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Yesterday Steve had to do something that no Webmaster here in adult is ever likely to have to do. I mean no adult web directory is ever likely to call up you or me and hit you with a sales pitch about why you should fork out heaps of dollars to be featured on that directory now are they?

If you were working in mainstream though you could easily get quite a few calls from marketers selling advertising, or as they put it - a premium listing, in an online directory. Because we work both sides of the fence we occasionally get those calls and we even have one or two clients who pass those calls on to us so that we can advise them on whether or not it's worth the cost of advertising.

And that's why Steve sat there for 10 minutes listening to the sales pitch but at the end of it the recommendation to the client will be that the likely return is not going to be worth spending money on. The directory is claiming 400,000 page views a month with around 15 pages per visitor (according to Alexa), advertising on television, radio and billboards; bidding on keywords and great organic results too but still it isn't worth it.

Apart from the fact that the media advertising is quite limited ... and we knew that already ... they aren't actually bidding on any keywords that are important to our client. But what about those wonderful figures, 400,000 page views a month are certainly impressive ... but how many of those page views were going to the category that would interest our client?

That was something the marketing guy couldn't tell us and there was another figure that he couldn't tell us ... and probably wouldn't have told us even if he had known about it. That figure is the bounce rate ... the number of people who hit the site and left almost immediately. That's a figure that's very important because it tells you the true number of people who are looking at a site.

Page view numbers are wonderful when it comes to marketing advertising on a site to someone who doesn't fully understand what they really mean. There's nothing quite like a huge number to impress people but it's unlikely that those huge numbers tell the whole truth.

It's the net number - page views minus the number of people who leave immediately - that's the real number you should be interested in. And you should be interested in that number because that's the number that tells you how many people are taking the time to go through your site and that's the number that will also help give you some idea of how effective your marketing is.

If you're getting lots of net page views but very few clicks through to your sponsor then you need to take a good look at your marketing techniques. If your marketing isn't engaging the people who visit your site then you need to change it and develop it into something that will get people interesting in looking at what your sponsor is offering.

And while you're looking at the page view numbers also look at the bounce rate numbers too because they're more than just a number you can use to arrive at another more meaningful number. The bounce rate will help you see how many people are missing out on seeing your marketing message and that's something that you need to consider.

Why are people hitting your site and then leaving almost immediately. Why did they come to your site and then find it so uninteresting that they left before taking the time to look further? What do you need to do to lower those bounce rate numbers? How can you make your site more engaging for all those people who weren't encouraged to look further?

And another question you should be asking yourself is what those people who almost instantly leave your site see before they actually hit the back button? What could you put in front of their eyes that might encourage them to follow a link to your sponsor if they want to leave instead of hitting the back button?

Of course, if you want to know your bounce rate then you're going to need something more than the stats package that comes with most hosting plans. Most of the packages that will show you figures like bounce rate tend to cost a lot of money but Google ... that company that I like to dislike ... offers their Google Analytics software free of charge.

The last time I looked at their terms of service there was no exclusions for adult related sites so it certainly could be useful for you ... especially if you want to add some meaning to otherwise meaningless figures.