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Why website statistics should come with a health warning
MySpace has, apparently, overtaken Yahoo’s combined websites for the first time in page views. MySpace is therefore ‘the biggest site on the internet‘ and more popular than Yahoo!, right?
Erm, well no actually.
As the linked article above does belatedly point out:
“Yahoo still dominates in total unique vistors, though, with over twice
as many people visiting Yahoo sites as MySpace. The end game isn’t page
views, its user attention and, ultimately, revenue.”The highlighted text above is mine - and I think this is an important point. Page views can mean many things. As Mike Davidson’s excellent MySpace analysis has pointed out previously, MySpace is an extraordinarily inefficient (perhaps intentionally), click-heavy site. A cleaner design and improved user experience could result in page views dropping very significantly.
Statistics, you see, can be misleading. Increasing page views isn’t always a good thing. It can mean that you are driving your visitors mad by giving them too many clicks on the way to where they want to go, it can mean they are lost.
Or it could mean they love your site so much, they can’t stop reading it.
How do you tell the difference? Analysing user journeys is part of the answer, but quantitative web statistics will always give you part of the picture, not the whole of it. Supplement your statistics with user surveys and regular ‘real user’ testing and you’ll gain a far richer picture of what your statistics really mean.
