I’ve been thinking lately that I should stop using the word “traffic”. It’s too impersonal. After all these are people coming to our site. These are fans. These are CUSTOMERS looking for an experience. Calling them traffic is only slightly better than calling them “eyeballs”. To me it implies we’re taking them for granted. So I’m going to TRY to use more sensitive terminology from now on. Words like “visitors” and “fans”.
More than a war of words
This is more than a battle of symantics. Our audience is something to be nurtured. We cannot take it for granted or we risk losing it. And if we lose it, we lose the ability to charge money for sponsorships and ads. So we NEED to dedicated resources to improve content and user interface and all the things that affect our visitors.
The number of visitors and page views has been running 2x normal for several weeks
We’ve had trouble REALIZING the of the value of our audience.
If we were selling our ads and sponsorships on a pure cost per thousand impressions basis, and we sold the same percentage of inventory, we would would have increased our Web revenues by 300%. How? Simply by monetizing our “national” audience.
Because our sales team is focused on local sponsorship deals, they tend to think of our site as if it were JUST a local piece of inventory. On the contrary, 75% of our traffic comes from out of state, so indeed we have a national (and international) audience. But we have had difficulty convincing national sponsors to “buy” our national audience because our reputation (as a team) is that we are a regional play.
Anyway, so how many fans are visiting our site these days?
Value of search engine optimization
One thing is clear. Lots of new people are finding our site these days, and many of these are using search engines to do it. You’ll notice from the Super Bowl Ad summary below, some major Super Bowl sponsors coulda, woulda, shoulda done a better job with SEO too.
Overall summary of Super Bowl Ad traffic online here (from Paid Content)
The same kinds of terminology problems are in HCI design, too. Engineers developed the computer before designers got involved, which is why we talk about “users” instead of “participants” or some other terms that puts the focus on a shared, mediated experience.