Ratios and traffic volumes, is this logical?

[marcjacob]

This may be a whacky theory but its seems logical to me, so I thought Id see what people think.

Ive always thought that a little bit of luck is involved in making sales. I know everything we do can effect it, but if you get a surfer who doesnt have a credit card, or wont use it online, you wont break the sale (assuming there is no "no credit card" options. Even then, many people simply wont use those premimum rate numbers (Im one of them).

So with that in mind, if you send a relatively small amount of traffic, are you less likely to get that magic surfer who is turned on enough to buy, has a card, is willing to use it, is within there credit limit etc etc. And if so, if you send large amounts of traffic per day, would you be more likely to stumble upon those surfers.

What Im getting at is that does the volume of traffic you send per day/week ect effect your overall ratio? This could be important to me if it does work that way as spreading yourself too thinly over multiple sponsors would mean less traffic per sponsor, and therefor less sales in the long run.

This sounded better in my head LOL

[basschick]

i've never found luck plays any part in sales at all. sure, there are guys who won't buy and guys who can't buy, but out of any given pool of 1000 surfers from my regular sources, there seem to always be between 1 and 10 who will be. and in that 1000 surfers, smart marketing and marketing the right site will generally keep it at at least 3 surfers - and good filtering will usually keep it to 6 or above.

and those numbers are consistent whether i'm working with 5,000 hits per day or 100,000 hits per day. the only thing that can change it is my marketing or going to radically different sources for traffic because there ARE sites where you will find surfers who are much less likely to buy. the secret? don't use or buy traffic from those sources ;)

most of the people i know who are able to pump tons more traffic tend to have to go to new or lower end sources for their traffic. a friend of mine who buys gallery spaces on thehun and converts them from $1 to $34.95 per month at a very high rate there recently got spots on another couple HUGE tgps. one did poorly, one after several galleries, sold the $1 trials but didn't convert even 1 trial to a full membership. btw, i had similar experiences with that tgp years ago.

[gaybucks_chip]

Simon,

While the ratios should stay pretty close regardless of the volume of traffic, statistics and averages also come into play in here, so that, for example, if the join ratio for a given site is 1:100, it's less exact at lower numbers.

In other words, you might send 115 or 130 or 150 surfers (or 25 or 50) before you get the first sale, and then next one might come in after another 125 or 175 clicks. But on average, over, say, 2000 or 5000 clicks, it should average out to whatever the general click through ratio is.

One of the things they taught us in direct mail marketing is that when we're testing a given mailing, the sample size has to be large enough to determine the response rate. On average, direct mail gets anywhere from 1/2% to 2% response, but you won't get accurate numbers unless you mail at least 3,000 pieces, preferably 5,000. I don't know what the magic numbers are web traffic, but I'd suspect it's somewhere in the same range.

Now... if you're sending 5,000 surfers but spreading it around several sites, that gets into a level of probability and statistics that I don't remember from school. I *think* it should still perform the same as if you send to one sponsor, assuming the conversion rates are the same, but I can't remember the specifics. Lloyd probably knows, he was a math major :)

Hope that helps!

[RottenRay]

Ive always thought that a little bit of luck is involved in making sales.

Marc, are you talking about banner traffic from a link list, free gallery hits, or what..?

(Not being sarcastic in the least - there is a difference...)


If you're talking about freesites, about 1:500 will follow a link, and about 1:200 (average right now) will join.

If you're talking about a selection of links displayed within a paysite, the end result is somewhere between 1:30 and 1:60 - those folks WILL get off their butts and use their CCs.



...

[abostonboy]

This may be a whacky theory but its seems logical to me, so I thought Id see what people think.

Ive always thought that a little bit of luck is involved in making sales.


Dang! Chip beat me to a good reply. Luck plays a huge role in a small sample size. Actually, many variables play a role in small sample size.

Take a coin and flip it. heads or tails. Do it twice. You will be lucky as hell if it's heads once and tails once. Flip it ten times. Now 100. Now 1000. The more you flip it, the closer it will get to 50/50. It's a very simple math model.

If your target goal is 1:100 you may need 1000 clicks to see that. If it's 1:500 you may need 20,000 clicks. It all depends on the model you setup based on external data from pass events. The more external data, the more accurate you can be as to future sales based on pass events.

If you expect to convert a site at 1:100 and you sent 1,000,000 clicks and converted at 1:100 then it is not luck. If you sent 1,000 clicks and made 10 sales and converted at 1:100 then it's a tough call. Maybe you are lucky.

If you sent 100 clicks and made 1 sale you are one lucky guy. (You can play blackjack with me anytime.)

From Wiki,
'The central limit theorem is a significant result which depends on sample size. It states that as the size of a sample of independent observations approaches infinity, provided data come from a distribution with finite variance, that the sampling distribution of the sample mean approaches a normal distribution."

What that means is in your case is quite simply, "the more clicks you send, the more accurate your conversion will be as to what expect in the future based on past events." As your sample grows (clicks), the more accurate your conversion will be and less likely to be influenced by external forces (luck, free hogs, computers blowing up while surfers surf, lightning storms, etc.).

This thread just caught my eye as a math major I wrote a whole paper on "How I beat luck". The answer was quite simple, repeat over and over again. Repeat some more. Then some more.....

[abostonboy]

Ray,

What does "follow" mean? Are you saying that only 1 in 500 surfers that visit a free site will click a link? If you have a conversion of 1:200 after following a link to make a sale, then you will need 100,000 visitors to a site to make a sale! Yikes! And that is if you are lucky!

[marcjacob]

Do you know Ive never looked at surfer visits to the sites against sign ups. I guess that would tell me how good my text links are? Or do you just get surfers who will click anything?

I think I understand what your saying about sample sizes.

[basschick]

there ARE surfers who will click anything, but i find surfer visits to the site to be informative. there are definitely more effective and less effective text links.

on the other hand, if you filter your traffic well, you'll send a lot less hits but will probably see more sales. back in the say, everyone said you'd make more sales and less clicks by adding a price. on a gallery with a guy named rob sucking cock, you might say something like

"See Rob swallow every last drop of cum!
Click here to join Site Name for only $2.95"

i actually didn't have much luck with putting prices on my galleries unless the prices were $1, $1.95 or $2.95 - and honestly i did just as well without the price, but then i experimented and tweaked my text till i was confident my links were very effective.