A new website traffic metric: Monthly Unique Visitor Dollars

It seems that many websites are valued based largely upon the amount of visitor traffic it receives. However, if two different websites have the same visitor traffic and conversion rates but one of these websites offers a product or service that costs one thousand times more than the other then shouldn’t these websites be valued differently? For example, in 2012 NYCdentist.com averaged 35,000 monthly unique visitors (muv) but dentistry has much greater economic value than, e.g. book sales at BN.com (the Barnes and Noble bookstore website). A new dental patient conversion can be worth 1,000 times more than the online sale of a book.

I haven’t found a metric to describe this difference in economic value of a website visitor and therefore propose one: $muv “monthly unique visitor dollars.” $muv measures the average economic value of the monthly unique visitor conversion ($) multiplied by the number of monthly unique visitors (muv). Muv is the standard value as determined by Google Analytics.

$muv may be important because it appears that many people involved in digital media mistakenly attribute website value based solely upon visitor traffic. They may therefore overlook a website that draws a mere 35,000 muv’s. However when factoring in, e.g. $ = 1000x, it really should be considered to have an $muv of 35,000,000! This could dramatically change the asset value of a lower traffic but much higher economic value per conversion website.

It might also be worth considering $muv per unit of time because sometimes a single conversion, e.g. someone seeking dental services, might lead to long term income rather than a single purchase. This might be expressed as $muv(t) where (t) specifies the time period considered to determine the average economic value of the conversion.

Categorised in: Dr. Dorfman Says

This post was written by Dr. Jeffrey Dorfman