When do sales figures become 'significant' ?

Harvey,

There are so many variables that I don't think you can ever really pin down an accurate answer.

For example, just the 250 visitors per day is open to a vast array of influences:

Where they are attracted from
If natural search are they from a #1 position or a #5
What time of day
What day of week
How close it is to payday
How close it is to tax day
What is on the news
and on and on.

You can easily have your 250 being made up of a wildly different demographic each day.

Or even if the demographic is stable, its behavior may fluctuate.

And then there are external factors:

The economy
The weather
Other products ebbing and lowing in popularity
Negative or positive reviews
New launches in your market or related markets


And then, closer to home there are other issues to contend with:

Your server's uptime
Your host's speed
Your site's compatibility with different browsers
Your payment processor's speed of page loading

I run a very big campaign for a major client, using banner ads to drive traffic to a video page. We noticed that suddenly the number of people clicking on the banners resulted in far fewer arriving at our video page than expected (there is never a 100% correlation because some people will always abandon an action before the page loads, but usually less than 5%)

The change was significant - it appeared that up to 70% of people who clicked the ad never arrived at the desired landing page.

I buy tens of millions of impressions each month, so the stats were very significant indeed!

After a great deal of analysis with some very sophisticated tracking software we found that the cause was a very small change that had happened at the server level that resulted in the video page taking, on average, 4 seconds longer than normal to load.

To those of us monitoring the account we had never noticed the slowdown because our broadband connections are fast and the 'delay' we personally experienced was much less. But couple the fact that many, many people are on sub optimal Internet connections and all of us have evolved to have teensy-weensy attention spans and the 4 second average delay resulted in massive page abandonment. And a loss of 70% of our business.

Needless to say we tracked down the problem and put it right, and the figures jumped back to normal.

Small things can have big effects - but tracking down which small things is the stuff of late nights and chaos theory!

Martin

Martin (Avis) and others.

Your points about why sales might decline are excellent
and could be the basis of an article or even ebook of its own.

However I still think you are talking about Step 2
of the process where Step 1 is the basic question

"Just knowing these figures alone is it worth proceeding to Step 1
- to find out the reasons"


Here is one answer

Harvey