What if visitor counts are inflated

There has been some research recently suggesting that monthly unique visitor counts for a website are inflated by 2 to 4 times.  This means that if your web analytics tool is reporting 1.6m visitors for the month, the actual number of people who visited your website is between 400k and 800k.  Details of this research [...]

Continue Reading...

Back writing about web analytics

I blame running a footy club.  Too much of my spare time went into not only playing and training for sport, but organising and calling and arranging, that I found writing blog posts too much work.  But the season is over, the presidency will soon be passed on, and it is time I found time [...]

Continue Reading...

New position with Logan Tod

It appears I have been out of action for the last couple of months on the blogging front.  I spent a fair amount of time setting this blog up and writing my first few posts so I am not going to give up, I have just been a bit busy with a new job and [...]

Continue Reading...

Making Web Analytics Actionable for Universities

A few weeks ago I was invited to talk at a meeting of Scottish Web Folk (web managers at Scottish Universities) on web analytics.  The actual topic was my choice, anything that I considered useful and relevant given my knowledge and experience with web analytics.  I sent around a short questionnaire trying to understand what [...]

Continue Reading...

Removing Daily Seasonality from Web Analytics Data

While I generally begin to look at web analytics data at a weekly or monthly level, there are times when it is useful to drill down to daily numbers.  This can be when examining the reason for a change in the data or simply to review the previous day’s performance.  But an issue arises which [...]

Continue Reading...

Measuring the Value from your Investment in Social Media

One of the hot topics around social media is how to calculate the ROI from it. Alternatively, should you be trying to calculate the ROI of your social media efforts? And taking it to another level, should you even be trying to get a return from your investments in social media? Social media consists of [...]

Continue Reading...

Evaluating the performance of a webpage

One of the tasks that can be performed using web analytics is to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular page on a website. The ideal method of doing so would be for every single viewer of the page to tell you if it was useful or not. For a variety of reasons, you are not [...]

Continue Reading...

A downturn in the economy is more reason to invest in Web Analytics

A nice article here by Bryan Eisenberg on how Online Marketers can weather the financial crisis.  He acknowledges that this is going to affect every company but, while not easy, it is possible to survive and even grow in this environment. His first recommendation is to innovate your way through the downturn in the economy [...]

Continue Reading...

Improving the performance of a website: STA Travel

I was using the STA Travel website last week as I had a £60 gift voucher that i needed to use up but I ended up fairly frustrated with the website design.  Based on my own experiences, there are some quick fixes they could make which I am positive would lead to an improvement in [...]

Continue Reading...

How to start using web analytics within an organisation

While everyone appears to think it is only them who are barely scratching the surface with web analytics, most companies that I have spoken to are in a similar position.  They may have a web analytics tool implemented on their website and know how to look at unique visitors and page views but are unsure [...]

Continue Reading...