What Is Skewing Your Data

Most analytics professionals will tell you almost immediately that there is no such thing as 100% accurate website traffic data. And they would be perfectly correct in saying so. However, there are many tasks and everyday type browsing that would be skewing the results to appear more successful than they actually are. I will outline a few easy, two second tips and steps to make sure that you are not boosting your traffic data unnaturally.

Block Your Business’ IP

The first step of any Google Analytics install should be to block out any fixed IPs used by your organisation. If your website is used by your sales team or support staff (*cough* their homepage *cough*) - this traffic shouldn’t be included in with the marketing objectives. This even includes search engine referrals as many less savvy employees could still use an engine to locate the company website.

New Visitors Aren’t Always New

Most analytics figure out if someone is new or old by various means, one of which is cookies. There are many web surfers out there that clean out their cookies regularly or don’t allow anyone to drop cookies on their website. Because of this they will be counted as new each and everytime.

For those that do not know/care about the cookies, these generally expire after 30 days from the last visit. From my point of view if no one has looked at your website for a period of at least 30 days, I don’t have any problems about counting that as a new visitor as there is probably a good chance that your website has changed in one way or another in that period.

There are Very Few One Night Stand Conversions

We setup goals and funnels that we all wish our visitors took each and everytime they come to our website. But we know in reality, only a small percentage of visitors will go landing page -> goal conversion page -> thankyou page in that exact order. That sounds more like the behaviour of a customer that already is familar with the business and the products and services - but more importantly - trusts the organisation.

To get to the one night stand conversion you have to earn that visitor trust, and once you master this extremely difficult step, you can see a nice improvement in your conversion rates.

If you use dynamic IPs it becomes a little more difficult, but as much as you can there should be procedures in place to minimise self driven traffic (is that the term? Let me know in the comments if there is an official phrase).

Website Overlay Link Percentages

Everyone loves pretty reports, whether they are about web traffic, financials, or performance stats. When people start digging around Analytics, many a client have wanted to further understand the website overlay feature. I personally like this functionality (when it actually works) as it can easily disprove the long held stigma that nobody scrolls when they search the Internet.

Anyway, what everyone fails to note is that if there is more than 1 link pointing to the exact same URL on that page, it totals the clicks from all links to that page, and assigns them the same percentage. So if the top homepage link got 3 clicks out of 10, and the footer got 1, the total percentage of clicks for BOTH of those links would be 40%, not 30% and 10%.

I would still not put all my faith on this tool, but just be aware because I have to explain this part of Analytics on regular occassions.

So in conclusion, by keeping these points in mind when you are generating your reports and your analysis, you will get a much more well rounded picture of visitor trending and behaviour on your website.