Statistics, Salesmen, Websites, Traffic, Hits, and Results. AwStats, cPanel, Google Analytics, SmarterStats.
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Statistics don't lie.
Salesmen do.™
A car salesman's job is to just get you in the door and pressure you into buying a car that you may or may not need or afford. He needs to get paid, and if you don't buy a car he doesn't get paid. Cold call advertising is the same way, but it's not a good career because the Internet and changed economy has revolutionized the way business is done.
Statistics is the science of effectively using numerical data relating to groups of individuals or experiments. Statistics deals with all aspects, including the collection, analysis and interpretation of data. Analytics is the science of analysis. Statistical analysis is preformed by a statistician. A statistician is someone who is particularly versed in the ways of thinking necessary for the successful application of statistical analysis.
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
When choosing a marketing agency to help you grow your business on the Internet, you should never just take a salesman's word for the truth. A salesman will usually provide you with the statistics that he or she wants you to see or hear. A salesman might tell you about all the "hits" they can get you for your website.
A hit is actually nothing more than a request for a file from the web server. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically overestimates popularity. A single webpage usually consists of dozens of files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded. One webpage could consist of enough information that when a single visitor visits the page, a hundred "hits" are generated. Therefore "hits" is more representative of the complexity of a website's page than the popularity or traffic of a page. Any salesman that provides you with statistics about the number of "hits", is providing you with virtually worthless information. The number of unique visitors and total number of visitors, as well as page views provide a much more realistic and accurate assessment of a website's popularity and traffic.
Another key element in analyzing your website is knowing how visitors are getting to your website, how long visitors are staying on your website, and are they leaving because they found what they were looking for or are they leaving because they didn't find the information they were seeking. 10,000 "hits" doesn't do any good if each visitor was on your website for an average of 10 seconds.
Statistics are usually a sign as to whether things are moving in the right direction. A statistical pattern is called a trend. The job market statistical graph below is a sign that the economy is not improving. A sign that things were improving would be a positive net of jobs gained to offset at least one of the other countless months of jobs lost. Our statistics for this website showed us that many people were getting to our website through the term "design your name".
This graph below is of a Web Your Name® client, whose statistics are a sign that his traffic is increasing significantly. The graph on the right is a sign that things are moving in the right direction, unlike the job graph.
The graph in the photograph above speaks for itself. In the worst recession in US history in the last 26 years, our marketing firm has been able to beat the odds. We do not employ salesman. 100% of our clients have come to us through referrals at this time. Our clients are our salesmen, because they have seen the results firsthand. A key reason to allowing our clients to come to us, is cost. The time needed to actively recruit customers is much better spent optimizing and improving our existing clients' websites.
Recently, one of my clients, provided me with a several page article about a class action lawsuit that was brought against AT&T for misleading, flat out lying, and cheating their clients. Rest assured, our agency is not one of the "bad apples" like AT&T. In fact, those same bad apples, are the ones who have helped our marketing firm excel. The majority of our clients came from other agencies who subtly lied, exaggerated, or misrepresented what they could and would do for them and their website.
The next photo is a screen shot of Google's search results some time ago. We no longer have a need to do pay per click advertising, as well as cut back in other areas as well such as Craigslist and CitySearch. The point is that this is an example where the statistics speak for themselves. If the other advertising agency is so good at search engine optimization, how come they can NEVER be found on Google? If you Google, "Raleigh marketing agency", our company appears times in the organic (natural) search results. Wouldn't you rather hire a company who makes things happen for FREE, rather than a company that is constantly making you spend money on PPC (Pay Per Click)?
Let the results speak for themselves. Did you know that AT&T's headquarters are in Atlanta, Georgia? Did you know if you search for Atlanta advertising agency on Google, you will not be able to find AT&T, BellSouth, or Yellowpages.com in the organic search results? Just because they produce a telephone book, does NOT mean that they are in any way good at advertising, marketing, website design or optimization. Choosing the right advertising agency is as important as choosing the right business name. Hire one that is going to show you that your business matters and that you are not just a revenue statistic to them.
If you are seriously considering advertising through AT&T on yellowpages.com, you seriously should be reconsidering. If you are already advertising on yellowpages.com, you should be asking yourself why you are paying them an enormous amount of money to advertise on a website that you yourself do not even use to locate products and services.
AT&T employs LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of SALESMEN!! Salesmen do a great job of making you think their Internet marketing firms are better than the other marketing companies. The funny thing is that no website can rank on the TOP of Google for EVERYTHING. For example, today I Googled, "marketing agency". I checked out the TOP five results and their websites. I then Googled, "marketing firm" and not one of the previous top five results appeared. In fact the same top 5 for marketing firm, did not appear in the TOP 100 for marketing firm. How could a marketing agency be so good at reaching the top of Google for "marketing agency" and not "marketing firm". I put this test one further and Googled, "marketing company". Only ONE of the top five for marketing agency appeared in the TOP 10 for "marketing company". This showed me that you have to be very particular in the words that you choose to use on your website. Of the three words, agency, firm, and company, which one would web surfers use the most to find a place to provide the services they need? Which one would you use?
Well, believe it or not the most popular order is company, agency, and firm. How do I know the answer? Google Trends provides data as to the popularity of search terms. The TOP 5 who appeared for my search were missing appearing in the most important search which was searched for about double the amount of times than the words I chose. Google Trends provides amazing statistics that can be used to improve the traffic to your website by targeting words that are searched for more often.
Analyzing trends seems like an easy task, doesn't it? In actuality, I suppose analyzing prior trends is quite easy compared to predicting future trends. Being able to accurately assess data and also apply that analysis to an Internet marketing campaign is something that takes incredible skill and talent. Unfortunately most Internet marketing businesses do not possess the "drive" needed to make their clients successful. Most all of the clients who hired us to do their Internet marketing, came to us because they were put on the back burner at their last company. The BEST marketing company will never stop working on your website. The Internet, or web, is dynamic. Dynamic means marked by usually continuous and productive activity or change. If something is dynamic, how can you be content being static?
There are three ways to collect good statistics for a website. There is Google Analytics, cPanel, and SmarterStats. I prefer to use AWStats in cPanel. From my reading, combined with my experience with using both, I came to this conclusion: AWStats is geared towards network administrators and network engineers, while Google Analytics and SmarterStats is designed for end users, small business owners, and overly zealous marketers. One HUGE problem with Google Analytics is that it requires the HTML code to be installed on each and every page. This is something that is extremely time consuming and in the end not worth while. A statistician can collect too much data. When you have too much data to analyze, you can tend to "overanalyze" things. Google Analytics and SmarterStats provides too much data along with very different interfaces than AWstats. AWStats is concise and seems to be much more accurate as well. Many webmasters have noticed discrepancies in the data when comparing their cPanel AWStats reports to their Google Analytics reports. I tend to believe that AWStats is more accurate as well as easier to locate and analyze data. No offense to Google or SmarterStats.
Google Analytics Statistics vs. Webmaster Tools
Don't confuse Google Analytics with Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a completely different service. Webmaster Tools is also much easier to install because the HTML code only needs to be added to the homepage of a website, and not every page. Webmaster Tools provides only a small portion of statistics, however they are extremely relevant statistics. Webmaster Tools also allows you to find linking errors as well as discover your incoming links from other webmasters. Webmaster Tools provides you with crawl errors experienced by the GoogleBot as well as crawl statistics about the number of visits and the amount of data analyzed by the GoogleBot. The information contained in Webmaster Tools is by far, much more useful than any of the information in Google Analytics. As far as I am concerned, Google Analytics does not exist. I was a network engineer and systems administrator for years, I now consider myself a Internet marketing engineer. I also believe that Webmaster Tools provides invaluable insight into the PageRank of a website. PageRank is one of many important factors that helps determines a website's ranking in Google. The statistics show that websites with higher PageRank do better in Google's search results. Statistically speaking, websites with higher PageRank are crawled more frequently by Google. PageRank is also an indicator or a website's importance.
Recently Webmaster Tools has undergone some major changes. Instead of showing you the organic ranking for keyword terms, they now show you the specific click-through rate for keywords and phrases. What does this mean?? This confirms what I have long suspected and that click-through rate is extremely important to organic search results and that click-through rate is probably the most important variable in a TOP 10 Google ranking.
It also confirms that Google's algorithim and ranking system is so sophisticated that it is capable of "testing" websites in higher positions to see if they will achieve higher click-through rates than those already ahead of them. The changes in Webmaster Tools were made a couple of weeks ago, but are essential to analyzing where you can improve your website to increase your statistics, visitors, and conversions.