Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Deck Builders Web Traffic- Real or Mirage?

Which Deck Builders have Traffic... and which Deck Builders are Faking it?



When you have it... flaunt it. When you don't, Fake it! Compete.com gathers information from a number of sources and even if the actual numbers aren't perfectly accurate - for comparative purposes they are quite good.

By Compete.com statistics GardenStructure.com has nearly double the traffic that Archadeck, Hickory Dickory Decks, Decks.ca and DecksUSA combined.

Hickory Dickory Decks seems to be faking it. Hits are quoted to people that don't know better in order to sell advertising in the side bar of their site. They are actually auto-generating hits with rotating ads. You can leave the page running in the background of your computer and leave for 2 hours--and give them a thousand or so "Hits". They pay an SEO company to increase their web traffic--but as the search engines get smarter, even that doesn't work very well. Compete is showing them with 2000 visitors or less a month. Decks.ca has so little traffic that they have to guess, so they show that as a flat line with maybe a couple of hundred visits a month.

In general, companies that don't actually have much traffic will quote hits. Hits tell you so little that Google Analytics won't even offer that up as a statistic. Visitors, Page Views and Unique Visitors are all that matters.
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Here's how it works.

Hits - Are Requests for a file or information. It could be a block of text, a picture, an ad.

Page Views - Are requests for an individual page. It could be a refresh (F5), or someone returning to the same page.

Visits - Is a person visiting a site. It could be a second visit, third, 10th, or hundredth visit by only 1 person.

Absolutely Unique Visits - Is how many individual users visit a site in a given period of time.



We have 350% more traffic than Compete.com thinks. (Actual Statistics for Traffic Above).
Our New Website was being debugged in April so that caused errors limiting our traffic for most of the month of april... however our actual traffic is stable at 125,000 visits per month.
Google is still digging through the new content so we actually expect traffic to improve later this year as things are indexed to reflect changes. We also have thousands of photos and projects to add to the site so stay tuned!
L

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