Benchmarking Your Stats

Posted on April 24th, 2008 by Larry Chase

Daily, weekly and monthly page views are good stats for you to have at your fingertips, no doubt. But they should also be put into context. Compare your stats for this last week to the stats for the same week last year and the year before. Are you trending up or down? Are there seasonal variations? Probably. Are there parts of your site that are visited more often this year than last year? Again, it’s probably the case. The point is a set of stats by themselves is only a snapshot of a horse race. What you probably want is the bigger picture that tells a story so you get a sense of where your visitors were, where they are and therefore hopefully extrapolate where they’ll go next. Digging up old stats and doing side-by-side comparisons is harder than simply looking at this week’s or this month’s numbers. But I think you’ll find the extra effort can pay large dividends.

The Internet Marketing Tip above originally appeared in Larry Chase's Web Digest For Marketers which you can subscribe to at no charge at www.wdfm.com.