Hits can come from anywhere

Had a discussion with someone today about how the number of hits you get may not translate into real customers. A percentage of these hits come from spammers and people who aren’t remotely interested in what you’re talking about. And even if you can factor those people out (especially when the spammers are trying to mega-comment-spam your site), you can’t always know that even the people who arrive are interested.

Take work. A simple website I built got a decent number of hits today from a large newspaper’s blog subdomain. A few more clicks with Google Analytics (which is a must have for any website no matter the size or content) revealed that this particular blog was about soccer (which is also weird because I used to write a soccer blog for a retail client at my old agency). I navigated to the blog in question and saw that the link to our site was in a list of other holiday-themed links at the end of a lengthy soccer article.

So people were reading the post and clicking on his links. How many of them are over 21? How many drink beer? These questions can’t really be answered. I do get a good idea of how many people click on this guy’s links, though.

I guess that’s the tough thing in word of mouth marketing, it’s difficult to fully quantify the people we’re actually reaching out to. But I need to keep motoring to create the best content I can.

Incidentally, I was looking (in vain) for a photo for this entry and stumbled upon Dashalytics – a dashboard widget for Google Analytics. It’s a nice and simple interface to keep track of the websites you administer. Seems easier than going into Google Analytics every day, and you can open the same widget multiple times (to have multiple sites up on the dashboard at once). I never use dashboard, so maybe this is a good way to implement it into my life.