STATISTICS

Defining Web-Statistics

Lecture Warning!

The following information is for people that hate being baffled by techno talk and mis-information or who are brow beaten by jargon filled sales pitches but would still like to know a little about the facts on statistics, what is important and what is not.

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

Statistics are often used as arbitrary numbers presented to persuade, normally by the ommission of key facts, that the arguments of the presenter are unquestionable. Statistics are sometimes mis-used to impress potential customers with large numbers they may misunderstand or interpret optimistically. Here we will attempt to set the record straight and tell you how to avoid being blinded by meaningless numbers and how to really calculate a good return on investment for your online advertising budget.

Hits

"So how many hits does your website get?" This must be the most common question asked about our and many other websites, to which some eager sales reps will keenly answer something like "1 million hits a month". Whilst this may be true, in techi-webspeak a "hit" is the name given simply to an image or text file accessed on a web server and therefore hits should not be relied upon as the sole indicator of a website's traffic. For example, a web page made of 200 files and images (many badly designed web pages can have this many or more) will only need 10,000 pages to be accessed in a month to generate 2 million hits, which sounds impressive! However, hits are normally only relevant to our developers in balancing the site load and functionality so that all visitors can see the website running as fast as possible. Therefore, less is actually more with page hits. If you want to know if a website is built efficiently then lower hits per page is normally an indication of good commercial web design.

Page Views or Page Impressions

"100,000 page views a month sounds impressive" you might say. However, this would include all the times search engines such as Google "spider" that website (invariably following every link on every page to every other page) as well as how many pages the person who made the website clicked on it to check if it is all still working or dare we say, inflate the stats. Most standard statistics packages do not filter out page views by search engine spiders or the website creators so take unfiltered figures with a pinch of salt.

The number of page views from genuine human site visitors is however an interesting statistic when looked at in conjunction with site visits because we can then calculate the number of pages the average visitor looks at. This is a good indicator of how much the average visitor looks at, sometimes refered to as how "sticky" the site is, which will demonstrate how interesting the average visitor finds the website.

Visits

We're getting somewhere now, bear with us just a little longer! Generally, the number of visits is the amount of times someone views the website in a new browser window (or session). This is a far more useful piece of information and gives a number we can work with. In conjunction with the number of Unique Visits this information can also show how many times the average visitor visits the site over a period of time, that is how loyal a site's visitors are, which is a good indication of an established brand and reputation.

Unique Visitors, IP addresses or Sites

Remember when you asked "how many hits?" thinking that this would give you a good idea of whether a site was popular? Well the number of unique visitors is probably what you were thinking of, but the unscrupulous or less informed sales rep might actually quote you the industry meaning for the term "hits" using a rediculously high number or the almost plausably useful but still inflated out of context number of page views. However all you really thought you asked is "how many people look at the website?"

Unique visitors are a very good indicator of how many people look at a website over a given period of time and is more akin to the figure that many printed publications use to quote their "readership". A reasonably fair estimate of the readership of a website would be to look at the number of unique visitors over a period of time such as the advertising cycle, or on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Jersey Events Site Statistics

We apologise for the lengthy introduction to this information but we really felt there ought to be some marketing myths corrected for you to understand what our statistics mean and how they are relevant. It is no co-incidence that our strapline is "The most popular website in Jersey" when you look at these figures from last year. Yes, they are impressive but they are only meaningful in context, which is why we have presented them as such. For a more detailed analysis, we have a full presentation on site statistics and Internet marketing available that one of our staff will be more than happy to explain to you.

First Quarter 2007

Since the launch of the new website at the beginning of the year the visitors and page views have been increasing steadily, reinforcing Jersey Events position as Jersey's most popular website! Watch this space for more stunning statistics coming to this page soon...

Population, Comparisons and Other Interesting Numbers

• Jersey Population : 87,000 (2001 census)
• JEP Readership : 50,000 (estimated - from sales of 24,000 a day)
• Jersey Internet Users : 35,000 (estimated)
• Jersey Events Readership : 25,000+ (estimated)

Any Questions?

For further clarification of our website statistics, please Contact Us.