80% of Statistics are made up…pay attention to the 20% that aren’t

My brain works with figures quite well – I am one of those bizarre people that enjoyed maths at school – and for me one of the main advantages of the internet is that it can give you amazing statistics.

Sorry to bring football into this – but I have to mention Peter Crouch playing for England. It wasn’t that long ago that he was slammed by fans and the press whenever he played for his country. We looked at his long legs and made an instant decision that the man couldn’t play.

But what we didn’t look at was the stats – or to quote Gill Grissom from CSI – the evidence. We all had a feeling about Crouch (what was that dance about?) but let’s look at the evidence.

Crouch has scored 10 in 13 international games, and McClaren called Crouch’s record as “phenomenal”. But did you know that his work rate on the pitch is extraordinary. The man runs about 13km on average throughout a game – about 0.5km more than the average for a midfielder. His highest is about 14km.

It seems that the evidence is saying that Crouch is now working hard on the pitch and this is finally starting to pay off.

The point that I am trying to make here is – examine the evidence. So often we have a feeling about our websites, an idea that we think is either good or bad. But what does the evidence say?

Who would have though Google would have worked so well when it looked so bad? eBay and Amazon hardly have cutting edge design – but the evidence is obvious. We have been monitoring the websites that we do and it seems that on just about every site we do one of the most popular pages on the site is the “guides” page – a page that gives them lots of free and useful information about your product.

The evidence suggests that Tuesday is more than likely to be the day that most people visit your website.

We did some testing for a client recently using Google Adwords and we found that reducing the amount we paid per bid (by 40%) actually increased our sales. This goes against the grain because the more you bid – the higher your listings. Yet for this customer the stats told him the best price for him was 40% lower than what he was paying.

The internet is great because of the information that you can learn about your website and about your visitors. It is a marketer’s dream. The key to having a successful website – get customer comments about what you do, constantly refine and monitor the evidence. You might think something will work – the evidence will tell you. You might think something will fail. The evidence may tell you differently.

Get detailed statistics monitoring on your website. The data is priceless.