IMC #7 Hits, pageview, and other lies

Brian Tol (Gospel Communications Staff member)
Stats and stuff…

I sat next to Josiah Ritchie for this session, check out his notes on the IMC blog.

How do you judge effectiveness of what you are doing?

How do you connect statistics to people?

Traditional statistics are optimized for selling ads, sales optimization, and other marketing data.

What about ministry though? How can you go beyond statistics and get to effect.

Types of statistical information collected
Hit = any individual file that goes from your web server to a users web browser. In the day of CSS, etc a hit is meaningless now.

Pageview = All the hits put together… when someone loads a page, it’s a pageview.

Visit = All of the pages a user look at in a session (each time on your site)

Unique visitor = How many times the same user goes to the site.

Visitor behavior = the action a user takes as a result of visiting your site.

Statistical analysis:
How is AJAX counted statistically? Every time someone takes an AJAX action, that counts as a pageview.

How does spiders/bots count? It’s logged, but not always as a pageview.

How do RSS/aggregators count? Right now that won’t show up on your stats… but it’s coming. (Google bought Feedburner, it’ll show up soon.)

How do "window shoppers" count? People who come to the site for 5 seconds or less. That will show up as a bounce rate.

Changing the length of a visit changes the number of visits
You can change the visit length to increase statistical response. (You need to ask that Q when looking at people’s stat packages)

With the influx of proxy’s, statistical information is getting harder to gather. Now one "household" can actually be 100 different people because of a proxy. So all of that traffic is actually seen as a single IP address.

Javascript collection: Historically 10% of people have Javascript disabled. (Christians are much higher as we are a suspicious tribe.)

There is always over/under reporting due to network errors. The internet has millions of redundancies because of the wild nature of the net.

Don’t give up on stats!

• We’re better off than radio and television
• Look at stats as estimates, not hard and fast numbers
• Try to put stats in the right context.

What are things more important than stats? What are techniques to get you important feedback.

• Feedback. web 2.0 stuff like comments. (more coming on this bigtime) email, publish it. (make a contest based on feedback)
• Customer service. Use a ticket system.
• Blog search. Technorati, Google Blog search, MyBlogLog
• Surveys. SurveyMonkey.com, SurveyGizmo.com,
• Chat. Having a regular chat session for feedback works great.
• Social Networking sites. Facebook, etc… don’t invest cash in it since it’s fickle, but is cool to have groups.
• Crowdsourcing. getsatisfaction.com (get customer service types of help from your community.)
• Meet-up with people. meetup.com or other utilities help get people together.