Everybody lies. Okay, not everybody, but a lot of people do. Even if it’s only an exaggeration or little white lie, it’s still a lie. This is especially true when it comes to stats. You know the ones I’m talking about… conversions, sales, etc. So let me set the record straight on this subject so that those reading this understand what the real deal is and will take all these stats with a grain of salt.
Let’s start with traffic stats. I’m referring to visitors to your web site. Did you ever see these folks who claim to get tens of thousands of visitors to their sites everyday and you wonder how they do it? Well, what many of them don’t tell you is how worthwhile those visitors are. Many marketers will either buy worthless leads or hit the traffic exchanges and buy massive packages of clicks. Now don’t get me wrong, TEs can work great if you know how to use them, but most of these folks send their TE prospects to sales pages which is just a waste of time because nobody has time to read a full blown sales page. So traffic stats can be very misleading. How many of these people buy?
Then there is conversions. That’s how many people actually DO buy for every 100 clicks. You sometimes hear crazy conversion figures like 10 to 20 percent. What they don’t tell you is that these figures come from ads that were sent to highly targeted lists of previous buyers, so of course their conversion stats are going to be higher. You’re not likely going to see those kind of stats off of brand new leads.
And then of course you have sales figures. I made $1 million in sales this year. Yeah, but what they didn’t tell you is that they spent $900,000 in pay per click advertising to get those $1 million dollars worth of sales. Or paid out 75% to affiliates, or whatever. Yeah they still made a lot of money, but nothing near what they are claiming in most cases.
My point to all this is simple… Take what you read and what you hear with a grain of salt because people don’t always tell you the whole story behind their stats. Ultimately, this leads the prospect into a false sense of security when it comes to using the product or service that is supposed to “get” you those stats. Trust me, it isn’t that easy and isn’t always as it seems.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. They’ll get you every time.