Simple Visitor Counts - The First Sin of Web Analytics

Web analytics is the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website. In a commercial context, it especially refers to the measurement of which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.

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.

A webmaster needs to 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.

Most webmasters “dilute” this important aspect of Internet Marketing to Simple Visitor Counts — which can be very inaccurate and mis-leading.

According to John Marshall — 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.

John examines a few of the factors that lead to non-human visitors in his great article: The Seven Sins of Web Analytics: #1 Simple Visitor Counts (Must Read!)

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Written by James Opiko on November 14th, 2006 with no comments.
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