Analytics are Evil
Analytics doesn’t help your site grow in a way that the majority of people using it.
Let me explain (before you judge by the title):
If your site isn’t very dynamic, like Facebook dynamic, and by looking your analytics data everyday is a mistake. Why? Because for one thing most of the data is not in real-time, even Google Analytics shows data gathered a day before, and small data collection often mislead the user.
For example. A website registered in Google Analytics last week shows today that it has a bounce rate 90%. That’s not conclusive data, to estimate bounce rate correctly we would need at least 1 month of data, before we should do any action.
Of course with high traffic websites this time reduces exponentially simply, because the site has so many visitors that the analytics application can present fairly accurate results.
As a good practice, check your analytics data once a week and set up tasks to change the behaviour, elements of your website if you find conclusive results in your analysis. Make those changes, wait a week and check your analytics again.
Comments
November 5th, 2008
I check analytics every morning with my coffee and over the years it has taught me many important things. Mostly it has taught me what exactly I must do to drive the number of visitors up and it has shown me I need to do this every day, or at least every few days lest I start losing visitors.
Of course this might just be the simple case that my site is my blog and my blog only.