Do Unique Hits Matter?
There is this misconception amongs traffic exchange users that high unique ratios are good. I can understand the thought, higher % sounds good right? Well today I hope to clear up the confusion.
First off, what is a unique ratio? Well its the ratio of unique hits to total hits. Unique hits are people who’ve never seen your page before. In advertising this usually is a 24 hour period.
So if you see a 100% ratio, that means every hit was a new person who hasn’t seen your site (or at least not in 24 hours). Many see this as a good thing, because you are getting new people to see your ad.
Say it ain’t so! The problem with this is that advertising, especially traffic exchanges, requires repetive views of your ad before you get a signup. It’s been proven, and I’ll prove it again:
Out of my most recent 79 signups, I tracked it took between 1 and 113 views of the ad to result in a conversion. It averaged to 14.83 pages viewed.
If you saw that your tracker got a 1% unique ratio, you’d be pretty upset right? Well in one of the cases the person saw the ad 113 times before subscribing! Now the actual reason why I couldn’t tell you, maybe some day I’ll match the tracking to the subscriber and interview them..
But the point is, if I had only been getting unique traffic, I wouldn’t have gotten that signup. And I wouldn’t have gotten the majority of my signups, as the average was close to 15 views.
Now one could argue that since the unique hits are based on 24 hour periods, I could still get those people over a 15 day period. But I disagree! Over a 15 day period my ad isn’t shown enough where it’ll get recognized. If you view 1000 unique pages a day, for 15 days, you aren’t likely to remember them as much as seeing the same page on one day 15 times.
So what’s one to do? Well you need a bit of both. Obviously, you want new people seeing your site, but you also want to repeat hits to get branding going. That’s why I only track total hits and results, because you can focus more time on uniques than results, and waste more time and energy.
My Game Plan to Double New Members This Year
Jon Olson asked what my New Year’s Resolution was for StartXchange, one of my replies was to double the number of new members joining. Currently we average 60 per day, I want it 120! This is my game plan:
- Make New Splash Pages - This is my downfall, and I’m sure many of us have the same problem. But I forget to make fresh pages and rotate the older pages. I even had Justin Ledvina design me new pages, but just haven’t used them yet. My goal is to make one new page every week, making it the primary page and rotating a couple older ones, and then phasing them out. (and re-introducing the really good performers again in the future when they are “new” again)
- Bigger Member Incentives - I’m going to increase the incentives to promote StartXchange. Many owners, myself included, will say it’s up to the owner to promote the exchange. But there are many members that are referring people as well, so if I up the reward for them they’ll be more likely to do so.
- Give Other Owners Incentives - There are many traffic exchanges online, and so I’m going to give incentives for those owners to also promote StartXchange. Some are already doing it, while others just need that extra bonus to do it.
- Promote, Promote, Promote - And last but not least, I’ll be doing lots more promoting. I’ve slacked off this past month doing more programming than marketing. I need to remember that the time spent on marketing StartXchange is worth it as well, instead of just doing the programing.
So there you have it. By the way, if you are an exchange owner please feel free to comment to this post with your StartXchange username and exchange URL entered into the proper fields and post a comment. I’m trying to get a list together but my mind is terrible for remembering usernames. LOL last I checked I had 8 usernames written down, 4 are SuperSurf so chances are I don’t have it.
Tim Linden Photography
After thinking about it for a while, I thought it would be best to have a seperate blog for my photography endeavors. It only makes sense, since it’s completely different than marketing. Some people will like both, but I’d say the majority are only going to want to hear about one or the other. So if you are interested in the photography side of things, check out Tim Linden Photography. I may still post photography related stuff here every once in a while, but primarily it’ll all be there ;-)
Branding with Banners
Many exchanges will allow you to win banner impressions while surfing, and I get complaints all the time about it. Over and over people tell me that banners are useless, or they have no banners, or they just don’t want banner views.
What they are forgetting about is branding. It’s simple really, and it’s something many try to teach with traffic exchanges. Use your photo, because you can brand yourself. And one really great way to do that is with banners.
Simply put your photo in a banner, and get as many impressions as you can out. Of course, make the banner actually advertise your business, but the key feature is your photo being shown.
Then people will recognize your photo, and take more notice when your pages come up in rotation. Countless people have seen their results go up when they started branding. It works!
If you don’t have a banner, then of course I’m going to tell you go check out Soren’s Instant Banner Creator! I made the banner below in a minute, put it into StartXchange and had a click on it within minutes. Don’t forget about banners!
Instant Banner Creator Review
This is the review you’ve all been waiting for! You were drenched with emails about it yesturday, but you all held out until you found out what Tim said, right? Oh, you got it anyways? Eh, that’s ok!
Kidding aside, Instant Banner Creator is pretty sweet. I had my chance at the banner creator gig. I’ve had one on StartXchange for quite some time, but nowhere as close as this:
Now that might not be the best graphic in the world, because your’s truley made it. But I wanted to show you a few things about it.. See how the red text overlaps the other text? Yep, I did that. I just clicked and dragged it there.
You can make Banners, Buttons, Headers, Footers, Animations, and Peel Away Ads. My creator.. Just a banner.. And it had the StartXchange logo (the really old one) as the background, and only black text. At the time it seemed great because you could stick your photo on it.
LOL thinking about it now I probably should have used a different template to show you the different ones there are, but hey I like the blue button OK! So my official review is that it’s easy to use, and it works. If you have photoshop and are great at it, chances are you won’t need this. But for the 99% of us that don’t have a clue, that’s who this is for.
So why do graphics matter? Well we are visiual people afterall. When you’ve got your splash page all made up, just a simple button as a call to action instead of a normal link could make a big difference. I challenge you to try it out and split test the results!
Click The Buttons To Go Check It Out!
Twitter Me Fun
Well I had a fun idea, and whipped this idea into an actual thing. Basically it’s like a friend builder of sorts for Twitter. You follow the people in the list, and then it adds you to the list. Eventually a bazillion people will have a bazillion people in their list. If you have any comments or tell people about it, please link them to this post as I may change the URL to the script.
