 The world is a busy place, and the land of dotcom is no exception. Even though our marketing maven had grown to understand the Myth of The Average Visitor, she began to fall under the spell of watching only for trends. The wizards from within the ClickTracks Castle sensed a disturbance and sent the following message to the marketing maven:
Absolute numbers. We often find ourselves explaining to customers that absolute numbers are inherently flawed. The fact of the matter is that you can't just look at a certain value and know if it's good, bad or indifferent. The numbers that illustrate success for your site may be the kiss of death for someone else's site. Think about it. If you sell a high-end luxury product online, your conversion percent may be miniscule (.5%) while your time spent on the site may be through the roof (18 minutes). Those same numbers that spell success for you would spell lean times (and something very wrong) for a site that sells $5 widgets.
More important than absolute numbers are the differences in absolute numbers. Those numbers rising and falling create trends, and it's the trends-not the absolute numbers--that hold the key to better understanding how your web site is performing.
This caused the marketing maven to ask, "So, what trends are worth tracking?" and the wizards replied:
What's Easy versus What's Worthwhile
"While web analytics software makes it easy to view certain trends--the number of visitors who came to the site within a certain time period-we know that that sort of data, while interesting, rarely useful."
"Why?" asked the maven. And the wizards replied, "There are three reasons the data is not as useful as some would think:"
1. Time intervals chosen by the software don't line up with real world events. Analyzing the past month of data gives you an idea of how things have been going for the past thirty days, but don't take into consideration the e-mail campaign that was sent mid-month or the site redesign that occurred 60 days ago.
2. The software shows numbers, but not necessarily the activities that led to those numbers. If your site experiences a large spike in traffic (due to being featured on a popular blog) or a decrease in visitors (due to technical difficulties on the part of one of your largest affiliates) the software can only show you the absolute numbers.
3. Something that's a big deal in a conversion rate (a jump from 2.07% to 2.16%) can't be accurately depicted as a line graph on a computer screen. These sorts of subtle, yet important changes need to be expressed as numbers in order to have meaning and allow you to take appropriate action.
"Remember, young maven," they said, "a monthly visitor report doesn't take into account the activities that occurred during that month which potentially had an impact on the numbers. Simply viewing the month data by day can also be misleading--because of the way traffic trails off at the weekend (or rises, for B2C sites)."
A Better Way
The marketing maven began to understand. She explained, "It seems a more accurate way to gauge trends over time is to take control of the time periods your software is comparing. So, instead of letting the software prescribe a 30-day or 6-month time period, I should set my own dates based on events and activities occurring within my marketing. For example: If I did a large direct mail campaign on the 18th of June, I should compare the twenty days before June 18th with the twenty days after. This will give an idea of the success (or failure) of my efforts in a way that a pre-canned trend could never accurately convey."
"Very wise." said the ClickTracks Wizards, "Now you know that the best way to determine improvements in ROI, unique visitors or any other of your key metrics is to label two adjacent time periods--one before a new event or initiative is launched, and one after. By doing this, you'll be able to weed out any 'wild-goose-chase' trends and focus on whether tangible improvements are taking place."
The marketing maven pondered this wisdom and looked forward to the next meeting with the wizards at the ClickTracks Castle.
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