Just like watching the end of a football game, stats are for losers – sometimes.
Stats are for losers – data is for winners
Let’s define “stats” and “data” in a slightly different way to make a point.
For the purpose of this post:
“Stats” are collections of information which are worthless without study and application. ”Data” is information that has been studied and can be applied.
Site statistics are important as long as they are analyzed as data and put to use
We believe these are the most critical pieces of information to pick up, understand and learn from with things like Google Analytics and other analytics software:
- Site hits
- Time-on-site
- Bounce rate
- Pages per visit
- Time on pages
- Hits per page
- Demographics
You should never, ever use one of those pieces alone to make decisions and changes about your website.
“Well, we’re getting lots of page hits.”
“There are hits coming from around the world”
“Most visitors are spending half an hour on the site”
That’s nice. But none of those are valuable on their own.
Are all/most of the page hits lasting for more than 10 seconds, or are all/most visitors leaving immediately? Do you want users coming from around the world, or do you have a small, targeted demographic? Are “most visitor” just a handful, or hundreds?
Demographic is extremely important. Even if visitors aren’t staying on your site for long, if they are coming from the right places, you’re headed in the right direction.
Analyzing and learning from information like that is important and needs to be done. Always check your data frequently. The quicker you can learn from and understand it, the sooner you’ll be making intelligent decisions to improve your website.
This stuff requires patients and effort. There’s no magic bullet to raise the quality of your page hits, time-on-site, demographic, etc.
Contact us if you’d like a little analysis of your site and what it’s data mean. (You are gathering data, right?)
