Within every industry, there is a language and jargon to deal with. Additionally, every industry has its own statistics. In order to excel, you must learn that jargon and you must also learn to gather and analyze those statistics. According to Steven Scott Google statistics of some of the most important.
Steven Scott Google’s Statistics
The statistics and terminology used in the world of internet, and therefore Google, are vast. They include:
- Hits. People who want you to believe they have an excellent operating website will tell you they receive x amount of hits every month. In reality however, this number is actually quite meaningless. A ‘hit’ is actually a file that a web browser received from the server. Hence, if a web page has lots of images and a big HTML file, then it is likely to receive lots of hits. That does not mean they also received lots of visitors.
- Page views. This is a far more accurate measurement because it doesn’t matter how many hits a page received. Rather, it measures the number of times the page was loaded. Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell whether there were 20 visitors looking at a single page, or whether there was one visitor looking at 20 pages.
- Unique visitors. This is where things get interesting and this is what you should be looking at. This really tells you just how popular a website is. It is vastly more accurate than hits and even pageviews. This number tells you the amount of individuals who came to your website.
- PPC. This is the money that you pay and get back for clicks made on advertisements, usually Google AdWords. It is impossible to determine what a good rate for PPC is as that depends entirely on what the website owner or hopes to gain from it.
So what does all of this tell you? Essentially, it means that simply throwing some numbers about tells you absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t know this and they are blinded by language. The example of the number of hits is an excellent example of this. It is all too easy to assume a website is functioning very well just because somebody received thousands of hits, when in reality it could mean they actually only have one visitor. It is for good reason that services such as Google Analytics exist. This allows you to look at the statistics and data that you are yourself interested in another actually meaning for to what you hope to achieve.
It is important to understand that statistics are limited. What they do is provide not an accurate picture but rather an average picture. A good example is that one in eight women will have breast cancer at some point in her life, but if you randomly pick eight women out of a crowd, it is likely that none of them will ever have breast cancer or even that all of them have already had it. When you understand this limitation of statistics, you will be far more likely to use it them your advantage as well.
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