Seeing the Forest for the Trees – Do you need traffic or bookings?

Today I had another one of those conversations I often have about online vacation rental solutions:

"Hi, this is Ralf"
"Hi, I need some help with getting online bookings.  I need to get SEO.  I need to get PPC.  I need to get more traffic to my site."
"Ok.  What do you know about the visitors to your site?  Where are they coming from?  What are the clicking on?  How many are booking?"
"I don't know.  I know I need more traffic"

This is when I take a long sigh, and start into my spiel about the importance of conversions.  Suddenly he says, "Well of course.  Kind of forgot about that equation."

The equation he is referring to is the "impressions turn into click-throughs, turn into site visitors, turn into bookings".  So it is as much about what you do with the visitors once they are on your site, as it is about how much traffic you generate to the site.  It is something that in the 'heat of the battle' is often forgotten because some of us are judged on characteristics such as number of visitors, or impressions.

So always remember, the key statistic is the number of bookings.  Work backwards from there and see how you can influence the numbers in the equation - whether conversion or audience.