Seven Deadly Web Analytics Sins    1    2    3    4    5    6    7

By John Marshall

Deadly Web Analytics Sin #6: Relying on Top 10 Lists
All web analytics tools provide a variety of 'top n' reports such as the top pages, top referrers. For many of us, they're the first thing we look at—especially the referrers. Since referrers are basically sources of visitors, it's cool to see all those people trooping over to your site from somewhere else.

The problem with these reports is they inevitably display just the most popular few, and not the interesting stuff that lives beyond the head, in the long tail of the data. This may sound quite vague and Zen-like, but it's a really important concept.

Digging Past the Top Ten
Take a look at your top 10 referrers for your site. I'll bet they haven't changed for many months—they're probably even in the same ranked order too. You probably don't even bother to look at this report much any more. If you compare the content of this report across different segments you can gain more value, but unless you're really on top of your analysis you won't do this more than once or twice a month.

Of course you can examine a lot more than the top 10 referrers. A quick visit to the settings or options and you can expand this to show the top 10,000 referrers. Now we're really seeing the long tail of data, right? Well, yes, but we're also seeing waaaaay too much data. Let's use an example.

Case in Point: Getting Blogged
Suppose your site just got mentioned in a blog. You get a bunch of visitors (e.g. referrers) from the blog site, and those visitors are highly qualified. Almost by definition any blog that mentions you will bring highly targeted, qualified traffic. The problem is that it doesn't bring a large volume of traffic, because it's so narrowly focused. Furthermore, the traffic peaks shortly after the blog is published and then quickly falls off as other articles replace it.

If you look at your top referrers for the month, I'll bet this blog referrer doesn't even make it to the top 100. A small number of highly qualified visitors, and you don't know about it. The data will get lost in the noise.

What you need is for the analytics software to tell you what's changing from time period to time period, and armed with that info, you need to further limit this to only statistically significant changes. Imagine the analytics software is keeping track of millions of data points, and showing you the top 100 because that's about all you can keep track of. It's not good enough to know about changes within this top 100. You may need to know that something has gone from rank 200,000 up to rank 1,000, because that's a huge jump in statistic terms. You'd never be able to work that out manually.

Sifting through the Noise with the What's Changed Report
The What's Changed report in ClickTracks was designed for exactly this. It works out the statistically significant changes from day to day, week to week or month to month, and gives you just that—so if you get blogged, you'll know about it immediately. New users of ClickTracks quickly discover that it's one of the most useful reports, and experienced users come to rely on it more than anything else, because the data in the long tail is so valuable and yet hard to reach that you can't do without it. Getting this report in your e-mail box each morning, automatically, turns a potential web analytics sin into pure bliss!

Seven Deadly Web Analytics Sins    1    2    3    4    5    6    7