1.1 Million Unique Visitors Visit CoolTea.com in October

On some level I have to pinch myself and find it hard to believe, but log reports don’t lie - they are bits and bytes and tell it the way the server sees it (or gets hit by ip addresses), so here we go.

Unique visits and hits started to climb after CoolTea first introduced several Web 2.0 technologies in the Spring and Summer of 2007.

As the numbers started to climb, at first I thought maybe we were hacked, but security experts confirmed this was not the case and log activity was legit.

Then during sundry conversations with CoolTea friends, “Hey Chuck, What do you think is contributing to the growing site activity?” I started to delve into logs and ponder realities of increasing web traffic.

This is a multipart answer and most of which is technical - e.g., some of the increasing site traffic is based on upgrading from HTML to XHTML which is easier for search engines to index; Some of the traffic is due in part from RSS feeds per our new event calendars, and not much of it is in part to our natural good looks, but I digress!

Last night I had a lively conversation with Zuhair Suidan, a highly in-demand global strategist for some of the best brands in the world, and it was fun to catch-up as he is often on the road.

During our conversation Zuhair asked about why web 2.0 technology makes a difference and generates results we are experiencing.

Suffice it to say that I will not get into all the nuances of hits, unique visitors, RSS feeds, XHTML, meta tags, et. al., but at the end of the day, Zuhair and I were focused on metrics that convert - e.g., if I see trends in hits and unique visitors increasingly hitting a particular CoolTea store, I don’t really care too much other than to have a gauge, so if 80,000 people hit that store and only a handful converted to purchases, well then - that is a different story. In this case, given high volume traffic, is our message not right, is the price an obstacle, is the brand message up for being optimized in copy, graphics, terms, etc. ..??..

Otherwise, it’s great to have increasing traffic but back to noise vs signal concepts.

Personally, I love no noise and lots of signal.