"Hits" mean nothing to me

If you measure your site's popularity in hits, you stand a good chance of me ignoring everything else you say. Hits are a measurement of how many file requests were made to your server. So, basically, it means nothing to me. I don't care how many times images were requested to be delivered to browsers. If your site's home page is image-heavy you could easily be getting dozens of hits every time someone loads that one page.

Now, I know that most of the time when a rep tells me how many hits they get they actually mean pageviews (a useful metric), but confusing web terminology makes me a little nervous about giving you my clients' money.

Tell me how many visitors you have, tell me how many visits you get, tell me how many pageviews you receive. More importantly, tell me all the information you have about who your audience is.

Don't tell me how many "hits" your site gets. That only tells me to be wary of signing a contract with you.

Sell your site, not your space

If you're trying to get advertisers to buy on your site, remember that it's not about the space you have, it's about your audience. You're not selling blocks of space, you're selling what your site has to offer.

You're selling access to your audience.

So if you want advertisers, you need to know who your audience is. What they're doing online and otherwise. I don't care how much traffic you get, I want to know who those people are. Remember, if it were about traffic I could just buy ads on Hotmail and be done with it.

But it's not and can't be about traffic, and it's usually not about reach. It's about hitting a demographic. It's about finding the people most likely to be interested in the product I'm trying to sell them. And I need to know if your audience is in that demo. If you don't know that, then I'm not interested.

And that means that you also need to find the people most likely to be interested in buying your product. You need to be reaching out to advertisers with the information you have, and you need to find compelling reasons for them to buy on your site.

Too many publishers think that just because their site is popular, or has a niche target, that advertisers will suddenly be interested in buying.

I can find your site's audience somewhere else.

Nobody only reads one site on the internet. I can always nab them when they're checking their webmail. Come find me and tell me why it would be better for me to advertise to them when they're on your site, and then I'm interested.

Traffic Ain’t Everything

In fact, it's almost nothing.

“How much traffic does your site get?” This is a question commercial websites get asked a lot.

And it makes sense, right? If you’re paying to put an ad on a website, you want as many people as possible to see it, so you’d want to make sure that lots of people visit the site.

Well, that’s just not how it works.

See, most of these sites sell on a CPM basis. This means that you’re only paying when someone sees your ad. So if you buy 10,000 impressions (or 10,000 instances of someone seeing the ad), then it often makes little difference how much traffic the site gets.

If you’re considering purchasing ad space online, “traffic” is simply not a thing to worry about in most cases. Reach might be. %Composition UV should be. But traffic? Not so much.

If it is a crucial part of your decision-making process, you’re thinking about the wrong things. You’re thinking that you’re buying space in a newspaper, or on a TV show. You’re thinking about Gross Rating Points. You’re not thinking that you’re advertising on the internet.

Internet advertising allows you to measure every single time someone sees an ad, every single time someone clicks an ad. You can see where they’re from (down to the postal/zip code), you can see what browser they’re using, whether they’re on dial-up or broadband, and so many more things. And many sites offer all of these things and more as targeting options. This is not TV, this is not radio.

Traffic isn’t a thing, people. Hitting your target demo precisely, and only paying when you do -- that’s a thing. That’s the thing that matters.

Slashdot has a ton of traffic, but if you’re selling nail polish*, that just doesn’t make a difference.



*Sorry to whip out the No Girls on Slashdot cliché, but you get my point.