Hello everyone and welcome back from the nice long weekend. Did you spend your entire day cleaning up your email? Well I didn't - but that's only because I have a Blackberry and kept up over the weekend... ok, I'll stop harping about getting wireless (at least for today).

My email did provide me with food for thought today, though. Amy Chorew, one of our our super-cool national trainers sent me a neat-o PDF file with some "traffic" stats on real estate websites from last quarter. Seems like someone out there still ranks websites based upon how many "visitors" stopped by each month. One wonders why? I mean, so what if a lot of people stopped by a website?

Oh, ok, relax; I get it. If you are Barnes and Noble selling books or IBM sellingi Thinkpads then, well, I guess traffic matters. Surely if people can click and order your "stuff" then the more people who come by your site, the more you can sell; that's the logic - isn't it?

Except in real estate - the logic is flawed.

More visitors to a website is absolutely (ok, near-absolutely) meaningless. Really. I mean it. So what if a lot of people stopped by. You can't click to order a house so traffic - per se - isn't really a measurement of anything. Well, maybe it measures the reach of your marketing budget. But so what? Lots of people spend money marketing real estate. It's the ones who sell real estate that count.

And that's why web "traffic" or "unique visitors" is really meaningless data. Now, to be fair (I'm a fair guy) the rankings also measure some other numbers. But until agents stop drooling that their site gets more hits than the other guys, nobody is going to figure out the benefit of measuring web traffic.

In other words, the consumer won't really be able to decide if one brokerage's online marketing is truly more effective than another brokerage's marketing. And that's where the "other" numbers come in.

So what numbers are important? Well, one number that is measure and important is average minutes per visit. Why? Because the longer someone spends on your site, the more they may become engaged in your product or services. For complex commodities like real estate, deep consumer engagement is more valuable than high-consumer volume (although both would be nice but that's fantasy). Of course, what's ironic is that there are many companies in the "rankings" who have very few visitors but have much longer average minutes per consumer (called "stickiness") on their sites. If they were smart, they'd start telling consumers about that comparison: it's not about how many consumers - but how many stick around that makes a difference when marketing complex commodities like homes. Plus you can affect stickiness easier than create traffic - by adding more videos, photos, deep content, interactive chat - all sorts of features that keep consumers (whether many or few) on your site.

The other number - which either nobody is measuring or nobody is reporting (maybe because they're not something to brag about) is leads generated per unique visitor. Now that's data. How many of those actual visitors request a showing appointment? How many ask an agent for more information? How many of those millions of visitors try to email, IM or otherwise engage the brokerage? The percentage of visitors who become leads is more important than the number of visitors total.

If you really want to get granular, then start tracking leads that actually close as a factor of total leads generated as a ratio of total visitor traffic. Huh? I mean: how many people actually bought something from you - not just visited the site. And not just emailed for more information. How many did you convert from a lead into a sale? That's the number you should be talking about in listing presentations. That's the real distinctiveness in service levels that matters to sellers. There are many successful websites of many products where only a few people visit but a high percentage buy the product. That's a critical measurement of website success.

Traffic? That's for travel sites and booksellers....