Meaningless web analytics reports
In the grand scheme of innovative technology, some things outlive their utility yet are grandfathered into assumed relevance almost infinitely. Web analytics, still in its formative years, has many such instances and most of them are found in the realm of reporting. By now, you probably know that “hits” are a completely useless metric, but in truth, many other mainstays of the WA vernacular bring little or nothing to the table themselves.
So as an homage to one of my favorite Mitch Hedberg jokes:
I saw a commercial on late night TV, it said,”Forget everything you know about slipcovers.” So I did. And it was a load off my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, and I didn’t know what the hell they were.
Here are three relics of web analytics terminology to forget (or at least re-think):
- Exit rate. News flash, people are going to leave your site. Paying close attention to this data in and of itself is useless. If you’re your data or looking at pass through pages (step 2 of a shopping cart for example), you MAY have something. Bounce rate is a better measure, typically.
- Average time on site. Before you have a conniption, let me explain. There are sites and situations when this statistic doesn’t tell you much. First, many javascript analytics providers measure time on site by measuring the time between loading page one and page two. So, at an aggregate level, if you have 40 percent of your traffic only viewing one page (this happens a lot on blogs, in particular), your data is going to be severely skewed.
- Visitors. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…Yes, we want more traffic. But what kind of traffic? Are visitors new? Are they returning? Does an upward trend in traffic correlate to a higher conversion rate? Traffic does not always mean business, so this metric without context is meaningless.
Okay, I feel I’ve done my duty for the day. Not only that, but I got to thinking about Mitch Hedberg and I’m now in a better mood.
If anyone has any other suggestions on past their prime metrics, please share. I’m all ears.
