[Web Analytics] Are You Making This Mistake When You Look at Analytics? [What Matters More Than Traffic]

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

I sometimes get questions like this from small business owners who have websites.

I'm quite surprised looking at my website's traffic. The numbers are higher than I expected, and there even seem to be visits from overseas. But nothing in particular is happening....

I want to raise sales quickly. Which Analytics numbers should I look at for that?

This article should help anyone with that question.

How many real prospects are there in the first place...?

It isn't clear exactly how much, but you should suspect that the following make up a fair share of your website traffic:

They likely account for more than you'd think.

This is especially true when sales haven't gone up since launch.

Is there a way to exclude my own visits?

On a PC, just use a browser add-on; on a smartphone, an app.

With Google Analytics Opt-out, the exclusion takes effect just by installing it. Please watch the video below.

With AdFilter, just add your website under "Per-site settings" and turn on analytics blocking. Please watch the video below.

Is there a way to exclude visits from competitors?

Unfortunately, you can't make competitors disappear, so there is no way to prevent it.

A certain competitor of the company I worked for ten years ago blocked access by IP address (something like the address of where a connection comes from).

That method is completely meaningless now that pocket Wi-Fi and smartphones are part of everyday life.

It's hard to say exactly how many such visits there are, but my gut feeling is that around 20% of all visits come from competitors.

Is there a way to exclude WordPress hacking attempts?

You can't exclude the hacking attempts themselves.

However, you can see the hacking history with a WordPress security plugin.
(And of course it also blocks them.)

Even this site gets hacking attempts like these—fewer than 10 a day, but that's the reality.

Analytics traffic is just a fish finder

Actually, nothing I've described so far is a particularly big mistake when looking at Analytics.

The far more serious mistake is.... "getting fixated on the traffic numbers in Analytics".

In Analytics, traffic is where the numbers are biggest and most eye-catching, and it's easy to get the vague feeling that it will turn into money.

But unless the website is built around AdSense ads, the number of users and visits doesn't generate money by itself.

Analytics traffic is just fish-finder data. Having lots of fish and being able to catch them are two different things, right?

To raise sales, it is important to improve in this order:

Keep that order in mind.