Is your website a fiasco?

How can you determine if your website is, most definitely, a failure? The common belief is, if your website has no visitors, it’s a sinking ship. No, this is not true. If your website has no, or little traffic, all it means is that your site has no incoming links, no one knows about it, no one spreads the word, no one advertises it. How can you know if product ‘A’ is good, if no one tried it, and no shop sells it?
So lack of traffic is not a parameter, what is the right factor then? If you ask me, a website that has no returning visitors traffic, is what I’d call a failure. Now you gonna ask why, since everyone always measure website’s success by the number of unique visitors, rather than returning. The thing is, if I advertise now on some super popular website, I’d drive 10,000 unique visitors a day to my website, only thanks to the advert banner that looked tempting and tricked people into clicking. However, if the next day or week none of these thousands will come back, what does it say about my site? That it was so interesting so that no one bookmarked it? That it was so fascinating that no one dropped by later to check for updates? That it had so much unique content that people just left and forgot about it?
Yes, I do thinking that returning visitors is the invisible, yet powerful feedback, an indirect way to tell the site’s owns - congrats, your site is a success and is worth coming back to.

You can normally see “returning visitors” in blogs though the Feed Burner, which displays the amount of daily feed readers of the blog. The data is, however, not very accurate as it only refers to bookmarks and feed readers. Not all the feed readers go to the website, (some just read through the feed and don’t bother to drop by). Returning visitors who followed other paths do not count, so here is an example of returning visitors of this blog, compared to those that count as feed readers, the difference is not big, but it is present.
Feed Burner Readers vs. Stats returning visitors:

Just to sum up the analysis: Yesterday I had 106 returning visitors, yet only 70 subscribed readers, while on Tuesday, there were only 62 returning visitors and again, 70 readers. So if you wanna calculate the average, just sum up both and divide by two.
My site represents rather avarage stats, normally out of every 100 visitors, only a few come back later. Why is the world so cruel? Because, unless you have very very targetted traffic, and unless you provide a mind blowingly unique content that grabs the visitors by the throat and at the same time showers them with free stuff and useful downloads, they don’t really have a reason to return.

So, if you have no traffic yet, don’t panic, it does not say anything about the quality and importance of your website on the net (yet). Moreover, if you have 20-30 visitors a day and no returning visitors, don’t panic either, your website was to exposed to big enough audience (yet). But, if your website is getting more than 2k hits daily and no one ever bothers to come back… Oh well, probably it’s CRAP