Entries Tagged as 'analytics'
Google’s enduring love
Well, a specific portion of the webnet is talking about the latest big change to Google’s ranking algorithms that seem to have spanked many of the most prominent websites. You, my valued ad-clicking reader, will be relieved… relieved to know that the pagerank of this very site stands firm at a modest, but increasingly interesting [...]
Web Metrics are hard
So online metrics are hard, there’s no question about it. Some are harder than others (oh, say.. time spent on site as an example), but they are generally difficult. Even the most basic metric, hits/page views, is difficult and building on top of that the notion of counting visits is more difficult and unique visitors [...]
Categories: analytics
GeekFindr: WASP - seeing web beacons
Scott pointed this one out to me a bit ago - WASP, the Web Analytics Solution Profiler. It’s a Firefox extension that gives you a sidebar showing you info about the various analytics beacons on the page you’re currently looking at.
If you’re building an big website, it’s useful as an easy sanity check to make [...]
Even more on why I think time spent on site is kind of a dumb metric
I don’t mean to harp, but “Average Time on Site” is a silly metric to use. Not in theory, sure if you could actually calculate it and know the length of time people had your site open and were reading it, it’d be the best metric ever. Unfortunately, you can’t.
So that the number is [...]
Blog ratings!
You know there’s nothing like having a blog to instill a little obsession in a guy. There’s no shortage of stats, right now my three main stats are FeedBurner both for my feed stats as well as a quick view into my daily stats - it tends to be more current than Google Analytics. GA [...]
Google giveth and Google taketh away…
So now that Google has dropped the old interface to Google Analytics and I’ve been full time on the new one, I have some opinions on the subject. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. The new interface is pretty and provides some nice new functionality - the two that I like the most [...]
More on why I think time spent on site is a kind of a dumb metric
So now that time spent on site is the new belle of the metrics ball, I just want to register my disapproval again. It’s a great and interesting number, for sure, if you could actually measure it accurately. As far as I know, though, you can’t. I don’t want to go into a lot of [...]
On the new web metric, time spent on site
So there’s a new web metric in town according to Nielsen/NetRatings - page views is so ‘96, the new sheriff is time spent on site. The rationale seems reasonable, in this new web2.0 world of AJAX and flash - for many sites pageviews are not a good metric to determine actual usage. Some sites are [...]
Somebody explain me some Alexa
Ok, so I wrote almost two weeks ago some wierd numbers I was seeing on Alexa. I was able to follow or at least my brain thought it was able to make sense of the “reach” number which seemed to fluctuate roughly in step with my actual traffic. That is, it was generally gently rising [...]
Categories: analytics
A thing I’d like to see in Google Analytics
Now, I’m no professional analytics guy. I’ve lightly used Google Analytics, used several log analysis packages, even wrote the log analysis software that the NYTimes used for the first few years of its life - but I’ve never been a hardcore consumer of said analysis. Having said that, now that I’ve been playing around with [...]
Categories: analytics
