A amplification of the points made on the front page
it obviously depends on what you are selling
Some subjects attract more viewers than others - so pornography can be more popular than butterfly collecting. Therefore look at what other sites in your category are doing http://www.hitbox.com has a list of every category of web site. This will guide you as to how many visitors you can expect
the Internet is full of hyperbole, and misrepresentation. I believe that "unique visitors" is the important measure of who is visiting your site.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. There are dozens of ways of recording "hits", but the only valid one is "unique visitors"
In other words you should exclude multiple visits from the same user, who may go back and forth from the front page a number of times. You should not report hits as the total number of files downloaded, an old trick to exaggerate hits - any one web page may have five or six separate files, as each photograph is a separate file.
Each visitor should only be recorded once, and that should be your criteria on how many "hits" you are getting. The important thing is to first get them there, then to get them to buy.
the number of unique visitors you get depends on your product and its placing with search engines
To determine how many visitors you might reasonably expect to get to your web site will obviously depend on the product. Even within a product there is the scope for enormous variations
For example a hotel in the Highlands of Scotland could expect fewer web visitors than a hotel in London. Then season and price would also effect those who might be interested
On top of other factors your ranking with all the search engines will influence greatly the number of visitors. Your choice of keywords is of vital importance. Nobody knows what words a potential visitor will type in to a search engine to find a business like yours - therefore it is a black art to find the right ones to go with. In other words you could rank well against certain keywords, but if nobody ever used those words to find sites like yours, then your placings are not relevant.
if you try http://www.hitbox.com you will find the "top 1000" sites by category. It is not a comprehensive list, and only covers those using hitbox counters, but is never the less, a good cross section of sites
This is an interesting site that contains the results from counters on hundreds of web sites. The results are broken down into category "tourism", "food", "music", etc
Each category then has a list of ranking of the top 1000 sites for that category. The ones near the top tend to be fairly wide ranging sites, the ones nearer the bottom are for sites with a more limited appeal.
A look at your category will show you how many hits you can expect for the sort of site you are.
For example if you look at "tourism" you will see that apart from a few sites offering discounted airfares, the best sites are running around 100 to 200 unique visitors per day. 100 uniques per day would put your site at about 150 on the list today.
You are never likely to get the thousands that a US based discount air fare site can attract. My Cornwall Calling site moves around the 150 to 200 mark on the list during this summer with around 100 unique visitors. But I have worked on that site for a year and it covers a fairly wide tourist area
a more realistic figure to expect would be 10 to 20 hits per day in this category which is what most sites get
My research on individual hotels shows that they get in the region of 10 to 20 hits per day, higher for London, lower for non tourist areas.
Remember that these sites with hitbox counters, are the ones that are keen on promoting their sites, and are interested enough in their web statistics to use the service. My view would be that they are the best examples of web sites, and are the ones whose statistics you should have the objective of emulating
a similar analysis in other categories gives you an idea as to what to expect for your product in those
Just find the category nearest to your particular product and see what the statistics are for that category. This will enable you to set realistic objectives for visitors to your new site
Once you get them to visit your site then its up to you to convert them to purchase
Return to New Web Site Design New Web Site Design page