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.