Google Analytics is a page tagging service, its accuracy will depend on you and what you want. If you have comprehensively tagged all your pages, then it will comprehensively report on your traffic, but that traffic will include bots and spiders i.e. not real people. You can filter these out - up to a point - but are real-people numbers important to you? Its unlikely that you will ever get an accurate number of real people visiting your site, so its best to accept that. Assuming, you did have an accurate number and that number suddenly doubled or halved what would you do? What would happen? In either case you would want to know why, but you're not really interested in the number, only the change. You can figure that out whether you have real-people numbers or all-inclusive numbers. Your real concern should be trends and Google Analytics is fine for this, as long as you know what you're reporting and you don't change the filtering. -nik
>>> "Jeff Tancil" <jtancil at tenement.org> 3/11/2008 12:58 PM >>> That seems to beg a question: what stats service is useful? As a fairly dinky Museum, we use the best free service, GoogleAnalytics. How badly do people think that skews? -----Original Message----- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nik Honeysett Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 3:53 PM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Website benchmarking Like you say, these sites are ok for trends but do not give anything close to accurate figures for traffic your numbers. -nik >>> Russ Brooks <RBrooks at mus-nature.ca> 3/11/2008 10:43 AM >>> When we noticed a shift in our web statistics we wondered if it was just our site or was it something that was affecting all other museums. We found the two following sites very useful in providing us with an opportunity to compare our performance to that of other museums. http://www.alexa.com/ http://www.compete.com/ These two sites allowed us to see the exact same patterns in traffic affecting nearly all other museums. These sites can also be useful when trying to determine Internet usage trends. Is Facebook still hot? Type in their address and you can see the results. On 3/11/08 1:26 PM, "Leonard Steinbach" <lensteinbach at gmail.com> wrote: > I was wondering whether anyone uses any particular web traffic statistics to > compare the performance of their website to the websites of other museums. > In effect is anyone benchmarking their website against others, or know of > any studies or papers which address this issue? > > Thanks > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l
