Years ago I used to send a PDF copy of the Google Analytics report to my clients. I also sent ranking reports (remember when they were relevant?) – and what I learned was that my clients didn’t understand them.
As a good friend tells me quite often, “Oh, it gives me a headache!”.
So, although all those numbers and graphs are interesting and fascinating for me to read, to my clients, they just give them a headache!
I stopped sending them that information and I started sending them a short analysis of those reports. That turned out to be better. At least for my clients.
But, knowing what I know (or maybe I’m just a die hard geek) – I couldn’t get by in my business with that little bit of knowledge about my website statistics. I want to know what all those numbers and details mean! So, although I agree that many small businesses just need to know the basic facts, I still think it’s important to have some working knowledge of the terms and information that website analytics can give you.
The folks over at WebTrends created an excellent alphabetized glossary of all website analytics terms and their definitions. So, without further ado, here’s the list of Website Statistics Terminology.
http://www.webtrends.com/Education/Glossary.aspx
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