I was looking at a potential client’s web statistics the other day. I was trying to get a handle on the web traffic that came to them via the search engines versus the traffic that either had their website bookmarked or typed it in. I saw unusually high numbers for the latter and yet their online sales were less than modest. So I began to investigate.
I had a phone conversation with the owner and during the course of our conversation it came out that they had the home page of their website as the startup page for all of the browsers on all of the computers in the company (20+ people). I also learned that the staff go to the website to look up pricing and to walk some less technically savvy people through their online purchases. “Ah ha.” Now it made sense. The large volume of traffic was likely from their own staff. There was no way to tell for sure because they hadn’t taken steps to separate the traffic generated by their own staff from that outside the company.
Why does this matter? Without a way to separate the traffic generated by staff from that by bots and real people, the numbers we see mean nothing. When they are separated we can use the numbers to gain meaningful insight into how the website is being used and by who.
The ability to measure and make decisions based on metrics is important to any business. The web offers us many ways to measure but we need to understand what we’re looking at. Think in terms of a balance sheet. If we don’t know what that “miscellaneous” category really contains, how can we know where we spent those dollars?
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