Sounds reasonable, right? not always. He, like so many others get blinded by those numbers right below the video. You know… the views. Open up YouTube or one of the other video hosting sites and on the first page you get a list of current videos, many of which have been viewed millions of times. Those ridiculously high numbers seem to blind people to the point of losing all sense of marketing THEIR products.

After spending the day looking through all the videos with viewership in the millions, he decides that the kind of videos he needs to create make use of crazy and outrageous stunts. He states those are the types of videos making the YouTube bigtime and hires a cameraman to shoot the videos. I sat there and watched the conversation about every crazy scenario that either one of them could think of and the following day the cameraman was out and about trying to catch one of these crazy scenarios happening. Hopefully, you can already spot the problems in this marketing campaign, there are many.

After a week of running around the city and not even catching a small fender bender, they decide that the video will need to be staged. At this point, I joined them for a meeting and went over the problems.

For one, with millions of videos out there, getting your first video to the million view mark is akin to winning the lottery. Actually, you may have a better chance with the lottery. But, even if that video did get popular, exactly how will it sell the product? The product in question is not cheap nor is it something that applies to everyone such as food or clothes. The product is related to a certain industry and is a service for a specific occupation. It is not something that most people would ever need. The only thing the video can be used for is branding since the video itself has no relation to the service and even branding is an issue since this is an internet service and not a physical product.

There are some great videos on Youtube for the purposes of branding, the Pepto Audition videos come to mind. There are briliant product demos as well. There is a series of videos called “Will it Blend” or something like that, demonstrating a blender in a series of odd experiments that include blending things like Ipods and cellphones. I somehow doubt that even those very successfull campaigns translated into millions of extra visitors to the companies websites and shopping carts.

You can expect that even on very successful videos only a tiny percent of people would ever take the time to leave Youtube and type in the URL. The millions of Viral video views you worked so hard for may only equate to a handful of extra site traffic. For large companies like Pepto, Youtube may be a great vehicle for advertising and branding but for small business owners and internet marketers that care little about branding and only want a good ROI, Youtube may be a far stretch.

There really is no way to even track how many people came over to the site as a result of the video and you cannot forget the Youtube demographics, a very young audience. My 10 year old and all his classmates live on Youtube, they replay the same videos all day long.

Youtube is great at making regular people into Internet stars and pretty good for marketing other video, social and content sites but for selling specific internet services, you may get more bang for your buck if you took the money you put into videos and put it towards PPC campaigns. Many people see Youtube as free traffic, but its far from free if you take into account the costs involved in video production such as cameramen, equipment, editing, etc.

I have had some success with Youtube videos for content sites where surfers can see more of the same type of video and the Youtube video serves the purpose of letting them know where to go to get more, but as for internet marketing of services and products, I really can’t say I have had much success. Most product demos just aren’t entertaining enough to hit the Youtube jackpot and go “Viral” and like I told my friend, by the time you do get something creative enough to catch, it’s unlikely the cost of production will even be covered by actual Internet sales.

The best course of action if you want video is to create the video to market and demonstrate your product in the most creative way possible and not focus on what crazy stunt is hot at the moment. Focus on what applies to your company and what your customers may want to see. Make videos that you can use on your own site and in your product promos and upload them to Youtube as well. O.K., they most likely will not be in the top 10 list but at least the people who are interested will be able to find them easily and a few new customers sold on your service because you made a great demo is far better than a million views to something meaningless to your business.

My friend listened to what I had to say, but in the end just could not get  the 7 figure “free” traffic numbers out of his head and decided to keep trying.

I have seen too many people place a lot of decision weight into a sites Alexa rank, sometimes being very disappointed, other times pleasantly surprised. I wanted to see how good the Alexa guesstimate really was.

Some people see it as the prime tool for site valuation while others dismiss it as fluff. I had to know for myself. Through my own sites and those of my clients I have a good deal of data for many different sites and I decided to track 4 sites and see how the Alexa data compared to the real metrics.

From what I know, Alexa uses ISP data as well as some user data to rate a sites traffic. I would imagine the data they collect serves as a sample group. The problem with sample groups is that unless the group is a true sample of the worlds internet user base, the results could be heavily skewed.

Now I am not sure if they base stats on samples, but, It would be kinda difficult to get data from every single user, so I assume its based on some type of sampling.

Alexa does state they use ISP data, I do not know which ISP’s, but there can be many issues with using an ISP as a sample of any population of internet users. For example, if the ISP data used is from a dial-up provider, you can expect that media based sites would suffer and your sample group would be occasional internet surfers, as opposed to daily die hards. If it was a dedicated line provider, it would be heavily business oriented. Sounds logical… right? anyway, I had to see how the 4 sites I picked did.

I used 2 sites that were well established, and 2 fairly new. The reason I chose these was because 1 new one and 1 old made a pair that received close to the same amount of real traffic (site 1 & 3, 2 & 4) and I wanted to see how accurate the rankings were.

The first established site had a traffic base between 1k and 2k daily, all visitors going to the homepage with 50% of the traffic coming from PPC.

The other well established site was an old single word domain that goes back to 1998, most traffic is organic SE and it consistently receives 800 to 1.3k daily.

The third site, was a newer blog that would receive 1k to 3k visitors to many different pages of which 1/3 to 1/2 would be the home page.

The last site was an informational site that was at about 600 daily with a growth that would put it in the 1k to 2k range within a few months.

At the beginning of the test period I logged the Alexa rank of all 4 sites.

I tracked this over 3 months because Alexa uses a 3 month average and I used these sites because they had close to the same page views and traffic

Here is how it looked when I started and I am rounding off the numbers

Site 1 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 725k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1k daily / alexa 800k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 700 daily / alexa 2M+ / page views 2

1 month later

Site 1 traffic 1.4k daily / alexa 660k / page views 2

Site 2 traffic 800 daily / alexa 165k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 2k daily / alexa 620k  / page views 1

Site 3 traffic 900 daily / alexa 1.5M+ / page views 2

2 months later

Site 1 traffic 1.3k daily / alexa 585k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 3k daily / alexa 260k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 670k / page views 2

Well, you can look at those numbers and make your own judgments on accuracy. The first thing that really amazed me is that site 1 and 2 are both established sites with single word domain names in the same type of traffic field (the same surfers would most likely visit both) Site 2 has always received less traffic than site 1 but 1/2 of site 1 traffic is ppc and site 2 Alexa score is incredibly better than site 1 when both sites are in the same niche and both are over 5 years old.

At this point I have 2 sites with little growth and that have not shown growth in years, also 2 sites that are growing. I did a few things to the first 2 sites to see how it tracked also site 3 had a roller coaster of a 3rd month.

Since its a bit long, I will save it for another post in a few days.

Understanding the meaning of your website metrics is not always easy. I am a marketing and site traffic consultant. Last week, a very excited client asked my opinion of a website he was buying purely for its traffic. O.K., I kinda cringed when he told me and crossed my fingers hoping the numbers were as good as he believed them to be. Unfortunately, buying sites as a traffic source for another site does not always give the buyers their expected end results (tons of free, non ppc, traffic that they can convert as well as the ppc traffic they now receive).

So he goes on to tell me about the site. He loves the design, and has surfed the site himself for fun on several occasions. The content and subject is somewhat related to his field of business but the sites business model is based on advertising revenue and not product sales. He was not looking to change the business model even though the owner told him it was not doing well. He was looking to add that sites traffic to his current ppc traffic to boost his primary site sales. The seller showed him the logs and the site was getting 5k+ visits daily, thats 5 times what he gets from his ppc campaigns.

On his product site he averaged about 1k visits daily from ppc that convert at a fair rate of 11%. He was very excited at the opportunity of adding a good amount of that sites traffic to his own to grow his site and become less dependent on ppc.

He figured if he could get just a few % of those 5k to convert everything would be very rosey. In the excitement over free traffic, he missed some key issues.

Getting them to the “product” site from the “traffic” site in order to even try to convert them and the fact that the owner already told him the ad revenue was minimal (meaning those surfers aren’t to quick to check out the sites ads). Personally, I don’t think those issues even crossed his mind, he was just seeing this purely as traffic that he could somehow direct over to the shop.

OK, lets examine this

5k visitors? lets check em out. I pull up his logs and I run through it with him

The majority of those site visitors 67% are google referrals, most people would think thats great, but its not always as good as it sounds. Looking further into the google referrals I see that 2/3 are actually google image. So now, the REAL referrals are 1/3 of 67% of 5k

Or, 3350 are google image and 1105 are keyword search. The site is not completely related to his product, but it does fall into the same general arena. To put this in perspective, he is selling oranges, the site is about funny looking lemons. So they are both sites about citrus fruit, though different and his is a store while the site for sale is entertainment.

I explain the difference between google image search and google search, I was surprised he really never looked into it. Basically, he was only looking at the keyword counts without looking to see what kind of a search it was. Google image only loads the image into a remote frame, the visitors never really see your site unless they click on the url to see it while google search links to your page directly.

OK, he isn’t as happy now, he just lost 3k daily from his figures. But my news for him just gets worse here. Looking at the organic search words I see that none even come close to being related to buying or shopping for “fruit”, they just wanted to be entertained by cool images or stories of “fruit”. These people were obviously fans of “fruit” but how would that convert into selling them?

So now, knowing what the numbers mean a bit better, he says, ” It’s still 1k free customers and if 1% convert that would be OK”.

Not really, the site in question is a blog, not a store, so 1% conversion may be unlikely. Think about it…

You use ppc ads to get traffic, the ads say “buy fruit”, shop for fruit”, “even “cheap fruit”. When a customer clicks the link they are in fact, shopping and looking to buy. So every person coming to the site is looking to buy something. Out of every 100 people you sell 11 of them.

The site in question has a traffic stream of people who ARE NOT looking to buy anything and they are on a site not selling anything. He has to get them to his product site first with links, ads and reviews. The site visitors need to do more than the visitors he is used to on his site, they need to first click the ad, then go to his site and get sold. That means he needs another % in there for ad click trough.

So we get 1% (if lucky) will click his ads, then go to his site, since these people were not originally looking to buy, the conversion on them would be much lower, lets say 4%. So how many people are we talking about now? Well, less than 1 per day!

My advice to him was, add an extra few bucks to your ppc account and not have to worry about running another site!

After that rundown, I started telling him what the costs involved in updating and maintaining a blog were… he walked away in mid sentence.