Web Wednesday Singapore - 2008-02-20 - "Show me the eMoney!"

As I mentioned in my post last week, we had the inaugural Web Wednesday Singapore here last Wednesday. It was the first one, so the three "(dis)organizers" - Kevin Tan, Andy Tu and I - just wanted to get a small group together to get some feedback and determine the viability of this kind of event. So we sent out personal invites that included something like this:



*****
Hi Everybody,

It has been a long time since we have had a gathering of like minded individuals for a night of drinks, catching up, and networking. The famous (or rather, infamous) Web Wednesday has now landed on our fair shores. The first one is next Wednesday (20th Feb) at 6-8pm at the J Bar at the M Hotel. Topic of discussion 'Show Me The e-Money!' by Joe Nguyen, Director of Global e-Commerce of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels.

This WILL NOT be:

1) a sales pitch
2) a long speech

It WILL be:

1) informal
2) interactive
3) alcoholic

Hope to see you guys there.
*****

It was a good showing of about 20 people ranging from publishers to advertisers to agencies.

We also try to start discussion by getting people to speak. So as you can see, the first one was me: "Show me the eMoney!".

So I just put together about 10 slides. Download PDF of them here.

But the main one is this one:

What this shows is that:

a) In all of 2007, 58.2% of our traffic is from Search Engines
b) 20.0% are from other site; many of which also derive traffic from Search Engines so indirectly we get that traffic from Search Engines.
c) Of the direct search engine traffic, 23% is from PPC and 77% is from natural search results (SEO)

Since our online revenue source pretty much mirrors that of our traffic sources (within a few percentage points), we are very dependent on search engines. I would say over 75% directly and indirectly of our revenue are attributable to search engines.

So there's the eMoney.... it's in the search engines. Here's an old article on how important Google is to a business and you will see what I mean.

Also, remember this slide below from my posting about "Online Travel Agents: Can we live without them?":


I still think that search engines actually contribute closer to 90% of my online revenue. I am still checking out the 21.8% of my traffic attributed to "Typed/Bookmarked". I do not believe we get that much loyal traffic from this segment. There must be some error in the system or tagging process. Something related to the 302 & 301 redirects...

As I have been saying, "the internet is infinitely measurable, but is (- hence -) never 100% correct!".

Anyhow, can't wait until the next Web Wednesday Singapore in March.

UPDATE: Web Wednesday Singapore Website is up.