Business Marketing Online (BMON): Google AdWords Management » Occam’s Razor

The types of Unique Visitors to your website you should avoid

Chris Rand — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:00:04 +0000

It took me years to get my head around the concept of "unique visitors" to a website, as mentioned in your friendly local web analytics program (probably). Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik explains what they are, and what the different types you hear about mean, in Standard Metrics Revisited: Daily, Weekly, Monthly Unique Visitors from his Occam's Razor blog. It's a long article, but straightforwardly-explained throughout, so do bear with it, and you'll be rewarded with an understanding of a crucial concept. Most importantly, it will explain why "Daily", "Weekly" and "Monthly" Unique Visitors are a misleading statistic in most everyday use, which you should avoid.

Most importantly, you should never ask or answer the question "how many unique visitors does your site have?" unless both parties understand exactly what is meant by the term. When I used to manage the Pro-Talk websites, advertising agencies would ask us this question every day, and I'd always ask them to clarify the question before answering it. They rarely could – they just thought they were being clever, when in reality they were just showing their ignorance. They still do it, apparently – collecting completely incomparable data from various websites and then using it for comparative purposes. They're not doing their clients any favours.

The types of Unique Visitors to your website you should avoid

Who knows what works?

Chris Rand — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:00:39 +0000

Analysing your website visitors is one of the great exercises in marketing today. It genuinely excites me to follow who they are, where they came from and what they do on my website. I never had this level of insight into the customer with any traditional marketing technique. But there's another fascinating exercise which online marketing has given us, and that's the ability to test everything easily. We're all daft if we don't find the time to do it, if only because it was so much more difficult to do in the past (testing direct mail pieces, for example).
In Experiment or Die. Five Reasons And Awesome Testing Ideas on the always compelling Occam's Razor blog, there's a whole list of things you can test on your website to see what works best. The article is written in fairly excitable US English, but there are a lot of ideas to take away for even conservative UK industrial websites. Be bold! You only have to expose a small number of visitors to your riskier ideas.

Who knows what works?

What people are searching for, and where

Chris Rand — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:53:00 +0000

One or two people commented on the post about GoogleTrends for Websites to say that they didn't realise such useful tools were available, so presumably many of you may not have come across Google Insights For Search either. This is introduced comprehensively in the article Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Insights for Search on Occam's Razor so make yourself a mug of coffee and have a read. This tool is a fascinating insight (of course) into what people are searching for, and where.

What people are searching for, and where

How do you compare to your competitors?

Chris Rand — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:04:00 +0000

Google Trends for Websites is a relatively new – free – offering from Google which allows you to track the clickthroughs from Google to any site on the web. This means you can compare how you're doing against your competitors, which is always fun. Unfortunately, you have to get a certain amount of clickthroughs to register on the graphs, which might not make it very useful for lower-traffic sites, such as many industrial companies. However, a really good, in-depth introduction to Google Trends for Websites appeared on the Occam's Razor blog recently, and it gives you a good flavour of what this tool can do. Have a read.

How do you compare to your competitors?