I will admit to being obsessed with our web statistics.  We have learned so much about who is visiting our website and how videos are being viewed by analysing our monthly, weekly and daily statistics. 

One of the results that struck me as being out of the ordinary, was from the country of origin.  In a nutshell, the counrty of origin is determined by the 2 or 3 letter extension associated with the web address of the host company of the originating IP address (sorry for all the techno babble).  For example, if your Internet access was provided by yourhost.pl, the counrty of origin would be determined by the “.pl”, equating to Poland.  This is hardly an exact science, since not all .com addresses originate in the US, but it is a general indication of where our visitors are coming from.

The result that seemed out of the ordinary was the fact that Australia has consistently ranked as the 3rd highest country of origin behind only Canada and the US.  Australia consistently beat out other contenders China, Hong Kong, Great Britain, the European Union, the Russian Federation and South Korea.  I realize that there are a lot of Australians here in Vancouver, considerably more than in my hometown of Toronto, but this result struck me as being skewed and somewhat illogical.

We often talk with our clients about maximizing the marketing value of their videos and this often includes a discussion about the number of views of their particular videos.  Our statistics clearly reveal that our videos are a great international marketing tool.  I had mentioned to a number of our clients that a significant number of views had originated from Australia.  The overwhelming concensus was that the interest was a direct result of investors viewing Vancouver real estate as having great financial potential with the Olympics arriving in 2010.  Having experienced the first-hand effects of the Olympics on real estate prices, Australia/Sydney residents are anticipating similar effects on real estate prices here in Vancouver. 

We just produced our first commercial video listing for a popular neighbourhood restaurant, The Grove Inn (1047 Denman Street) for Andrew Chan, owner of Realtyline.  Commercial listings attract interest from a much broader geographic area as foreign investors and individuals/families wishing to emigrate look for business opportunities in cities with robust economies.  Video is a great medium to give more context to any real estate listing, and is ideal for commercial properties in large part due to its ability to market local businesses to international audiences.

Here is the video:  Grove Inn