Hits, Pageviews, And Other Lies

Hits, Pageviews and Other Lies

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About Me• Manager of Property Development

• Stat Guy at Gospelcom

• Not an “expert”

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A little secret...• I don’t really think hits, pageviews and other stats are worthless

• However, the context (or lack of context) we put them into makes them worthless.

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Big Picture Today• Help you understand your “traditional” stats a bit better.

• Start to explore new ways of collecting information about your impact.

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Motivation• Little real knowledge of end-users

• How can we treat them as more than stats?

• How can we do that without breaking the bank?

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“Traditional” Stat Packages• Optimized for

• Ads

• Sales

• Marketing Data

• What about Ministry?

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Definitions

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Hits

• A hit is any individual file moved from a web server to a client.

• Images, css files, javascript, html, video, audio, etc. are all hits.

• 1 web page + 10 images + 2 CSS files + 1 javascript file = 14 files = 14 “hits”

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Pageviews• A pageview is what you see in the browser.

• It’s all the hits put together

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Visits• A visit is comprised of one or more pageviews viewed by one person during one, uninterrupted time period.

• A.k.a. “sessions”

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Unique Visitor• A unique visitor is a person that has interacted with your site during one or more visits.

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Visitor Behavior• The actions a user takes as the result of visiting your website.

• Hard to measure.

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Traditional Stats• Two forms of data collection

• Javascript (Eg., Google Analytics)

• Log Files

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“Interpretation”

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Stat Analysis• 10 stat packages will give you 10 different interpretations from the same raw data.

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Hits• Mostly worthless when tracking visitors on your site.

• Useful for debugging errors and tracking downloads.

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Pageviews• Pageviews require lots of context to interpreted correctly.

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Pageviews: Frames• One frameset with 3 frames

• Will be counted as 4 page views by the server

• But the visitor sees it as a single page.

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Pageviews: Frames

Page

Page

Page

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Pageviews: Ajax• A page might have one or more components updated via Ajax.

• Often Ajax updates generate new “fragments” that are counted as single pageviews.

• Demo

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Pageviews: Spiders• Is it a person, or a spider?

• Traditional spiders: Google, Yahoo (noisy!), Live.com (MSN)

• 100s of smaller search engines

• RSS readers and aggregators

• DIY spiders

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Pageviews: “Window Shoppers”• Aka “Short Visits”

• If a visitor spends less than 5 seconds on your site, have you really impacted them?

• Engaged or “lost and confused?”

• “Information Hunting” vs. “Information Consuming”

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Pageviews: Visits• Changing the length of visits changes the number of visits.

• Industry “standard” length of a visit: 30 minutes

• Varies from tool to tool.

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Pageviews: Unique Visitors• Challenges to counting visitors

• Proxies

• Multiple computers/devices for each person.

• One household, many people.

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Data Collection• Log files: Busted by proxies.

• Javascript collection: Historically 10% of people have javascript disabled.

• Javascript collection: Non-traditional (e.g., cell phones) computers may or may not run the script.

• Over/under reporting due to network errors.

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Don’t Give Up!

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Don’t Give Up!• The web has better metrics than radio and television

• Treat them as estimates, not hard and fast numbers.

• Try your best to put stats in the right context.

• Augment with other information

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Stat Tools• Google Analytics is a great, free stats program.

• Feedburner.com is a good tool to track feeds.

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User Feedback

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Feedback• Gain a deeper understanding of your users by communicating with them.

• “Web 2.0” is giving us lots of new ways of connecting with our users.

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Email• Solicit email feedback

• Publish your contact information

• Contests

• Customer Service

• Use a ticket system

• Think about standards

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Blogosphere

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Blogosphere

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MyBlogLog

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SurveyMonkey

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SurveyGizmo

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Chat

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Social Networking Groups

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Social Networking Groups

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“Crowdsourcing”

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Physical Meetings

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Q&A

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