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The Seven Sins of Web Analytics: #1 Simple Visitor Counts

[ Posted On: 2006-11-13 ]

"People commonly use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post -- for support rather than illumination" -- Mark Twain

Mark Twain didn't have Web analytics in mind when he made the above statement -- but he might as well have. Far too often, the purpose of Web analytics is to produce a graph that goes up and to the right. But, good, meaningful Web analytics is a deductive process, not just an effort to produce a chart.

Invest the time to truly explore the data, gain insight into cause and effect, and understand the underlying data points by filtering out the noise.

Mistake #1: Simple Visitor Counts

All visitors are not created equal. Many entities arriving at your web site may appear to be human visitors, but in reality are anything but. Unfortunately this inhuman traffic is counted alongside your human visitor, so you can see why "number of visitors" data can be faulty. A few of the factors that lead to non-human visitors include:

Bad Bots. Bots are robots that visit your site to extract data from its pages. "Good" bots include search engine crawlers like Googlebot and Yahoo! Slurp. You definitely want good bots to visit your site so your pages will show up in search engine results.

Good bots follow protocol, identifying themselves to Web analytics programs so that they aren't mistaken for human activity. But bad bots don't play by the rules. Out to harvest data like email addresses, they don't announce themselves, preferring the cloak of anonymity that masquerading as a human visitor gives them. The bad bots know if they were to identify themselves for what they really are, webmasters would simply block the bots and reduce the shady activities. So they simulate human behavior and end up skewing your statistics.

Fraudulent Clicks. A very real, rapidly growing problem, click fraud occurs when someone (or some computer script) knowingly clicks on your PPC ad with no interest in your products or services. Whether they're trying to fraudulently make money from the traffic being sent to your site or are maliciously attacking your ad budget, one thing is clear: when click fraud occurs, your wallet deflates while your stats inflate.

Monitoring Services. Uptime monitoring services are "good" traffic in that they provide a useful service. By probing your site as if they were human visitors, they alert you to problems human visitors might be experiencing. They will, however, skew your data.

Any of the above examples can cause a spike in a simple visitor count or an upward trend. Getting past this bogus information and to the actual human behavior requires a willingness to examine the data, not just take comfort in the stats. Looking at a variety of stats in conjunction with visitor counts helps give you perspective.

Qualified Visitors

A metric must be defined to bring into focus only "qualified" visitors. Different sites have different methods of defining this, but a fairly universal method is to include only those visitors that spend more than 10 seconds on the site.

This will exclude many bots and instances of click fraud because those entities are likely to visit for a very short time. It's worth noting, however, that the 10-second-or-more label may inadvertently exclude a small number of real human clicks, like those who click through from an ad, don't like what they see on the single landing page, and immediately exit.

Given that the "number of visitors" is a fairly vague metric for defining business success, it doesn't matter too much that we exclude some real human traffic. Especially since we're interested in only the "qualified" visitors. A visitor who clicks in and immediately out of your site isn't even a lukewarm lead.

The practice of exclusion will obviously reduce your metrics, but gives a clearer picture of whether your site is improving.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: John Marshall is CEO of ClickTracks Website Analytics, a Web analytics firm known for its visual presentation of website data that helps marketers make sense out of what is happening on their site.

| View Profile & All Articles By: John Marshall |

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