PageViews - What do they tell you ?
The general visitor process
How a pageview is recorded
Conclusions for analysis
How do I know my PV/E ratios
| THE GENERAL VISITOR PROCESS |
Our objective, based on the information you submit, is to get qualified, interested and serious buyers to complete an enquiry form and make contact with you, It's that simple.
- The buyer either views descriptions or displayed pages, refers to lists (city, province, category, etc) or searches our website to see what's available.
- Based on that description they click on the link to view your listing detail. This records a Pageview.
- The buyer reads the supplied detail about your sale offering. If it is of high interest the buyer presses the Contact Button to complete and enquiry form and make contact with you. Our process is complete and this last action generates a single enquiry statistic.
- Pageviews
- Enquiries
- Time
- and Successful Sales.
But before looking at statistics one needs to understand "visibility", also referred to as "discovery".
We find that most visitors will always scan the front page as they know that the "Hot Picks" usually have a market edge of some type or are well priced to generate a high ROI which reduces the investment risk. And of course the "Latest Listings" promise freshness and scooping a new offering while still new on the market.
The next visitor issue is usually the location. Most buyers are not planning to move residence and are generally more interested in operating from within commuting distance or relocating the business. Most interest is around the three larger metropoles of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
The third major area of consideration is by sector or industry to take advantage of existing skill sets, experience and market knowledge. And for this the visitor will usually use the category listings.
So let's now accept that the visibility is understood and factored in and that the reasonable buyer, one way or another, should be seeing the brief description of your business offering. They find that brief description atractive so they click on the link to proceed to your detailed listing and you have a recorded single pageview.
| HOW A PAGEVIEW IS RECORDED |
Unfortunately there are many other entities (none of them human) who also make regular site visits and view your business details page.
We currently receive around 4,000 of these visitors monthly and they include search engine crawlers (very necessary), plagiarism detectors, Facebook verifiers, LinkedIn checkers, archive snapshotters, platform detectors, malicious attackers, directory services, email scrapers, and many many more. But they are not potential buyers so we can fortunately filter these out to leave a "human only" result which makes this a trusted metric. You can view a list of the Last 500 Robot Extractions here.
When you view your own pageviews for a particular month you can not only see when these legitimate potential buyer visits were made but you can also click them further to see geographically where their ISP link terminates. While this gives a good idea of location you need to remember that it may be misleaing depending on how the ISP has set up their public facing information. But the important issue here is that you can see that almost every pageview recorded is a valid visitor.
So we now know when the site became live (creation date) and the number of interested humans (pageviews by time) who have looked at the detailed listing.
And of course we know haw many have attempted to contact you by completing the enquiry form. Before enquiries are recorded against your listing we inspect them to make sure they are legitimate and to weed out spammers and other junk form fillers. We also check with you to make sure you received the emailed enquiry (a whole separate discussion) and only then is the enquiry recorded.
At this point, relative to time, we now know how many visitors have found your description attractive (pageviews) and how many of those who viewed your detailed listing have made contact (enquiries).
| CONCLUSIONS FOR ANALYSIS |
( 1 ) WHAT IS YOUR BASE PAGEVIEW TOTAL PER MONTH ?
This could be very low compared to averages and under 10pv/mth would be a cause for concern
POSSIBLE CAUSES Include:.......
- Poor visibility on our website leading to low discovery
- Rural and remote locations being less popular
- Unpopular lifestyle - 24/7 operation, funerals, debt collectors, etc
- High skill requirement - accountant and law practices, medical niches, etc
- Weak financials
- Skinny detail - raises suspicions and lowers trust
- Contradictory data not explained
- Business model difficult to understand
REMEDIES Include :.......
- Test the details text against all the above.
- Speak to us for other ideas.
- Ask independent colleagues for opinions
Then the pageview total could be very high compared to averages and over 70pv/mth would need investigation.
This would not usually be an issue for concern but it becomes a problem where an normal conversion rate (level of pageviews per enquiry) is below average. We will get to that next.
( 2 ) WHAT IS YOUR CONVERSION RATE ?
This refers to turning a pageview into an enquiry and expressing the relationship as a ratio of pageviews to one enquiry.
A PV/E rate of 22 simply means that, in a given period of time, it took 22 pageviews to generate a single enquiry form completion. A lower PV/E of 5 (quite rare) means that every fifth visitor makes that enquiry contact. And a PV/E of 100 indicates there ie something wrong with that detail listing.
1) A low PV total (under 10pv/mth) means that your description is hard to find or, when found, is unattractive to buyers. This needs to be investigated and fixed.
2) A high PV/E (+40) indicates that the buyer is less interested once the listing details have been viewed.
- Consider the curiosity factor. For example a brothel listed for sale may elicit many pageviews but there would be few serious enquiries. Similarly, a "gold extraction from PC electronics" would have many quizzy visits driven by curiosity alone.
- You would need to figure out why the visitors do not complete the process to contact. Consider financial info, lifestyle, location, staffing, shills reuirement, premises, risk, thin data, contradictions, funding)
The point here is to align the content in the detailed listing with the brief description. Perhaps you have to disclose extra data in the detailed listing (for transparancy and trust reasons) which is currently negative to a degree. What you are trying to do is to understand why the PV/E is unusually high.
| HOW DO I KNOW MY PV/E RATIOS |
With every enquiry lead mailed to you there is a link to your current Pageview Report for that business.
In addition, other reports such as "Full List of Enquiries Received" as well as the regular "Availability Confirmation" requests all have links to that businesses Pageview Report
Recommended Article - Valuing A Business
Related Resources :
Buying a BusinessHow to Buy a Business
Restaurant Internet or Online Retail Manufacturing Service
Wholesale / Distribution Service Station / Convenience Store Liquors
Conducting a Due Diligence on Buying a Business
Selling a Business
Preparing Your Business for a Future Sale
How to Sell Your Business
Determining a Realistic Selling Price for Your Business
General Topics
Financing Sources for your Business Purchase
How to Choose a Business Partner
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