I think it can depend how close you are to the website as to how you see trends and patterns in your minds eye. We perhaps only have about 300 pages on our website and I do know them so personally, how they interact with each other etc that I can usually relate a change in one place from something happening somewhere else, be it on-site or off-site. These are often the things that show as the peaks and troughs.

Overall almost every website with ongoing work to it has seen a consistent upward trend in general traffic over the last few years I would highly suspect, that is natural saturation.

For larger companies with bureaucracy etc thrown in and with perhaps thousands of pages and multiple websites then I can definitely see the need for far more ‘break down’ and ‘further segment’ approach and due to the amount of data a longer term trend analysis would make sense.

Nick: I got a good chuckle reading this part of your post:

“Does the M/M or Y/Y trend rise because of that great campaign, or because your closest competitor just spend 10x buying lots of TV ads?”

I remember being in a web analytics meeting years ago – the company had seen a big increase in a dozen or so metrics and we were all trying to determine what caused what. The web guys were said it was their work – re-organizing / optimizing the site; the marketing guys claimed it had nothing to do with the web guys, but was the result of their new strategies; the boss concluded that it was almost all due to seasonal factors (warmer temps, more sunny days) and the demise of a competitor and that neither the web guys or the marketers could claim too much responsibility for it!

I am curious about one thing – how are people handling the variations in # of business days in YOY and MOM comparisons? I’ve seen it addressed a number of different ways in a number of different formats…

Ben

Yes, we can take 3 month average as a basis for comparison agains same period for previous year. Taking a more widely period for averages have 2 disadvantages: more information is required and the lagging effect on data increases.

Why 3 months? just because in that way we can see only strong trends over time. As an example: a downturn maybe is produced by circunstatial effects, but if during last 3 months the trend still going down you need to take concern about it.

Is not the same as taking quarter numbers but it is pretty close to those.
Why is not the same? because by using 3 months average you are able to make forecasting based on more time points than if you are trying to do it with only 4 each year.

Justo so you take a 3 month average as a basis for comparison? Why 3 months? Is that taking the quarter numbers and comparing?