Most brokerages have come to realize that most of their leads come from online sources. However, a great deal of confusion remains regarding Internet advertising. Much of this confusion stems from poor understanding of the terminology. Though initially these terms may seem confusing they are in fact very simple.

With Internet advertisement I focus of three statistics;

Unique Visitors: This is a count of the number of individual people coming to the site in a give month. Each person is counted once even if they return to the site multiple times. Unique Visitors would be comparable to the total number of individuals who use an overpass. They are counted only once even if they use the overpass once in the morning and once in the evening.

Page Views: This is also often discussed in terms of visits. A Page View is counted every time a visitor enters the site. The same individual is counted each time he visits the website. So statistic would be comparable to the total number of trips taken on an overpass. A delivery driver would be counted 10 times if he had to keep using the overpass throughout the day. This is useful in determining the total amount of traffic that the website is getting.

Average Stay: This measures the engagement of an Internet user. You also may hear this described as the stickiness of the site. This number represents how long the average site visitor stays on the website. There is no comparative measurement for magazines. To make a real world comparison this is how long the driver stays on the overpass.

Look at where the Internet users are and what they are doing by using free tools such as www.alexa.com and www.compete.com. Don’t trust just one source, but rather check data with multiple sources.