Last night, Mike and I were sitting in the office discussing traffic to our website for our two upcoming auctions. They both are doing well. However, in the conversation, I noted to him that for the past 30 days, search engines have sent 51.75% of our traffic, 16.71% has come from referring sites, and the remaining 23.40% has come from direct visitors to our site.
That peaked my interest, and this morning I decided I’d take a look at the numbers for 2008 year-to-date. The results surprised me a bit: 33.61% direct traffic, 25.64% referring sites, and 40.75% search engines (google makes up 35.08% of the total or 86% of all search engine traffic). The results got me to thinking.
In a typical advertising campaign, we expend 90% of our ad dollars to generate the 33.61% direct traffic, and 10% to generate the referring sites traffic, and 0% to generate the search engine traffic. Yet the results seem to show a completely different result than what one might expect. Note, realize I’m generalizing this over the year to date numbers. In a typical year we are running about 20 active marketing campaigns (about two weeks in length each, with some overlap), and the other weeks we are running passive marketing campaigns.
I’m wondering if we kicked the advertising spend around a bit, say 80%, 10%, and 10%, if we’d see increased traffic to our website? I’m guessing we’d see increased traffic. I’m wondering if that traffic would convert to a respectable ROI.
Increasingly, as general newsprint becomes less influential, and web becomes more influential, and specifically web searches, it is going to be important for small companies to make the transition. Now, it shouldn’t be an overnight, immediate shift. However, a slow steady trend to 10% advertising directed at the search engine traffic that generates 40.75% of our traffic would be beneficial to our company and companies of similar size.
Before now, one of the major underlying factors to why the oil situation is not likely to improve never crossed my mind. I have read plenty of articles concerning oil, peak oil, and other thoughts on oil and our dependence on it. I’ve got to say, I’m a believer in peak oil – the point when maximum production is reached, and production declines to no production (Wikipedia has an extensive discussion on peak oil). However, put aside all the talk of peak oil, production, supply and demand, and take a gander at Foreign Policy’s interview with Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency.
The interview is an interesting read. However, what really caught my attention was the question about why new supplies aren’t coming online. The last statement of his answer made the light bulb go off in my head. It was one of those, oh yeah, no crap moments in life. The statement:
[T]he bulk of the growth in the future needs to come from the national oil companies, and perhaps price will no longer be the main determinant when they make their [production] decisions, because for many countries, oil is their only natural endowment. And those countries legitimately value and want to leave their one and only natural endowment for future generations.
Once I read the statement, I instantly realized that the problem with oil supplies are not as simple as drilling for more oil. It’s a matter of survival for the countries with oil supplies. It’s not supply and demand – it’s survival. It’s the controlled release of a scarce/sacred “natural endowment” from countries that otherwise have little to no chips in the game of prosperity. If we’re going to beat the rising cost of oil, we’ve got to understand it’s more than just increasing supply. We’ve got to figure out how to ensure survival for the countries with oil supplies.
