Much excitement in mirrormirror land over the last couple of days, as the worldwide exposure gained by Petite Anglaise (check out her press page now), and thus for mirrormirror’s clumsy blogad, has resulted in traffic to the mirrormirror site going through the roof.
Visitor-wise yesterday was our best day ever, yes, even better than the 14th December last year, when we were mentioned by the Times as one of the best places to shop online, and it’s looking like today will be equally as good.
The interesting thing though is that, to date, the Petite Anglaise-related traffic has not generated a single additional order. Yep, that’s right – nothing, zip, zilch, nada. Probably because many of these visitors will be from overseas and/or incandescent with indignation and hence not in the mood to buy fancy embroidered cushions from an online store in the UK.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, as I’m sure this sort of exposure can only be good for the business and it will be interesting to see whether it bears fruit in future months.
However, it has been useful to observe how little impact on the bottom line traffic which does not derive from our target demographic is having . The message both for bloggers trying to monetize their blogs and people advertising on blogs is that while traffic is important, you should focus squarely on the number of conversions in order to get a real picture of how well that ad is doing.
And yes, it does help that I’m married to someone in the web analytics industry who can provide me with the software tools to measure such things.
See, that’s what we’ve always experienced with our books. We can go to all the effort of getting a book mentioned in 100+ papers over the world (that’s only happened once), and the book still won’t shift. Our best seller hasn’t had a single review, strangely enough. Go figure!
Yeah I heard about her – I guess she’s trying to be the euro version of dooce.com – the american who got sacked for blogging and now has a HUGE following.
Hi Anna!
It’s one of the things I find most fascinating about this job – seeing which bits of marketing work and which don’t.It’s like a giant computer game. And you’re right, it’s never the ones you think it’s going to be.
I think the main lesson to be drawn from this is that people don’t shop at ‘mirrormirror’ on impulse, but more when they’ve seen something they want to buy in the paper or know they have to buy a present for a friend or something.
Holly! How nice to have you back. You’ve got mail…