MSN has a news story online this morning citing various idiosyncratic measures of economic recovery. Given last year’s crash that caught even Warren Buffet unawares, these grass-roots gauges- including spikes in expensive cupcake sales- are as valid as a measure of economic strength, or continued doldrums, as anything else.
Even we have some measures that we use to gauge, if not overall economic performance, than at least what our own business portends. No one will be surprised to learn that we track hits on our website very carefully. What might come as a surprise, however, is that we don’t find any connection between an overall spike in site hits and a spike in sales. What we find more significant is when during the week that we have site hits. For instance, if we see quite a disproportionate amount of our internet activity occurring on the weekends, we believe that it is people surfing with no particular objective in mind, beyond general interest. Oddly, we engender our greatest number of website-related inquiries during this time- my Monday morning is given over to responding to these- but our rate of sales based on weekend inquiries is quite low. If, on the other hand, our site hits are greater during the working week, we find that this generates a significant amount of business both from private clients and interior designers. Moreover, we find that browsers with money to spend also take the time to browse during the week- not at the weekend. This certainly makes sense considering interior designers: their legwork, including all shopping trips, even to virtual shops on the internet, occurs during weekdays. Evenings and particularly weekends are very often given over to client meetings. While increases in our site traffic during the week don’t always translate into more internet inquiries during the week, we always find that actual visits to our galleries increase. When we inquire of new visitors to our galleries, they with nearly 100% frequency tell us that they visited our site precedent to an actual gallery visit.
While the maintenance of our website- and maintenance of placement on the major search engines- is important to us, the most telling indication portending good sales is actual gallery visits. We log in every single gallery visitor- who they were, what they were interested in, price quotes- absolutely everything germane to the visit, even, if appropriate, what they were wearing. Call me old fashioned, but while coiffure may not signify, jewelry and handbags do. For the gentlemen, Prada loafers don’t mean much, but we can always spot a DAKS jacket. This is probably our most important internal management tool, with our gallery log a record of subsequent activity. It is accessible for review and data entry by all gallery staff, with each week maintained as a separate document in 12 point type. When our Weekly Report extends to in excess of 3 full pages, we know some good sales are likely to follow. Although typically the longer the report indicates that we have had more gallery visitors, this is not always so. Occasionally the report can run long because we’ve had some pretty heavy-duty gallery visits- lots of interest in lots of items. So, rather than just a measure of gallery visitors, the length of the report reflects the earnest nature of those visits.
Much more palaver on this subject and I then will begin to give away proprietary information. Suffice to say these are informal measures, but things we take seriously. Moreover, while Wall Street and the other money centers are the big stage upon which economic dramas are publically played out, the larger economic engine is one that employs every individual consumer and every business, even small ones like ours. We firmly believe that when we can sense economic trends as well as anyone can. The one thing we know for sure, amidst all this, is that when the news media reports on any trend, it is, in this age of information, already old news.