(*) adopted this sleek-willie on ronmartin.net :-)
Spotting the Outrageous Claims is always Quite Easy..
This is a typical example of one of those “our website is the greatest thing ever and you should advertise with us” emails that you are each receiving daily – one of our Vancouver members just received this and promptly forwarded it to us (thanks!); I am only including the opening paragraph:
My name is [..withheld.], and I am the Director of Online Accounts with [somewebsite.com]. I have just come across your website and I would love to have your services on [SomeWebsite]. We are an online wedding shopping mall in over 72 cities, with over 6000 brides shopping and booking services daily in Vancouver.
.. blah, blah… sales pitch …
OK, let’s think about this for a second…
- There are 8,000-10,000 brides annually, in Vancouver; if you are a Vancouver vendor you already know this.
- A number of them are second weddings, very ethnic weddings, very small weddings etc. And a number of brides are not “planning on the internet” anyway – okay, a small number :-)
- So, let’s keep everything nice and round; let’s say that the “real” market in Vancouver, the customers available to book a Vancouver wedding vendor, is ~ 6,000 brides annually. Sounds about right?
- The busiest wedding planning websites in Canada are weddingbells.ca, bride.ca and Toronto’s PerfectWeddingGuide.ca – you can check on Alexa, the internet ranking service.
- Besides those, Canadian brides primarily use Google, Facebook plus some content-rich U.S. sites like theKnot.com or blogs like StyleMePretty.com
So, what this particular operator expects you to believe is that, after Google, after Facebook, after the big, established super-busy wedding websites, after reading wedding magazines and talking to friends and attending trade-shows, after Twitter, after the Knots and the blogs… after everything else… still ..
…every single bride in Vancouver, visits this particular website, at least once, every single day of the year!
Really? Seriously?
How believable does this sound to you? You don’t need me, you don’t need web “experts”, gurus and fancy technologies, analytics, tracking, statistics – just use your own judgement.
My educated guestimate: this number is “exaggerated by a factor of 3-5, at least; but the real question is : if they are “exaggerating” these numbers, what else are they “exaggerating”?
In case you are wondering, these people are probably quoting some appropriately vague internet metric, like “hits” on their website monthly. Whether those are brides, or vendors, or internet bots, or google or their own staff; whether those are individual visitors, or “visits” or “sessions” or “pageviews” or “hits” or “requests”… good luck.. you will never get to the end of it, because there is no end to it.
Last month an Alberta operator () was claiming even more outrageous results. Something like 70,000 people saw your Calgary wedding invitations listing in three weeks :-) (there are ~4,000 brides in Calgary.. lol)
Just use your common sense; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you have received one of these things and you are wondering, send it over, give me call; I ‘ll happily go over it with you.
Cheers! ~ Niko.
