The hits just keep on coming

Some blogs back, I wrote about being engaged in a negotiation to trade a kayak. I said I checked the hits on my photo site to gauge how eager my prospect was to have it. Someone asked me how else I use that data.

I don’t very much or even look at it that often. But, sometimes it comes in handy. For instance, a couple weeks ago, I sent a proposal to a company about co-sponsoring an event with my group. I included a link to photos of a previous similar event to communicate the nature and scope. I asked the recipient to review the information and I’d call him in a couple days.

I watched the counter on those photos to see how many times he viewed them, if at all. There were no hits. I did the follow-up call anyway and, as expected, he acted ambivalent about the idea. Since there were no hits, I surmised he hadn’t delved into it and I had a fallback position ready, which worked out.

I alluded to a paddling event in my previous posting. The organizer emailed me to ask how I thought it went. I just posted the album link this morning, but checked the counter; over 11,000 hits already. I should footnote that isn’t the number of viewers. It’s the number of times any photo in the album was viewed. It’s one indicator of how much the trip was enjoyed although there are other variables (e.g. (number of participants and quantity of photos). My average event album draws about 6,000 hits so I was happy to report to her that she scored high. I could’ve gone into more detail (like which aspects of the event drew the most interest), but decided to keep it simple.

I guess it’s my business background. You establish benchmarks and measure everything you do against them so you know how you’re doing and what you need to adjust.