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RE: Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?

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Subject:  RE: Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?
Author:   Colin Cooper:   view profile | all posts by this author | add to favourites
Date:   12:07:55 9 September 2004
 
Hi Ashley,

It has been said that managing your boss is as important as managing the people who report to you! Communicating your objectives is an important part of this to get the buy-in and support for ongoing investment. Ongoing education (done tactfully of course!) is a part of the process. Progressively KPIs will reflect greater sophistication, but there is still a way to go. Objectives don’t have to come from on high but can be the agreed goals that you work through with your boss that reflect the web team’s contribution towards the overall company goals.

I’m under no illusions about the importance of traffic figures. I remember working with an organisation back in the dot.com boom days where they kept 2 sets of figures for traffic – one the web team worked with and one which included every possible hit on the site they could scrape up to keep the top level figure they presented to the board going up. The business didn’t really know why they had a site but the board wanted one! Traffic is an important indicator but I’m always wary about how the figures are used.

It’s a sign of the maturity developing in the web world that we can be talking of the less = more concepts. Every other medium has developed into working smarter so there’s no reason that the web shouldn’t go through these growing pains.

Maybe we are already getting to the stage where the demand for online promotional opportunities is outstripping the consumers available to take them up – after all there are only so many PDAs, holidays, insurance policies etc people can search for so they can consume. That’s where you get a fight to steal market share from your competitors and a profitability squeeze between what you have to pay for the keywords in a market with too many bidders and the profit you can generate by each sale. Maybe Google’s shares aren’t overpriced!

Colin Cooper
ISSEL colin@issel.co.uk
Aligning Execution with Strategy
 
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  • Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?, Ashley , 7 Sep 14:22
    My understanding is that internet usage at work in the UK is on the up, broadband pentration is quite dramatically on the up (4 out of 10 internet users according to NOP), the inte ...
    • re: Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?, Alex Chudnovsky, 8 Sep 10:50
      Usage and penetration will raise as soon as people start streaming video and music on demand, start using email and instant messaging on the go using 3G phones. It might not rea ...
    • Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?, Colin Cooper, 9 Sep 10:12
      Does it matter if traffic is up or down? Provocative perhaps but where is the value in traffic for traffic’s sake? There are several good reasons why traffic being down can be ...
      • RE: Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?, Ashley , 9 Sep 11:00
        Hi Colin Yes, you are right that ultimately it is absolute values (sales values, number of registrations, uplift in brand metrics etc.) that are most important. Conversion rates ...
        • RE: Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?, Colin Cooper, 9 Sep 12:07
          Hi Ashley, It has been said that managing your boss is as important as managing the people who report to you! Communicating your objectives is an important part of this to get t ...
          • RE: Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?, Ashley , 9 Sep 13:46
            Yes / agree with all of above. What I find interesting is that when all of this shakes down, and all companies are online marketing savvy, and all customers are web savvy, your abi ...
          • RE: Underlying web site usage growth has stalled?, Alex Chudnovsky, 9 Sep 15:02
            >Maybe Google’s shares aren’t overpriced! At 140 P/E not overpriced? Maybe if you compare that to Yahoo or similar companies, but certainly not to companies that produce "real" ...
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