Part 4: Making sense of statistics

• Introduction
• A brief glossary of terms
• Four types of statistics
• Turning statistics into decisions
• Summary

Introduction

Most people know that statistics can be used to make whatever point is required. They can be interpreted selectively to prove ‘anything’.

Interpreted and understood correctly, however, web site statistics can help you make better business decisions about the Internet marketing options available to you. That’s the goal of this chapter – to help you make better business decisions based on the four main sources of statistics.

First, some definitions of the terminology we’ll be using because this is where the problems of interpretation begin. For example, the terms ‘visits’ and ‘visitors’ are often used interchangeably although they mean very different things.

Pages, page views, page loads

These terms are almost universally understood and correctly used. They are used interchangeably to signify how many pages of your web site have been displayed to visitors. Beware though, a count of 50 could mean 50 different pages or one page displayed 50 times.

Hits

This is now a meaningless number to measure, although many still continue to do so. A page is made up of a number of elements, for example, an image, some text, perhaps a video. As the page containing these elements is loaded, the statistics will record one page load and three hits – one for each of these elements.

That’s the main reason why ‘hits’ is a useless measurement. With good web design, you can reduce the number of hits per page and with poor web design you can increase them. You can now safely ignore any measurement of hits – it’s pages you want to know about.

Visits, visitors & unique visitors

Here’s where things start to get a little bit tricky. Ideally, a measurement of visitors would be the number of individuals who come and see your web site and the number of visits would be the number of times that they visited. In this ideal world, you might see numbers like this: 100 visitors, 300 visits – meaning that, on average, each individual actually visited three times during the measurement period.

What complicates this picture is that, depending on where the measurement is taken, visitors can vary in meaning from an individual, a group of users, an organisation, a network or a country.

When the ‘visitors’ count is that ambiguous, the number for ‘visits’ becomes questionable too.

At Kyero.com, when we quote a unique visitor count of 500,000 per month - it’s actually an educated guess based on the combination of four of the five different measurement methods. It’s the number that makes most sense and is most likely to be correct but we could legitimately be quoting anywhere from 100,000 to 2,000,000. Neither of these extreme ‘visitor’ counts make much sense when compared to our page view counts and this is the main sanity check of visitor numbers.

For now, just be cautious about visitor numbers quoted by other web sites and the visitor numbers from your own web site statistics.

Domains, countries & nationality

It’s useful to understand where your visitors are coming from and most statistics packages provide some kind of percentage breakdown of visitor activity by country or domain.

Once again, these measurements vary wildly depending on where the measurement is taken. Many statistics assume that visitors originating from dot com network domains are in the US and that all visitors from Spanish domains are Spanish nationals. Clearly, neither of these assumptions is true. For now, it’s enough to establish that countries, domains and nationality mean completely different things.

Four main ways of gathering statistics

1. A web application runs on your web server and analyses the information collected at that point by the web server itself.
2. Placing a cookie (small piece of text information) on the browser of each visitor. Because each cookie is tied to one visitor, this permits more accurate visitor-centric statistics.
3. Advert tracking can be a useful sanity check of your other primary systems of measurement and a useful method of spot-checking particular areas of your web site.
4. Application-specific statistical analysis can be a useful measurement of the performance of your marketing campaigns.

1. Web applications

Popular stats packages:

• AW Stats
• Webalyser
• Analog

They all look different and present statistics in a different way but they all do the same job of analysing the statistics that your web server collects. They make the ‘raw log file’ more useful by translating row upon row of text into useful and easy-to-understand graphs and charts.

The key advantages of this type of solution are:

• Easy to use
• Normally free
• Pre-installed on many hosting accounts

The key disadvantage of this type of solution is that it gives no visibility of the visitor.

AW Stats (and other similar programmes) cannot see your actual visitors. They can only see the networks that they come from.

Many network operators use things called ‘proxies’ or ‘caches’ to speed up the delivery of web pages and to reduce cost. They are so commonly used that the AW Stats measurements of page views and visitors is rendered all but useless because individual visitors are hidden behind these devices.

There are many such devices in common use throughout the Internet which means you can’t trust the actual numbers that this type of solution will provide for visitors and page views. You can still use them for month by month comparisons and changes in traffic but their absolute figures are unreliable.

That’s why cookie-based systems were introduced in an attempt to provide more accurate visitor tracking.

2. Cookie tracking

Popular solutions in this category:

• Statcounter
• Google Analytics

Although this type of solution presents information that is similar to the previous category, the way the data is collected and generated is completely different. When a visitor comes to your web site, a cookie is placed on their computer that identifies them. Because each cookie is different, the statistics programme can quite accurately track individual visitor activity.

It’s main advantages therefore are:

• Accurate visitor tracking
• Accurate page view tracking
• Solving the ‘cache and proxy’ problem

Cookie tracking systems are designed to track visitors not server requests. This can result in a significantly lower count than standard log file analysis. It does, however, offer a more realistic figure of the visitors to your website, in far more detail and in real-time.

If a visitor has cookies disabled there is no way of knowing if they are ‘unique’ or not, and will, by default, be considered so by this type of solution.

To remedy this reliance on cookies, statistics are normally also based on the visitor’s network address. This method works very well for the majority, but again there is an exception: visitors who use a ‘dynamic web proxy’ which changes their network address each time they access a web page. For example, if such a visitor views seven web pages on your web site it will most likely count as seven different visitors.

Both cookies and network addresses have their strengths and weaknesses for identifying an individual visitor – but it is still impossible to be 100% accurate all of the time.

3. Advert tracking

There are two main ways of using advert tracking to help double-check your other statistics for accuracy.

Google AdSense

When you display Google adverts on your web site, you get paid by Google when a visitor clicks on an advert that you display. In order to pay you, Google collects information about your web site and which adverts have been clicked and displays some of that information to you in your AdSense account.

The good news is that they use JavaScript to display and track adverts. This means that the page view statistics they collect are not based on cookies or server requests and therefore can be used to compare the results of the first two statistical methods discussed so far in this chapter.

The bad news is that some visitors will not have JavaScript enabled in their browser. It’s a small minority but the statistics you see in the Google AdSense account will be ‘missing’ these visitors and page views.

Ad-tracking applications

This type of service allows you to sanity-check your main statistics gathering methods because they use (yet another) technology to track clicks. In this case they simply redirect the click to another page and, in the process of redirecting, record the activity as a page view.

You can use these redirect statistics to sanity-check your other sources of statistics or to track specific marketing campaigns. Typically they also allow you to conduct ‘split-testing’ or ‘A-B’ testing of different pages. Popular choices in this category are Omniture and Verster.

4. Application specific measurements

The data generated by Kyero.com is typical of the type of statistics that are custom-designed to work within a particular application. In this case, these are the property views and leads generated by the Kyero.com system. We do so because the four other methods mentioned in this chapter do not provide this kind of drill-down capability specific to property advertising.

There are six sets of graphs available to each Kyero.com advertiser so that both they and we can accurately measure how well Kyero.com is working. The statistics are clickable to allow a drill- down to the property level so that an estate agent can see the big-picture and zoom right down to an individual property too.

With so much data available, what’s the best way to make sense of this vast array of numbers and how best can you use them to make better business decisions?

Turning statistics into business decisions

The first two methods of statistics collection will offer you various different types of report. Here’s how you can use them to better understand your visitors and change your web site to better accommodate their needs.

How many visitors visit your site each day? By itself, this is not terribly important, but when compared to a previous week or month, patterns will generally emerge. Sudden declines in visitor numbers might be indicative of web server downtime or a failing link campaign. Sudden increases might be because of a successful ad campaign, improved search engine ranking or even a competitor stealing your web site content!

How long are visitors staying on your site or on a specific page? This question addresses your site’s ‘stickiness’. Stickiness gives you an indication of how important your content is. If visitors return on a regular basis or remain on a specific page for an extended period of time, generally the content is considered valuable.

Which pages on your site are visitors arriving at? Is a specific page on the site drawing an unusually large amount of traffic? Do users come back to the site? Generally speaking, content that is refreshed often will attract return visitors. What specific areas on the site are of interest to web visitors, and can those content sections be expanded to increase the overall value of your web site?

Which pages of your site are visitors leaving from? If a specific page has a large number of visitors leaving the site, perhaps the content needs updating. It is critical that you consider the source of the traffic too. Are visitors coming to the site through a pay-per-click campaign with a landing page that does not relate to the initial search terms? Directing visitors to content-specific landing pages will help reduce quick site exits.

Who is making the referral? What kind of sites are sending traffic to your site? This can be used to track the effectiveness of your linking and other marketing campaigns that you undertake.

Are visitors attempting to access pages on your website that are no longer active? Be sure to check for any pages or graphics that are generating errors for visitors.

When reviewing the statistics made available from sites like Kyero.com, you can compare the total leads to the total page views to easily get an idea of how well your properties are converting to leads, known as ‘effective LPV’ or leads per 1000 page views. LPV is a useful way to compare responses across different channels or advertising methods. It is calculated by dividing the total number of leads generated by the number of page views, in thousands.

For example, if you received 200 leads from 20,000 page views, the LPV would equal 200/20, or 10. Tracking LPV over time and across different advertising methods allows you to bench-mark any particular advertising method and assess its effectiveness.

Summary

By necessity, this has been something of a whirlwind tour through the terrain of statistics. It’s one of those areas that can get more and more time consuming as you dig deeper and deeper.

You can start by implementing and analysing statistics in the order that we reviewed them in this chapter and then move on once you’re comfortable with what the numbers mean to you and what actions they guide you to take.

The AW Stats type of solution is an easy way to get started and will give you the big picture of what’s happening.

The Google Analytics type of solution will give you a better understanding of your visitors’ activities.

You can use Advert tracking to sanity-check the figures that these two programmes are producing for you.

Customised statistics like those produced by Kyero.com are generally the quickest way to tell if a specific marketing activity is paying it’s way or not.

Once you have all this ammunition at your disposal, the next task is to interpret what it means. Change one thing at a time on your web site and then monitor the statistics again to see if that change made matters worse or improved things.

By just doing one thing, your progress will be slow, but steady. You might get lucky and change a number of things simultaneously that do, actually work. The problem will be that you will not know why and you will not be able to replicate that success with any degree of predictability.

Next: Part 5. Saving time managing properties

Article Contents

1. Introduction to Internet marketing – why market on the Internet at all?
2. Listing properties – making the most of your most valuable content
3. What’s wrong with your web site? – 10 mistakes that keep visitors away
4. Making sense of statistics – hits, pages, cookies, visits and visitors
5. Saving time managing properties – exporting and distributing property details
6. Property photos that sell – professional photography tips

 

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