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Are web stats irrelevant?
One of the questions we ask people is how will you know if your website is a success. A lot of the time people respond with “Web stats”, but with the advent of things like Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), and other innovations online, in my opinion current web analytics are becoming less and less relevant .
Evhead has a great post taking this idea further and Mike Davidson wrote months ago about the case of Myspace and its page views statistics being misleading.
The bottom line is Page views and other web analytics tools may tell you how many “pages” users are viewing, but they don’t tell you a great deal about the user experience, or how satisfied the user was when they left your site. To find this kind of information you really have to talk to your customers or whoever your audience might be, and talk to the rest of your organisation and get feedback from the primary source and not from a tool which performs analysis at a very superficial level.
