...and I've got some interesting numbers to analyze. I had about 8300 unique visitors during July, at least 8000 of which have come from my Google Adwords account, which lists my website among search results for phrases like "anti-Bush t-shirts" and Google advertisements on webpages with content that somehow relates to "anti-Bush t-shirts." The handful of remaining visitors were mainly from my friends and family who I told about the site or who got wind of the site from others.
As an Adwords customer, I get nearly real-time data on how my phrases are doing: how many people are searching on them or looking at websites with content related to them; how many of these people then click on my website; and how many of these clicks resulted in sales for the website. The last number is the key one, of course. Getting 1 billion unique visitors wouldn't be worth a dime if none of their visits converted into sales.
My conversion number for the month was less than 1%. In other words, fewer than 1 in 100 visitors bought a shirt. But that number is significantly understated: it doesn't include the 60 shirts I sold to the cafe in Hollywood because I had arranged that deal over the phone.
Still, I'm disappointed to see that so many people are coming to the site and then leaving without buying anything. Before going into business, I had thought about what my conversion figure would be, and the number I kind of anchored on was 10%. That now seems naively optimistic!
At the same time, I'm encouraged to note that my conversion at the OB Farmers Market was somewhere in the 5% to 10% range. (To get that number, I'm dividing the number of sales by the approximate number of people who stopped to check out my shirts. Basically, I'm saying that - for the purposes of comparing direct conversion with Internet conversion - a farmers' market customer who stops to check out the merchandise is equal to an internet customer who makes their way to the site.) This tells me that people are more likely to buy when they can actually touch and feel the shirt, which makes sense. It means I'm going to have to do more than just run the website - I'm going to have to work more touchy-feely sales into my game.
