Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Measuring Traffic against Activity

Your Web site traffic data shows you a lot of information. To give these numbers some perspective so that you can make higher-level decisions, you have to match the traffic with other indicators of activity on your Web site:

• Number of orders
• Average order size
• Number of registered customers (if you offer registration)
• Total sales volume
• Average number of products per order
• Most common search terms (if you have your own site search engine)

The reason to compare these numbers is to give you an idea of how much your traffic is influencing your sales. Suppose that your Web site gets 1,000 unique visitors one month and you see that you're getting 250 orders from 200 unique customers that month. Theoretically, if you can double the number of visitors you receive in a month, you should see a similar increase in your orders and unique customers. Perhaps it doesn't double, but if you can estimate the benefit of bringing in more people, you can estimate the amount of money you can spend to increase traffic.

Putting together all this information gives you a complete picture of how your business is operating. Knowing these factors helps you make dozens of decisions that affect your entire business.