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Why do we have web analytics? Why do we have reports?

Well it’s not so we can stare at the pretty charts to see what obscure metric we
can come up with next.

The reason for reports is to invoke actions!

We don’t really care that 500 people visited our site today. We want to see
how today compares to yesterday, last week, last month, or last year. It doesn’t
end there. Just knowing these things won’t improve your business. If
you see that you had 1200 visits yesterday, you need to be looking for the reason.
Are your pay-per-click campaigns running? Did you get banned from a search
engine for using black-hat techniques?

OR

Was yesterday a fluke?

When we look at an entire week of analytics, here’s what we see:

Sun: 250 visits

Mon: 340 visits

Tues: 400 visits

Wed:(yesterday) 1200 visits

Thurs: (today) 500 visits

Upon further inspection, we see that we were Stumbled Upon. For those who
aren’t privy, StumbleUpon is basically a toolbar that you install. You can
press a “Stumble” button and it takes you to a random site that someone else has
“Stumbled”.

Generally, when a site gets Stumbled, you’ll receive a flood of traffic for about
one day.

***Warning*** StumbleUpon has the potential to send an enormous amount of traffic to your site. However, it is not possible to do that by only submitting your work. In fact, that will probably backfire on you.

That’s all that happened on Wednesday. Fortunately, this anomaly requires
no further action.

However, if Wed had 120 visits, rather than 1200, we would have a bigger issue.

We would go through the same bunch of questions to find the cause. Perhaps
someone paused our AdWords campaign and forgot to reactivate it?

The ultimate message of this post is that we shouldn’t look at Wednesday and say,
“whoopdideedoo, we had more visits that day.” We need to ask, “WHY.”
Then, we need to ask, “So what do we do about it?”

- Jason Green

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 9:54 am in Analytics.