I get asked sometimes which is the best metric to use when creating a certain report. My rough rule of thumb is to go back and ask what sort of question it is that you are trying to answer with this report. If it is related to: the number of people, use unique visitors traffic [...]

As I discussed in my first couple of posts, there are some basic metrics that I look at when evaluating the performance of a website e.g. unique visitors, page views, etc. I am going to describe here how to set up a report in Sitestat that contains all these basic metrics. This report can be [...]

I am discovering that while my clients may know how to run basic reports using Sitestat (generally saying how easy a system it is to use), they are less certain of which reports they should be running to get the answer to a specific question and how to use some of the more advanced reports [...]

The engagement merics that I discussed a few weeks previously are a useful method of understanding user behaviour on site. However it must be remembered that they are averages and that there is no such thing as an average user. So while these are useful as a single number representing these metrics, there is an [...]

So you have set up some weekly reports, focusing on key metrics – whatever is most important to your business/website in understanding its performance. Monday morning, you crawl out of bed, into work and update your reports so you can check out this performance (hopefully at the touch of a button). But something has happened, [...]

This was my second Web Analytics Wednesday and I am still to attend one on a Wed. The topic for the night changed rapidly from Jim Sterne summarising the outcomes from E-metrics (only two minutes needed there but I really liked what the summary was) to a vendor Q&A session. It was a little weird [...]

My experiences in the past make me suspect that many people in the business world view web analytics as 100% science. That you input the data at one end and via some mathematic equation or formula, out the other end rolls reports, insights and recommendations. And that if the answer is not immediately obvious, all [...]

I dislike buzzwords. I really dislike buzzwords when they are repeated by people with no understanding of what the word actually means. Especially when these people work for an agency, earn a lot more than I do, wearing weird glasses and think they are really cool and trendy. Yes I have some issues I am [...]

So you have your basic metrics and you know the best ways of giving the numbers some meaning. What then is the appropriate time period to use in order to understand performance when looking at this data? Should it be day, week, month, quarter, year or something different altogether?

Any metric by itself is inherently meaningless. It is a number, a percentage, a ratio but without something to compare it to, there is no way of knowing if it is good, bad or indifferent. The metric needs to be compared against something in order to give it meaning.