The magical world of web analytics

My job in internet marketing and e-commerce has given me a lot of experience with web statistics. It’s truly a magical world, full of arcane search terms, exotic referring URLs, mysterious IP addresses, and no small portions of wild speculation and utter bulls***. It seems especially when you’ve got a site that’s in its fledgling stages and that’s not taking off in terms of popularity and traffic, you’ll grasp at any straws you’re given in terms of trying to explain the ups and downs of web traffic, for example…

Say you’ve got a company that sells lampshades. Not just any lampshades, mind you, these are world-class, top-of-the-line lampshades with singular craftsmanship and industrial-strength materials. You decide to try your hand at marketing your company, Lampshades, Inc., in the online realm – but traffic is slow to start up, and you the web marketer, in a state of pure desperation find yourself up late one evening combing through your web analytics program for some glimmer, some small prayer of a clue as to who it is that’s visiting your site, just a tiny glimpse into the mind of the elusive creature known as the “customer.” You see that only one single solitary search term has been used to locate your site through the major search engines. Some soul out there in cyberspace has encountered your site by typing the following cryptic search term into Google’s search engine:

“whar i can find lampshad for my hed at partys wooooooooo im drunk”

…That’s not all though! Not only did someone find your website once by typing in this eloquent sentence into their outdated Netscape web browser, they actually happened upon your site on five separate occasions by typing in the same garbled phrase, your web analytics program tells you. Now, certainly, it’s almost 100% certain that this was the same person all five times, probably mistakenly hitting the ‘back’ button on their browser and then clicking the link again, but maybe, just maybe.. I mean five times? Seriously? Five times?!?! Your undying belief in humanity won’t allow you to accept that someone that stupid could actually exist.
Which means… maybe.. maybe more than one person searched for

“whar i can find lampshad for my hed at partys wooooo im drunk”

through Google’s search engine. Dizzy from sleep deprivation and an excess of caffeine, your mind swims with possibilities.. maybe you’ve been ignoring a key vertical niche market – drunk people at parties! You could start a whole line of fashion headdresses for tipsy persons that double as quality industrial strength lamplight-diffusion fixtures! You can see it now! It’s not just a lampshade, it’s a Chapeau for the Sloshed! You’ll offer an entire line of Hammered Haute-Couture! You’ll usher in a new era of Shitfaced Chic! You can barely resist the urge to immediately login to your ftp server and gut that smelly old website and start fresh at www.KeggerVogue.com – all this because for a brief second those little numbers on the screen filled you with hope and ambition. Of course, in actuality it was just some dumb lush who happened to get access to a computer during the peak of their inebriation, probably searching for lampshades as a joke just to show their drunk friends who weren’t really paying attention.

That’s not to say that you couldn’t be successful with such a venture, who knows. People do love their booze. I know it sure is tempting to try and piece together some sort of meaning in the little scraps of information you can glean from web statistics when you’re a small, low-traffic website, though – but the truth is probably closer that what you’re doing is mostly speculation.

The rough thing about this whole deal is that you can only really make any kind of definite conclusions about the numbers when you have a high traffic site to begin with. So if MegaLampshadeDepot.com changes an aspect of their site layout and suddenly traffic takes a huge hit, they know what went wrong. If they change some aspect of their SEO program and suddenly they’re getting dozens of extra hits a day from people searching for some kind of kinky porn (I’m sure lampshade must be a sexual term for something – if not, someone will probably turn it into one soon enough) they can have a pretty good idea of where they need to make a change. These tactics though, sadly, don’t usually apply much to your average little site out there in the series of tubes that is Internetland.

However, I don’t wish to end this post on a note of despair. So! Here’s a special little marketing hint or insight from me to you – so, in the past year or so that I’ve had this blog-site, the #1 most viewed page on the entire site has been the one entitled “Goodies.” In fact, “Goodies” has had almost double the traffic of even the “About” page. Apparently, people’s curiosity over what the hell ‘Nútsjesmoar’ means is actually secondary to their desire for “Goodies,” whatever that might mean. I don’t know if they’re thinking they’re going to get free candy, or see some kind of explicit photos of my own “goodies”, or what thought process draws people in such numbers at the offer of free stuff like that, but there you go. In conclusion: if you want to drive traffic to a certain part of your website, just entitle it “Goodies,” and watch the numbers stream in.

This sound, logical and strictly professional internet marketing advice has been brought to you by Nútsjesmoar.

Have a pleasant day.

– Dennis