Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Visit Reports
We are all suckers for a standard visit report. Do not deny it, as i will proudly proclaim
that i look at this particular standard report once every other day as well.
We were taught from the beginning of internet time (for me that started in
1996) that it was all about eyeballs, and that quickly translated into the embarrassing
term and key performance indicator
hits
, which later translated into the slightly better
indicator
visits.
Hits
In the early 1990s, web analytics consisted primarily of counting the number of client requests,
also known as
hits
, made to the web server. This was a reasonable method initially, since each
website often consisted of a single HTML file. However, with the introduction of images in HTML,
and websites that spanned multiple HTML files, this count became less useful, and hits is now
widely known as “how idiots track success”—which should be enough reason not to use it.
196
the fair reasoning and justification behind a look at the visit report is not so
much because it tells us much by itself. think about it: What does the visit report tell
you about your business, blog, or other web property? it is valuable because we can
usually do 10 crosstabs in our head on what 2,000 visits a day means to our business.
We can quickly evaluate visits against the other factors involved in the Key performance
indicators (Kpis) that drive revenue, profit, and so forth for the website. look at
figure 8.1. What conclusions can we draw from it?
Figure 8.1
What conclusions can you draw from this visit report?
all that is shown in figure 8.1 is a visit trend that does nothing but prompt us
to ask further questions—which, by the way, is super valuable. a question could be
whether the increase from october 7 to october 8 had an impact on revenue. the
increase in visitors was as follows:
october 7: 2,099 visits
october 8: 2,502 visits
