How Many Hits Do You Use To Evaluate A Sponsor

[Urban Legends]

Originally Posted by Bare

Another question on this... do you consider a time frame when making this determination? For example, if I send only 25 hits a day to a site, it'll take 200 days to get to the 5000 hits. Is 5000 still the "magic number" or do the daily hits figure into this?

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

I've seen this discussed before and people appeared to be in agreement that 5k hits spread over a longer period of time don't seem to produce as many sales as 5k in a quick spurt. It's one of those internet porn voodoo things.

Some of it may be voodoo, but one thing happens for sure: if everyone in the world is promoting a site, you need to be the first one sending any particular surfer there to get his join. So, if it takes you years to send that 5K in traffic, an awful lot of your would be sales are going to other webmasters who send the surfer there before you. This is especially true for small, new sites. When a site just comes on line, it's not unual to see unbelievable ratios... which steadily decline over time. Even if they end up plateauing at "good" numbers, they aren't as impressive as when they were "new out of the box".

Also, I think one thing being left out of this discussion is that you really have to be honest in evaluating how good your own traffic is and what your own historical conversion ratios are. If you've got great niche traffic which converts well (say you've got ebony traffic which has been converting at a bunch of sites at 1:100), you don't need to run the same type of "tests" as if your best conversion ever were running at 1:2500. Not all traffic is created equal.