a phrase with 28k results.
I suppose after 6 months or so, I will be able to consider my position in the SERPs, but for now I'm nowhere to be seen on million+ results. For that matter, I don't think I want to rank high on the few million+ results that are remotely related to my field. Those searches would be people looking for other things, and they would just be a waste of bandwidth. It would be the the equivalent of a golf club manufacturer ranking #1 for the word "drive".
BigDave, different web sites, about different topics simply cannot be compared.
Use your own site's growth.
Date: 18 Nov 2002
Visits: 1772
Pages: 7513
Hits: 25099
Bandwidth: 141.42 MB
(via awstats 5.1)
I don't know enough to say whether these are good or bad, but I hope it gives you some idea.
It all depends on the REASON or CASH MODEL for your site.
If you are selling widgets off a site, and that is all you are selling, then the key preformance criteria is number of widgets (and revenue) sold from the site.
If you are an affiliate site, it's affiliate revenue
If you are an info site, it could be the number of authoritative links to your site or good reviews or whatever.
MacGuru said it so well with his comparison between oil rigs and movie seats.
Our site which sells very targeted and a high priced product with 10 sales a year is arguably much better than our site which attracts 1000 times the visitors but just sells small things like books etc and makes 1,000 sales a year.
