Meaningful Data (One Key Indicator)
Those who read yesterday’s post will know I struggled with coming to some sort of coherent point. (Sorry about that.)
To sum up for those who didn’t read, reader Leo asked me how many page views you need to get before you’ll see a sale with a niche site.
It’s a complicated question because there are so many variables. I couldn’t give a succinct answer.
Some takeaways:
- It doesn’t really matter how many page views you get with a niche site. It either makes sales or it doesn’t.
- You aren’t paying for traffic, so you might as well continue and improve.
- With a niche site, your views and sales will improve over time
- You need a lot of views/sales before you can draw a conclusion
- If in doubt, use 1% (But probably not.)
Frustratingly, once I’d finished writing it, I came up with a better, more succinct solution. That’s what this article is going to be about.
I’ll tell you how you can know when you have meaningful data.
First things first though, why do you need meaningful data?
Why Do You Need Meaningful Data To Make Decisions?
Like I said yesterday, a lot of people quit before they’re ahead in a whole range of pursuits.
Think about fitness: Most guys will try a weightlifting program for six weeks. After six weeks, they’ll look exactly the same. This’ll lead to them trying a new program for weeks seven through twelve.
Years can go by with guys changing up their weightlifting routines and getting nowhere. The reason? They don’t wait long enough with any one program to see results.
The same is true of making money, making friends, learning a language and all kinds of other stuff.
When it comes to building websites and conversion rates and the like, there are a lot of different variables. If in doubt, you need to think longer term than you probably do, or you need to buy traffic. The reason it’s one of the two options is because when you’re dealing with the internet, you’re dealing with a potential market of billions of people.
If you have a website selling shoes, you might get a thousand visitors overnight and make no sales. It might be because your shoes are rubbish. It might be because your website is rubbish… but it might be because some blogger in Indonesia shared a picture of your shoes to their Twitter followers because they’re great. Unfortunately, you don’t ship to Indonesia. No sales.
Will this sort of thing happen every day? No. That’s why you need to develop a baseline and test it.
If your website gets ten views a day for six months, but then overnight gets a thousand views, then you’ll know that there’s an outlier.
If you get one sale a month for a year, then you get ten sales a week for three weeks, that’s great but you shouldn’t necessarily think it’s the new norm.
This applies to everything you do. How many times have you seen a gym rat on some forum saying, “I gained 20lbs muscle in my first three months, so looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger is definitely possibly with three years of training”?
The problem that they have is that they’re extrapolating data without having enough of a baseline.
Alright, So What’s The Easy and Fool-proof Way To Know If You’ve Got Meaningful Data?
This is the answer that came to me in bed last night, just a few hours after hitting publish.
You know you’ve got meaningful data when the data you’ve got doesn’t change.
By that I mean that it stabilises. If you’ve got a new website, then you’re going to get 100 views in your first month. You’ll get maybe 500 views in your next month and then a thousand views after that.
You can’t assume you’re going to double your traffic forever. Some people will think, “I’m doubling my traffic every month, so within a year I’m going to have millions of visitors.”
Needless to say, it isn’t that easy.
Over time, your data will stabilise. It won’t stop coming in, but you won’t get those exponential gains. Your traffic might increase by 10% a month. Or, you might not gain 5lbs of muscle a month but instead 1lb of muscle a month and you’ll stay at this rate of increase for a few months.
That’s your baseline data.
Once you’ve got that and you fundamentally understand the meaningful data you have, then you can work on new things that’ll create those exponential spikes that everyone wants. But that’s a topic for another day.