[#] Another CBA post

So I was checking Stats for the blog this morning, and I noticed that I was getting some traffic from Colorado Springs, CO. Now, since I haven't mentioned Focus on the Family in quite some time, my intuition is that someone from CBA has just gotten word from the Advance show in Nashvegas that I have had some saucy words for them.

I have some more today, so if you're reading from CBA HQ, please take notes.

I saw this on the CBA website this morning:

Signature Website Sales Surge
01/23/2006

CBA service provider Innovative Inc.’s Signature Websites reported 4 million-plus visits to its sites and 1.6 million retailer opt-in e-mail promotions during the 2005 Christmas season. Signature Websites online sales in the fourth quarter 2005 rose 74% over the previous year, due in part to the added gift certificates and increased music sampling. Jay Langston, Innovative’s online sales & marketing director, said e-mail in-store coupon redemption rate increased 70% over 2004.

Let me say this plainly: Innovative offers a very nice product. I'm not refering anybody there via link because that would be advertising. But the question, really, is this: How productive is an Innovative web site for the individual retailer?

You know: 4 million visitors is nothing to sneeze at. I'd take 1% of that as traffic to a e-commerce web site for my store any day. The problem is that my store -- if I had an Innovative web site -- would never get 1% of 4 million visits.

I think Innovative runs about 200-300 sites -- it might be more than that. But in that case, the average Innovative site got between 295 and 445 visits a day, and that's peak season traffic. Not for nothin', Innovative, but that's how much traffic my blog gets in unique visits every day -- and if I'm being particularly randy, we get gusts up to 1000 unique visits, or more than 1500 page views per day.

As I remember, the average Innovative web site gets about 800 hits per quarter as they would report at their CBA booth at Advance this week.

My point here is this: why is it that about 300 CBA web sites as an aggregate cannot draw more interest and traffic than one lone blogger with a somewhat-curmudgeonly attitude?

Think about that. I;d be interested in opinions other than my own on that subject.