Discerning the truth about web stats

We have discussed in the past how some webmasters can twist the statistics their web sites generate to mean things that may not exactly be the truth. Such a practice is often used to influence people, whether it is web site visitors into thinking that the web site is more popular than it actually is, or to influence advertisers or potential advertisers into spending more money because it seems as if there is a lot of visitor traffic.

But, as we examined before, claims of ‘millions of hits’ to a web site are most often an exaggeration of the facts and a distortion of what web server statistics actually mean. Such claims can also reveal the ignorance — or the deceitfulness — of a self-proclaimed ‘web guru’ that has just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough experience to be trustworthy.

Besides spouting spurious stories about web site ‘hits’ (be sure to read our article discussing this in more detail) web site operators frequently boast about the incredible breadth of their web site traffic, claiming to be significantly ‘global’ and ‘international’; again this is more often than not designed to convince readers into thinking that that particular web site is more than just a hometown sensation but is instead some sort of worldwide phenomenon. They will often gloat about ‘millions’ of international web site ‘hits’ and minimise the number of Bahamas-based visitors, all in a deluded effort to inflate their own egos and mislead their readers.

Such claims are based on that web site operator’s misguided understanding of ‘country’ statistics that web servers generate.

Just as web site ‘hits’ are inherently inaccurate for determining a web site’s popularity, ‘country’ statistics are a sorely inaccurate basis upon which to boast. Country statistics are determined by two primary things: the top level domain (TLD — the portion of a web address after the ending ‘dot’, such as .com, .net, .bs, .ca, .co.uk, etc) of the requesting site and/or the reverse lookup of a person’s IP address. While this can be accurate it can be just as often inaccurate.

The reality is, any boasting of accomplishment based solely on web site statistics is a house built on the sand. It will soon crumble under closer scrutiny and honest evaluation.

When a web site visitor’s geographic location is determined using the TLD of the visitor (such as ‘.com’) then any sense of accuracy is immediately lost. How many people in the Bahamas use e-mail addresses ending in ‘.com’? Think: gmail.com, coralwave.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com. Then, compare that with how many people utilise e-mail accounts ending in ‘.bs’ (can you think of anyone?) and you begin to get the picture. Associating a geographic location with a TLD is vastly flawed.

According to one web consulting firm’s glossary of web stat terms:

A country is determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. Reporting of visits by country is inaccurate because there is no strong correlation between many top level domains (such as .com) and particular countries.

But, in reality, few web server stats use this method alone, but rather use the reverse IP address lookup method, which helps to compare a web visitor’s origin with a database of IP address allocations. This can help more accurately identify the geographic location of a web visitor, even to such granularity as the city from which they are visiting. But even this information can be severely skewed.

Here is one reason why this is the case: Without getting too deep into the technical details, major corporations design their computer networks so that all internal users must pass through their own routers which perform address translation from internal addresses to public external addresses. This conversion can make it appear as if all of those individuals are coming from a single IP address. This can even be the case for thousands of users from around the world that are connected remotely to their company’s network using such technologies as VPN (virtual private network).

Ford Corporation, for example, has over 320,000 users worldwide — but these could be counted as a single visitor from a single location outside Chicago. It is easy to see how this fact alone can cause web traffic information to be misstated, and there are others.

The moral of this story, then, is to view all web performance statistics through the discerning lens of skepticism and generalities. Don’t base your boasting on such an inaccurate and still evolving technology. As another Internet consultant put it:

• Web analysis is statistics, not accounting. Absolute precision is impossible.
• This inaccuracy is OK so long as you don’t get too excited about the fine detail.
• If you design your processes accordingly, the exact numbers shouldn’t matter too much. You are where you are today. You want to improve on this. The key to success is to concentrate on trends over time, not individual numbers.
• We have to accept that web analytics software is in its infancy.
• Life’s full of uncertainties and web analytics is no different.  Somehow we all manage to get by.

We believe that web site operators in the Bahamas should spend more time creating unique, interesting and compelling content and less time manufacturing tales of success and plagiarising original content from other writers and web sites and passing it off as their own. This, far more than spinning fantastic fallacies of figures, will lead to actual success.

LEARN MORE:

• Click HERE to read more about understanding web statistics
• ‘How to sell statistics to clients’ – sitepoint.com (Interesting to see the opening line of this article — almost identical to our first article — and this was published more than a year after ours! -Ed.)
• ‘Web Stats – The Truth About Hits And Visitors’ – freshbusinessthinking.com

~ejr~