Stats: Baseline

In the online retailing biz, there is only one number that really matters: the number of visitors. The question is can you drive visitors to your site. Your conversion rate is also an important number and can undoubtedly have a big impact on sales, but without visitors your conversion rate means little.

So, that being said, I thought I would lay a few baseline measurements on you:

• Unique visitors last week: 206 (Site record: 292)
  
• Returning visitors (within 30 min) last week: 30 (Site record: 30)
  
• Page Loads last week: 593 (Site record: 593)
  
• Shirts sold last week: 2 (Site record: 7)

Some new records last week. That's good, of course. The record for unique visitors was set on the third week of the bicyclemark spots (3/27/06), which was the third consecutive week of record-breaking visits. The number of visitors dropped off in the fourth week of spots back to normal levels. So, it's clearly true what they say -- marketing does indeed work.

On a related topic, we're creating new bicyclemark spots this week highlighting the newly re-designed site. We'll see if that impacts visits at all. Also, after the 15th I will be no longer be a sponsor of the bicyclemark podcast. As the stats above show, the largest impact is within the first month of sponsorship. Therefore, it seems clear that I need to change up my sponsorship to attract new visitors. No plans as of yet as to who that sponsorship might be with. If you know anyone who has a blog, or other online venture, that needs a sponsor, let me know.

Lastly, please go skew my numbers by visiting Springheel Jack and buying something. They say that shopping can have an almost euphoric effect on people. Don't you want to feel better?