Off the top of your head | What you need to know about using web statistics to better market your business
Owner of The Internet Educator, a web strategy company based in Freeman Township that offers seminars and consulting services
You are probably aware that every website generates statistics — the number of people who came to the site, what those folks did when they got there, what time of day they came and so on.
You may even get reports from your web person, e-mailed to you with great regularity as though this report was in fact helping you.
If you are like most entrepreneurs, it probably seems like there is “data, data, everywhere and not one drop to drink.” You stare at the numbers and maybe nod a little, but it doesn’t have much impact on how you operate your business. You still mostly go from your gut, the same way you do with old-school print advertising.
Imagine if you went to a medical doctor who drew a blood sample from you for testing. In the laboratory all the little gizmos hum and ring, and a thick report is produced on your blood chemistry values. Suppose that when you went back to the doctor, she took this report and tossed it on the desk in front of you and said: “There you go. That’s everything you need to know. Have a nice day,” then walked right out of the office and on to her next appointment. Maybe she’d answer a direct question if you asked it quickly, but other than that she’d say nothing about your health.
This is exactly how most web professionals behave. They provide web statistics as though they were in fact the answer, as though you, the entrepreneur, were a trained web statistician able to read and take action based upon the information.
Geeks — and I use the word geek with love, as I am one — don’t do this to annoy you. This is done because, gasp, unlike an MD, most geeks don’t know how to read these reports either. Sure, they know that more visitors are good, and they can provide you with the basic info, but translating information into productive action steps is not what they do. In their mind it has nothing to do with making a good web page, in the same way that your plumber is not qualified to install an electrical outlet.
So if you are smiling and maybe even laughing as you think about the degree to which you are one of those entrepreneurs who receives reports that don’t really help you, fear not, for “Top-of-Head Metrics” is here to assist you.
Top-of-Head — or TOH as I like to call them (geeks love acronyms) — are completely unrelated to the web, and entrepreneurs have been using them for at least a century.
Ask someone who runs a restaurant how many “covers” he did yesterday or last week or last month and he tells you right off the top of his head. Ask a hotelier about her occupancy rate and you’ll get a similar answer. Ask a real estate broker about the average transaction size and you’ll get an earful — you get the idea.
You need to view and use web statistics in the same way, which means creating your very own Top-of-Head Metrics report. Your web professional can generate this for you once you explain to them what you want included, and it must always be less than one page long — unless you have a special talent for memorization.
All TOH reports should include three pieces of information.
1. How many people visited the website? (visitors)
2. Where did those people come from? (referrers)
3. What did they do when they got there? (most popular pages)
This information speaks easily and directly to things you can do to improve your website. Remember that any time you spend working with stats that does not improve your website is wasted time.
“Visitors” is like the circulation of your print ad, or the number of people that came into your retail store — without this info it is impossible to tell if $1 million in sales is good or bad.
“Referrers” tells you how effective your web advertising is — and you should be dividing the ad spend by the number of people to compare all ads on a relative basis as in 1,000 visitors for $500 is a heck of a lot better than 2,000 visitors for $2,500.
“Popular pages” tell you what your customers want to see, which is a list of what content you should work on. My own website contains a genealogy page because for some silly reason people who visit my site are more interested in learning about me than the web at first.
As you work to develop your own Top-of-Head Metrics, your list will expand, change and grow. You will find out what matters to you and you’ll discard stuff that is irrelevant.
Make sure that you do two things with your own TOH report: Keep it short and simple so you can recite it from memory easily and do your entrepreneurial brain a big favor — never read one of those blasted website statistics reports in raw form ever again.
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