Winning Online

I’m a total sucker for numbers. I don’t really know how this happened, but somewhere along the line I became interested in stats. For someone who did as horrible as I did in Stats at college this is a bit of a surprise to me, but hey, I’ll take it!

How about these numbers… in January of 2008, approximately 77% of the searches done on the globe were done using the search engine Google, while in a distant second place, and I do mean distant, you have YAHOO! with just 12% and in third place MSN with about 6%. Chances are you’ve heard about the recent offer Microsoft has made to purchase YAHOO! in an effort to battle the king of the hill, Google… yet another interesting number, 44.6 - as in $44.6 billion. I read today that YAHOO! turned down Microsoft’s offer because they felt they were worth more. Earning potential and branding power had a large impact on that decision, makes you wonder what kind of number they are really looking for, ey?!…

The reason why I like numbers so much now is pretty simple, they help me do my job better. As a web guy, in charge of web sites, if I can see who is coming to our web sites, how long they are staying, what pages they entering from, what browser and resolution they are using or what country visitors are coming from, I can then take that data and use it to my advantage. Quick example, if I notice that all of my web site visitors are using Internet Explorer version 6.0, wouldn’t it make sense for me to optimize my web site pages for the IE6? Yes, it certainly does! And say I were to notice from these stats that many of the new visitors coming to the site are using an iPhone, wouldn’t it make sense for me to optimize my pages for handheld viewing? Sure does!

The fact of the matter is that collecting and interpreting site statistics will help you create a more efficient web site and web marketing strategy. If you haven’t started tracking your web site statistics now is the time. There are many different statistic solutions out there, from WebTrends to Google Analytics. Most hosting packages offer some kind of stats program as a standard feature. It really depends on the specific business needs, in many situations a free solution will give you all the data that you need. So, what are you waiting for? If you haven’t already set up a way to monitor your web sites stats, there is no time better than now to get up and running!

Until next time -

nb