Comments on: What Are My Statistics Telling Me?

By: UrbanShocker

UrbanShocker — Thu, 17 May 2007 15:50:44 +0000

Are there any statistics we wish we had ?

I love that I can now track website conversions via Google PPC.. just another great offering from Mountain View.

By: Neal Linkon

Neal Linkon — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:42:20 +0000

With bots, people using the site as a doorway to other portals, etc., short visits are indeed quite common. Which begs another question: Many people assume that the longer the average visit the better. But if the visit length is because people are struggling to find what they are looking for, that’s not a good thing.

By: Judy Stokes

Judy Stokes — Wed, 16 May 2007 21:49:04 +0000

Here I am , agreeing with Ed Numbers are great, but let’s get back to our mission – do the numbers indicate they did what we most wanted them to do? Choose to see one of our doctors? Actually use our services?

We have to sort through the volume of possible stats and decide what ones have real value – and consider that the stats that have the most value might not come from your Web Trends pages at all.

Having said that, the lure of having volume figures is almost irresistable. But when you look at minutes spent on your site, that bubble can be quickly burst. How many of you have 0-1 minute stays as your largest volume?

By: Neal Linkon

Neal Linkon — Wed, 16 May 2007 19:42:04 +0000

There is little question that too many people use web stats as just numbers rather than analytics. When we make any substantive change on the site, we have theories regarding which metrics will change and why. We then monitor those to see if we were right. We also have more complicated amalgams of data that reflect things like conversion rate, physician and facility searches, etc. Much more useful than just visits and visitors (but I still love those numbers, too!).

By: UrbanShocker

UrbanShocker — Wed, 16 May 2007 14:20:24 +0000

Interesting. Our sleep center bump was b/c the Dallas TV station linked to our sleep quiz and soon after, the story was picked up by other stations. We soon had people from all over the country taking it. It was never intended as a stand-alone item. We had to change the ‘thank you’ msg to make it more proactive.

By: Ed Bennett

Ed Bennett — Wed, 16 May 2007 13:39:23 +0000

For me, there is only one statistic that matters – the number of new patients we get because of the web site. That can’t be tracked by your log files – it has to come from your call center, or tracked by the individual departments. It takes a lot of manual work to get this data, but a positive ROI is the most powerful metric you can present to management.

Back to web stats – we had a similar anomaly in the traffic to our Sleep Center. The single word “child”, was the number one search bringing visitors to this section. It turned out that Google Images listed a stock photo from a page on “Sleep Disorders in Children” as the #1 result for this search. None of those visitors cared about our Sleep Center, they just wanted to grab a picture.

Lesson learned – we now filter out traffic from Google Images from our reports.