Global Direct Investment Solutions

Corporate Development for a Networked World

OnTheShortList.com     SurgeUSA.org

ShortListNews.com

Monthly website visit statistics 2004 to 2007

Bruce Donnelly   bruce@gdi-solutions.com    (Biography)

In just 3 years after our launch in 2004, this online reach already exceeded some of the specialty magazines in this niche market which have been circulated for free to 25,000 to 45,000 recipients (at many millions of dollars in advertiser expense) for the last 20-50 years.

In May 2007 our visits hit a new record level - 58,850.  In June 2007 we hit 61,622 followed by 57491 in July - without the cost of producing and distributing a glossy magazine, and without using large email broadcasts, direct mail, or trade show exhibits to attract visits.  Our visits primarily come through Google search results as visitors discover our information resources and useful tools which are relevant to their interests.  Our websites were designed to help them find what they need for their own project plans - not to be magazine article archives.

We are not a publisher pushing ads or advertorial content repeatedly at the same subscription base at advertiser expense.  Our focus is to draw in relevant visitors as they search for what they need in this niche market, particularly while actively working on capital investment project plans involving research to evaluate new business locations.  Like a concierge service, we independently help executives to find what they need in this market - both through our websites and as a personal referral service.  The small fees we charge for our work to highlight specific areas or services enables us to maintain the extensive networks of contacts and timely market knowledge necessary to provide a better service to our visitors in that regard, rather than to print and distribute magazines.

The publishers in this niche market typically promote their websites heavily to their subscriber base through such things as email broadcasts with links to attract visits, but their monthly visit levels generally don't greatly exceed their print circulation.

We had 50,315 visits in November 2006, after 52,626 in October and 58,453 in September 2006 - a level achieved again in May, June, and July 2007.  This was up from the brief dip to 45,219 in August 2006 after averaging 50,000 per month in May, June, and July 2006.  We averaged 51,000 for the last 6 months of 2006, so we were fairly confident that we would exceed 600,000 visits in 2007.  The record September 2006 pace would have been 700,000 per year - our marketing goal for 2008 as roughly 22% growth over 2006.

 We expect strong growth to resume in 2009 as word of this resource continues to spread and as we expand our marketing initiatives in our targeted niche market after we launched our new ShortListNews.com website with powerful new research tools for 2008.

In January 2007, we already achieved 55,308 visits - a 50% increase over January 2006.  February 2007 was 49,616 (28 days), up 30% over a year ago.  March 2007 maintained this pace at 52,807 visits.  There was a minor decline in April 2007 (30 days, Easter holiday, more weekend days) to 48,834 visits, but the bottom line is that 2007 remained fairly consistently above record 2006 levels until year-end.

As a niche B2B marketplace for the support of capital investment projects, which are related to long-term economic cycles, the volume of visit activity should peak at some point (or decline as fears of a recession increase - since capital investment plans may be deferred in such a scenario, triggering less project research and planning work).  It's just difficult to predict when this rapid growth will flatten out.  We think it may be quite viable to achieve a pace above 75,000 visits per month by the end of 2008 if the US economy remains strong, which is roughly 50% growth over the 50,000+ pace of 2006 - 2007.  We don't think a growth rate of 70% as in recent years is sustainable because the number of corporate expansion projects being planned around the world each year is eventually a limiting factor for relevant visits.  Our goal is to attract relevant visitors, rather than to simply maximize the number of visitors through various marketing gimmicks, because we make our money through the delivery of services for corporate executives with real expansion projects rather than through ad impressions.

Our analysis of the quarterly CEO Survey results from the Business Roundtable may also be of interest.

We recently (October 2007) published updated analysis of project trends from 1994 - 2006.

We also published an October 2006 - 2007 analysis of regional and US state directory visits on our website.

The visit statistics reflect the diverse business location interests of our visitors - in the USA and worldwide.

Our April 2006 newsletter (4 pages with graphs) summarizes 12 year US project trends.

Our 7 year analysis of investment project trends by state may also be of interest.

We have also published an analysis of economic development lead generation costs.

Those who support our independent work sometimes ask us about website statistics.  We therefore provide detailed and timely monthly visit statistics here for quick reference.  We know of no publisher or service provider in this niche market who openly shares comparable details about their website reach.

Our focus is on personal service, providing well-qualified referrals to executives and their professional advisors for major capital investment project interests.  The flow of visitors to our website may be of interest to our supporters, however, as an indicator of our market reach and how quickly this service has become established as a unique and valuable resource in this niche market.

This website was set up quietly at the end of 2002, and then improved through initial research work during 2003 before being promoted in our target market in 2004 and 2005.  We expected 320,000 visitors in 2005 (27,000/month average) from early in the year.  We then grew this to a consistent 600,000+ pace (50,000+ per month) during 2006.

After only two years of active promotion of this website, our daily visits were soon above a 500,000 per year pace in 2006.  This is comparable to, or exceeds, the websites of leading magazines in this niche which have been circulated to 25,000 - 40,000+ free subscribers for 20 - 40 years.  For example, one of the leading magazines - Expansion Management - reported 28,000 visits per month late in 2005.  Unlike audited circulation statistics for advertisers, publishers do not generally release statistics for their website visits to readily compare to the details we share.  One of the market leaders, Site Selection, reported 57,502 visits in March 2006.  As above, we reported 47,695 that same month - or 83% of their total - but we hit 58,453 by September.

Our 2005 online advertising campaign (promoting this website through others in response to relevant searches) delivered over 3,200,000 ad impressions in nine months.  If we maintained the pace of our September - November 2005 test of our online ad campaign, we could reach an estimated 5,000,000+ ad impressions per year.  Our aim was to expand our reach beyond 500,000 visits per year in 2006 (42,000 per month by comparison to 27,000 in 2005 as shown in the  chart above).  We already achieved that goal by March 2006 - without such intensive online advertising in 2006.  We will test the campaign again in 2007 after some scheduled improvements are implemented.  That should help us to exceed our ambitious 2007 growth goals.

We are not a magazine publisher, and our work does not compete with them.  We serve a similar target market in very different ways, however, so their website "reach" is also quite relevant as a simple benchmark.  They reach their base of subscribers repeatedly with glossy magazines designed to help attract visitors to their websites and help their advertisers to be memorable to their target audience for interesting stories about this market.  Each such magazine typically costs all of their advertisers a total of $1 - $2+ million per year in advertising to produce and distribute these magazines for free to readers.  Some are largely "advertorial" in nature, with limited independent market research, analysis, and reporting beyond their base of advertisers.

That adds up to millions of dollars spent each year to attract relatively few projects as areas promote themselves to a 40,000+ "qualified" subscriber base which often includes many mid-level managers or executives at very small companies.

We specialize in well-qualified referrals for top executives, not publishing and distributing a magazine, so this website was designed as an open reference tool for location research work by executives and business advisors.  We designed this from the start to take advantage of the capabilities of powerful and intuitive search engines such as Google, as shown by our site search features, so that available information about business locations anywhere can be researched quickly in a globally consistent way. 

In summary, we personally introduce executives to useful contacts for their own project plans, as opposed to producing an interesting magazine about what is happening in this market in general.  This is more analogous to direct response and referral work, somewhat like an independent concierge service or marketplace which organizes useful knowledge and contacts to help executives find what they want at the time, rather than by publishing ads and interesting content at them.

•  Daily visit statistics comparing 2006, 2005 and 2004 visits
  • higher visit levels on business days (the most relevant visitors) = 1800+
  • 2006 total visits for 12 months          = 573,665  or 47,805 / month = up 77%
  • 2005 total visits for 12 months          = 324,413  or 27,034 / month = up 61%
  • 2004 total visits for 12 months          = 201,982  or 16,832 / month

   

•  Global pattern of regional contact page visits, including 2005 data (Q1, Q2, 9 mo)
  •  North American regional contact page visits
  •  Asia Pacific regional contact page visits
  •  2005 and 2004 vs. 2003 year-end regional contact page visits

See more details of our data analysis below, or further graphics on the above pages.

More information :

•  for Professional Service Providers
•  for Economic Development professionals

This complements the GDI-Solutions content with field research work and custom search tools, as well as some new services designed to support marketing work by communities and professional service providers, including optional field research trips and reports in cooperation with top site consultants.

Although even 48,000 visits per month may not seem like much by comparison to major business magazine publishers, the ones specialized in this niche generally report 25,000 - 40,000+ subscribers and website visitors per month.  Our reach is therefore quite significant for a highly specialized website after only two years of operation without the multi-million dollar production and distribution budget of a magazine (at advertiser expense).  For more details, refer to our analysis of market reach costs.

This website was set up quietly in Sept 2002, with very selective magazine advertising, events, and other marketing work to promote the site during 2003 and 2004 as our research and development work advanced.  Data transfer bandwidth (gigabytes of content downloaded by users each month) has now quadrupled since mid-2003 without just adding large graphics files for our visitors to wait to download.

The highest percentage of visitors per month find this website through Google, plus a much smaller number are referred from other search engines.  Others are in response to our direct promotional efforts and online advertising campaigns we developed in 2005 to reach executives and advisors who would value our independent capabilities to assist them with capital investment project plans.

Are you really curious about trends in our visit statistics?  Here's the daily picture.

•  Daily website visit comparison between 2004 and 2005

•  Online advertising campaign statistics
•  Patterns of regional directory page visits worldwide (user interests)
•  Invest USA directory (state "long lists" with local website links)
•  Invest in Europe directory - not limited to EU countries
•  News about us (chronology of progress)
•  Highlights (recognizing support of our work)
•  Contacts (in global regions and professions)
•  GUIDE Area Profiles (executive summary, links)
•  GUIDE Service Profiles (professional capabilities)
•  GUIDE Area Surveys (contacts, reported benefits)

We do not use "cookies" or a registration process to track the interests of individual users of our website.  We use standard website statistics to periodically review patterns of usage so that we can continuously improve those pages which seem to be of greatest interest.

We welcome suggestions and relevant reciprocal links.

This is reflected in the analysis of home page visits relative to other pages of content.  As of October 2005, Google had indexed over 650 pages of content on this site, typically catching any changes within days.  There are more than 20,000 relevant external links to sources of information worldwide in this niche.  That is growing at a pace of around 5000 new external links per year as we find more relevant resources to share openly through our continuous market research work and networking.  In effect, this is now a "megastore" for finding useful resources quickly - anywhere in the world - in this niche market.

We focus on the relevance and response of visitors to our work, such as how many executives or advisors we assist with their project interests in response to enquiries received through our website, rather than how many Internet users may look at our website.

We have also tried to design the website so that visitors can quickly find what they are seeking - rather than force them to visit multiple pages full of blinking banner ads and buttons to find content and links that are basically limited to recent advertisers.  This is a far more comprehensive global resource.

Leading publishers in this niche typically distribute 15,000 - 40,000+ magazines per month on a "qualified" free subscription basis, with some better qualified than others.  Other general business media may offer much larger circulation levels, but they may simply be reaching far more irrelevant readers, rather than more good prospects.

For example, the Financial Times newspaper reaches over 425,000 readers worldwide, and attracts millions of website visits, but many would not be involved in any significant way in business location selection decisions for capital investment projects.  They would simply have other interests.  Since there are only a few thousand major capital investment projects worldwide each year, one needs to reach a very targeted audience rather than a vast one.

In a sales pitch to potential online advertisers for 2006, Expansion Management magazine reported 28,000 visits per month in late 2005.  We averaged 27,000+ for all of 2005, as shown above, in our second year.  By contrast, Expansion Management is part of the respected Penton Media group, and has been published for over 20 years.

Site Selection magazine reported 57,502 visits for the month of March 2006.  We had 47,694 that month, as shown in the chart above, and that rose to 58,453 in September.  Site Selection has been in circulation for over 50 years as the leader in this market.  After only three years of operation, we already attract an average of around 50,000 visits per month, which is still growing, with visit levels consistently more than 50% above the same period in the prior year.

In summary, the leading development magazines in this niche market have reported 28,000 - 57,000+ user visits per month to their related websites, although details are generally vague (unlike audited magazine circulation statistics).    We focus on effective response to the specific business location search efforts and interests of executives and their advisors, rather than publishing magazines or newsletters for distribution to a direct mail list.  Note that subscription renewals, e-mail broadcasts with article links, and other techniques prod their subscribers to visit their websites, whereas most of our visitors come from Google or other searches because the content is relevant to their current interests.  We are not, for example, prodding a large base of subscribers to visit our website again and again just to view news articles.

As a magazine advertiser, one pays a premium to potentially "reach" and attract the attention, interest ("recall"), and response from a limited number of prospects within their current subscriber base.  Magazine advertising rates can typically run between $2000 and $12,000 or more per month (from small black and white ads to full pages in prominent placements).  Online advertising costs in such channels may cost between $500 and $2000 per month or more, although the costs for such things as banner and button ads have generally declined as advertisers have evaluated their actual effectiveness for much more than brand name or logo recall. Click-through rates are typically very low, and those who follow banner ads may not really be the targeted prospects.  Rotating ads may miss the target completely.

General business magazines with larger circulation, or those targeted at the most senior executives, can cost considerably more than this for a single ad, and typically have no reader service process because they are more commonly used in brand campaigns rather than for direct response ads.

During the last year, this site attracted many millions of "hits", which we regard as a fairly irrelevant or meaningless statistic.

We only mention that because we have seen very well-established economic development magazine websites, in business for many more years than ourselves, report similar or larger numbers as though they were significant.

What do these hits really mean?  The number of "hits" can be driven up by the number of graphic images which have to be downloaded for a page each time that it is accessed, so the total can reflect page design choices more than relevant user visit activity.  Hits basically mean that the web page has requested something to display from the server - which can include multiple graphics, rotating banner ads, or other content.  Viewing a single page briefly can therefore result in many "hits".

Since our site deliberately minimizes the use of graphic elements per page, our "hits" will be much lower than sites which may cram many graphics and advertisements onto pages which their site users may need to visit repeatedly.

Another metric of this nature is "bandwidth", or the total size of all the data transferred to users.  A site with many large graphics will therefore have much higher bandwidth statistics for a given number of actual visitors.  Streaming videos (such as those "skip intro" presentations on home pages) require a lot of communications bandwidth to transfer the images, and are therefore very slow on dial-up access rather than high-speed connections.  That can annoy rather than impress impatient visitors.  Senior executives are not generally known for their patience at watching unsolicited video presentations.  What works well for some target audiences may not be a good idea for top executives and their advisors.

Consider carefully how the magazines in this niche differ

Some magazines in this niche also do not publish circulation audits (such as BPA statistics), and may distribute copies as unsolicited promotional mailings to direct marketing database lists, rather than to an ongoing base of many subscribers who have recently confirmed (opt-in) that they are willing to receive the free magazine, whether or not they actually look at the content very often or have potential project interests.

Virtually none in this niche attract paid subscriptions by executives, even for a token price, which can be an indicator of how much they are actually valued and used by subscribers.  That should tell you something.  How many executives would even pay $10 per year to receive these nice glossy magazines, in which the editorial content may be quite obviously favorable or directly tied to advertising sales?  By contrast, they often pay very significant subscription fees for media or websites which are clearly relevant to their interests.

Some of the magazines exercise commendable editorial integrity as journalists, doing good research work to provide well-written articles about important issues and timely news.  A few, however, are basically advertorials or direct mail promotional pieces, willing to publish almost anything plausible which their advertisers will pay them to say.  It is one thing to do that in a way which is obvious to the reader, but biased content is sometimes presented as though it was actually objective reporting by an independent, professional journalist.

If an area wants to make a good impression on potential investors, which type of publication is likely to have a greater impact?  Is it more valuable to publish an obviously biased but favorable presentation, or to obtain more objective coverage through a more professional channel which has developed credibility among potential investors and their advisors?

It is noteworthy that some of the "advertorial" media rarely attract advertising by any of the many professional service providers in this niche.  Instead, these magazines attract advertisers who may be less selective about careful promotion of their "brand".  Some of the service providers are happy to be quoted in almost any media which can raise their visibility among potential clients, but where do they invest in advertising to reach new clients?

By design, we expect users to visit few pages to find what they want on this website - and to spend relatively little time on them - because that is simply the nature of the top executives and advisors we serve and the service we want to deliver to them.  If they want our help, the contact details are right at the top of every page.  Otherwise, we have tried to organize the website and such tools as the custom Google site to make it really easy to go quickly to exactly what they want to find.

They don't have time to read through the overwhelming amount of information which is readily available in this market to those who know where to find it.  They just want to quickly find what they need at the time, and we have therefore organized a vast amount of "on the shelf" resources in this "store" so that they can find and buy what they want, with or without our direct intervention to help them find what they are seeking.  This response-oriented service, somewhat analogous to a concierge with useful market knowledge and contacts, is designed to complement our proactive marketing work and networking to reach more such executives and advisors.

Visitors should be able to navigate or "Google site search" quickly and easily to those few pages (among hundreds) which are most relevant to their current interests, rather than wade through many useless pages before finding what they are seeking (or giving up).  We have tried to organize information about over 25,000 resources worldwide in this niche with search engine optimization in mind so that it is very easy to find such content in a matter of seconds as a unique global service.

Unlike most websites, our focus is on the content at the "back end" of such a search, by sharing more detailed local market knowledge in cooperation with those who choose to support our work.  Rather than deliver many irrelevant ads up front, as on a home page, we want to highlight areas and services as visitors seek information about them.  Like point-of-sale merchandising, we want to make it easy to find the relevant "products" and "buy" directly, rather than push lots of irrelevant ads at every visitor to our site.  Once users find a relevant page, other related content of likely interest should be readily available there.

They may simply stumble across a relevant page through a web search, quickly realize that we can help them, and just send us an e-mail or give us a call about their specific interests.  If they find what they are seeking, and navigate off our site within a minute to accomplish what they actually wanted to do when they found is, is that such a bad thing?  In other words, we are not an advertising site, trying to get visitors to see as many banner or other ads as possible.  To the extent that we share ads through our website, it is through meaningful content directly related to such ads, such as to support the search process.

The value isn't in visit statistics, page views, hits, ad "impressions" or other activity metrics.  These may be interesting indicators of website activity, but our focus is on growing the flow of successful project referrals and the reach of this website among top executives worldwide and their professional advisors, rather than simply growing our website activity statistics.

How many company executives are you really trying to reach?

If you think about it, the larger firms are the types of companies which most often have the financial resources and multi-state or multinational growth interests to create projects of 50 - 100 jobs or more beyond their existing locations.

When many millions of dollars and critical business changes are at stake, executives and advisors may find relevant (even if obviously biased) magazine content to be interesting background and helpful, but they won't base project decisions on it.

Such media are now confronted by many Internet resources which can be used to gather potentially useful information which was much hard to find in the past, especially in the early stages of planning.  As the planning process moves forward to local project details, however, the general published content becomes less relevant to their specific interests.  Our approach from the start has been to make it easier to reach relevant local content.

If one takes a closer look at the magazine circulation statistics, a typical pattern is that only around 5,000 - 10,000 copies (some more, some less) go to executives in any role at companies with more than 500 employees.  A large percentage of the copies may go to firms with fewer than 250 employees, where it is considerably easier to boost the circulation statistics among presidents and top executives.  In any case, few "C-level" subscribers at large companies are likely to scrutinize many pages and ads each month, or respond directly to the ads, or keep their copies and refer back to them.

By contrast, if somebody (subscriber or not) visits the related website, they may be actively looking for something which does not appear in a recent issue which they have actually kept, but there is rarely any easy way to qualify who is visiting such websites, or their project decision authority (without annoying visitors through a registration process, or perhaps through opt-in features and newsletters to gather such information).

Are you impressed by ad impressions?  See our own ad campaign statistics.

Websites which publish banners or other advertising will often report the number of "impressions", or the number of page or "ad views".  Keep in mind, however, that page views and ad views can potentially be quite different things, as multiple ads (and thus multiple impressions) can be served onto a single page view, and they can also be rotated fairly rapidly so that the number of ad views increases even while the user is not doing anything except leaving the page open in the browser while new ads blink past, rather than typically just serving new ads whenever the user navigates to a new page.

In any case, some of the more prominent development magazine websites in this niche have reported 10,000 - 12,000 "impressions" per day.  Their "impression" statistics can also be influenced by site design choices, however.

For example, if users typically have to go through a series of small pages with minimal useful content on each in order to reach anything of significance for their interests, then the "impressions" per visit may be inflated.  They may have to visit 5 or 6 pages or more just to find what they are seeking, rather than go straight to it.  We don't believe that making a website more inconvenient to users just to serve more ad impressions is a good strategy.

The user may therefore spend more time on the website searching for what is wanted, but is that really a good thing for any purpose other than to present more chances to serve advertising "impressions" and charge advertisers more?  Many more ad impressions get delivered as promised at the agreed price, but how does the user react to them?

That also doesn't necessarily mean that the ads displayed on any given page had much relevance to the interests of the visitor.  Some websites do offer the option to only have ads appear on very specific pages, in which case most visitors would never even see the ads, but those few "impressions" who do might actually be much better prospects.

Who are we trying to reach?

While some smaller firms are also growing rapidly and can create major projects, that is more the exception than the rule.  They are more likely to do projects involving local expansion at existing locations, or set up relatively small operations in new locations, because they generally lack the need or resources to do more than that at any given time.  In short, they would have to be growing at a dramatic pace relative to their size, with the exception of relocation projects.

In any case, few areas actually have any reason to try to reach 40,000+ executives in North America. There are only a few thousand significant projects per year, and many of these are not "mobile" among potential location alternatives.  It is just very challenging  to attract the attention of these few thousand key executives at the right time, which is why our focus from the start has been to provide them with a very powerful tool to help them pursue their interests, anywhere in the world, very quickly and easily.

Rather than trying to reach these executives by pushing glossy magazines and display advertising at them, our approach is to build relationships over time by helping them to find effective solutions to their project interests, quickly and easily.  We aren't trying to become their preferred magazine publisher.  We want to be their trusted advisor.

One "qualified lead" we received recently from a leading development magazine was from a local laundromat owner who was considering a move to a different building in their town.  That is simply not the focus of our work, although he could have found more relevant local contacts directly through our website.

This is just one of many amusing leads we have seen over the years as an advertiser.  Of course, we also get some "waste of time" responses to our website, but we don't pass them along to our contacts as "qualified leads" for follow-up action.

To be fair, there are occasionally some very good prospects which are identified by these media.  The problem is that, at any given time, the flow of such prospects for any given area is likely to be quite small - and these "leads" get distributed widely to recent advertisers in every state or country of interest as identified in the information request.

Since the scope of our work is national and global rather than state or local or limited to one type of service provider, however, we have therefore done some advertising very selectively for our own "brand" promotion purposes in recent years, and would expect to do so in the future as well - in both the leading niche publications and other valuable media for reaching our target audience, with a focus on those who support our work.

Professional Internet-based "reader service" - without the magazine

Our design from the start was very different from the advertising focus of publishers.

We are not a publisher selling advertising by providing some useful content on which ads can be served, and providing some marginal reader response "bingo card" services to help readers reach advertisers or request information from many of them at once so that more ads can be sold.

We don't have junior staff or telemarketers calling readers to "qualify" their information requests just to validate the content of a response card or website form (largely to figure out how many advertisers should receive that "lead").

Instead, our focus is to help executives and advisors to find what they are seeking in this niche, like the operator of a very helpful and convenient store rather than the media through which the store operator may choose to promote that service.

We publish useful content because it helps the executives and advisors we serve to act on their investment interests, rather than because it helps us to sell more advertising.

When we talk to executives about their interest, it reflects many years of professional project support experience through personal meetings with executives at over a thousand companies about their interests, and contact with thousands of others over the years.

We are not trying to distribute their enquiries as "leads" to as many advertisers as possible.  We have already made it easy for them to directly reach many contacts.

Our focus, if they ask for our assistance, is to personally introduce them to a short list or a single contact which is very relevant to their interests.

We want executives and their advisors, in hindsight, to look back and think, "Wow, that was really helpful!  They knew how to find exactly what I was seeking!  They understood what was really important to our project, and offered very helpful suggestions!  That saved us a lot of time and money and effort, and moved our plans forward quickly."

That is not the usual function or capability of magazine reader-response services.

How do you win friends among top executives?

Maximizing the user time spent on the website, or the number of page visits per user session, or the number of "ad impressions" or "hits" on our site is not our purpose.

Our goal is to quickly get each user of our site to the most relevant content we can deliver which, thanks to such things as the powerful Google site search feature and many convenient navigational links, may take only a few seconds.

From the very start, our focus was to make it easy to find relevant content for potential business locations and service providers in this niche market, anywhere in the world, in less than one minute over a dial-up Internet connection.

That isn't always possible, but the point of this goal is that we don't really expect top executives to spend ten or twenty minutes or more exploring the hundreds of pages of content and thousands of available external links on our website to potentially useful resources.  We expect them to either quickly find what they are seeking, or just call us so that we can help them to find it.

Rather than feed lots of advertising images at users on many pages, we present such images very selectively in places where they may be very relevant to user interests, and thus helpful as a visual shortcut to differentiate and reach potentially useful content.

For example, we can display relevant advertising images in our "On The Short List" feature reports, or on the "Highlights" page, or on individual GUIDE Area Profiles or Service Profiles, or through our Surveys, Ad Recall and Event Recall sections..

In this context, our use of advertising images is more analogous to helpful "point of sale" displays which highlight specific products in the relevant section of a store, linking the wider "brand" marketing campaigns to the active search for a specific "product" by a motivated potential buyer or "shopper" with a some interest in that product category.

The user who visits such pages, and sees any such advertising, has already "clicked through" to reach this part of the "store" because it is of interest for some reason.  The number of such users for any given area or service will therefore be much smaller than the general website visit statistics, but far more valuable for relevant advertisers than simply having a banner ad rotating on irrelevant pages to a much wider audience.

How do we define success?  Successful investment projects.

Our business model is based on making it easy for executives and advisors to find what they want very quickly and easily, rather than on serving a lot of irrelevant advertising content before they find anything useful.  Our measure of success is not based on selling more advertising on this website or maintaining many free subscribers to justify high advertising prices.  We're trying to drive down the cost and time it takes to connect active investors with people who are well-qualified to help them.

An ideal "user session" for us would be a simple Google web or site search which takes someone directly to the most relevant page within seconds, where that user readily finds what is needed along with helpful related content or links, and then either calls us directly to discuss how we can be of further assistance, or simply uses that openly available information to pursue their interests directly with the appropriate contacts.  Even if we can never identify that user or investment project as a way to justify advertising or the sharing of more content on this website by the organizations we list, that's OK - because we achieve our objective of helping such investors or their advisors to quickly and easily reach the contacts they need in this niche.

That makes it more likely that such investors or professional advisors will return to our websites or contact us if they ever need help again to pursue similar business investment project interests in the future.

Find your service on our site in seconds - then, let's make it better by sharing more knowledge together, which creates even more relevant ways to find you

Our "Highlights" page and others can help to draw the attention of users to a specific area or service, but the many navigational links and the power of the Google site search feature are intended to make it easy for users to browse through the "aisles of the store" very quickly and easily for anything of potential relevance to their interests. 

We don't present lots of ads as though we really expected top executives to click through on them.  Instead, we try to present very relevant ads which may be helpful to users, which is why we favor the way that the Google search process can present potentially relevant ads to users from sources beyond the scope of our website content.

Try our Site Search feature.  Can a user of our site find useful content about your area or service capabilities quickly and easily?  Let's talk about how to provide even better content so that more relevant users can quickly discover what you have to offer.  Call us at 847-304-4655 (Chicago) to discuss what we can do for you.