Traffic Swarm - Oh No! Not again!

Yes, I’m afraid so. Just a small bit though.

Imagine that you are able to distribute fliers through letterboxes, or place drop cards at ATM’s, just to name a couple of the off-line methods used to attract inquiries. How do you measure the effectiveness of what you are doing?

If we take a look at the Direct Response industry - often better known as mail order, very often the response rates of ½% to 1½% is typical. I understand that a campaign returning less than ½% is deemed a failure and any campaign returning better than 1½% is terrific.

At the time of writing the previous posts on Traffic Swarm I read in a forum post that someone had sponsored 700 members into Traffic Swarm. Only 10 of them had upgraded to Pro level.

How does that look to you? Not too good I suspect, but do the maths. 10 divided by 700 is 1.42%. That’s getting close to terrific as far as direct response averages go, isn’t it? He didn’t say how long it took him, but that’s not relevant.

The problem with the internet, everything can be seen whether you want to see it, or not. Every mouse-click in a traffic exchange, every email blasted to a safelist, every impression in Google Adwords and Adsense, The numbers are terrifying and the Click Through Rates (CTR’s) look terrible, don’t they?

In the days before the internet, much of the advertising was done in newspapers and magazines. There was no way of telling how many people actually read our adverts. It was only when they responded that we started to have any idea of how effective our campaign was.

The people who used direct response, or direct mail were able to collect figures and it is from them that the ½% - 1½% range comes. But just because we have all been seduced by the immensity of the internet, how is it that we ignore those figures? It’s almost as if the internet casts some magic spell and causes us to ignore the lessons of the real world.

Another example is Bill Britt. Bill is one of the most successful Amway Distributors in the world. His explanation of the reason for his success goes something like this, ” I showed the opportunity to 1200 people. 300 joined 900 didn’t. Of the 300 that joined 215 did nothing 85 did something. Out of the 85, I found 11 who made me a millionaire.”

If we take this final set of figures, 11 people out of 1200 is 0.92%. That’s about midway, but leaning towards “failure”.

I don’t think any millionaire would mind being classified as a failure, do you?

When we sit at our computers, three foot from the rest of the world, we are still human beings who make decisions in similar fashion to our parents and grand-parents, don’t we? Or may be you don’t.

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