Statistics and Pie Charts

When it comes to online traffic, smart people don't only work on wall street, they also configure statistics. We all want online traffic, especially the kind that makes the phones ring, but there are many ways to make clients believe they are getting a good service, while nothing is really happening. Have you ever wondered why you're getting hundreds of uniques each month from a particular web site, but not one phone call? The answer is that there is unique traffic and unique quality traffic.

When most contractors sign up with a site, they have been conditioned to ask how many clicks they can expect from any given directory, and many directories have answered that call by sending traffic from their site to that contractor, but it's dead traffic. I've seen this over and over again, each month they release the statistics, you log in, get a fancy pie chart, and you can then justify the payment; but the problem is you didn't get any phone calls.

Anyone can go out and purchase unique traffic, and it looks great on a pie chart, but it doesn't accomplish the true goal, and that is to make the phone ring. I would rather have 1 good unique visitor that is interested in my clients service, than 10,000 unique visitors just accidentally being pushed to my link, whose only value is to uphold the appearance that the system is working.

Over the years I have found that even though my rough raw numbers for Cleaning Terrazzo are lower than other directories, my clients get 2X, 3X and 4X the amount of calls. But how could this be??? I mean, obviously the other guys statistics and pie charts CLEARLY show that the client got 10, 20, 50 times more unique hits than what our directories served him, but for some strange reason, his phone rang more because of being listed within our directory.

The answer is in the quality of the traffic, and that's the bottom line. If you base your decision on who to go with by the amount of hits you're going to get, then I hope you like the pie chart each month, cause that's usually what you'll just end up with. We all know the future of advertising is with the internet, but the only sure way to know if a particular companies system is working is to contact some other people on the site and find out if they EVER got any work from their listing.

If you're a contractor looking to advertise online, here's the BIG clue for finding a good directory to be listed in, check to see where the directory lists for the keywords your prospects may be typing in. Think about it, when you yourself go online and search out a specific keyword like "Concrete Polishing", it's pretty certain that you have a solid interest in getting your concrete floors polished.

Now imagine that you are bored and searching the internet like most people do who spend a lot of time online. And you clicked on a link for something, and next thing you know you're on some page that has nothing to do with what you want, but you click a link because you're bored and want to see what it's about; well that's your unique, and there's another plop of filling to your pie chart.


It's not about statistics, or pie charts, it's about how many people actually call you and the quality of the traffic, and the only way to get past that is to check what your prospects are looking for against where the directory lands in the search engines. If you're basing your decision on unique hits, and the directory doesn't carry any weight with the search engines, then you are not getting a good deal.