Julia Gillard (Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister) has been quoting the number of visits the My School website and using these visits as the basis of some determined policy decisions.
On ABC1’s Insiders on Sunday, she said:
“If we look at the My School website, Barrie, the current statistics are we’ve had around 2.7 million visits. We’ve had 140 million pages of the My School website looked at.”
Ms Gillard then makes the following conclusion:
“Parents have literally voted with their fingertips in extraordinary numbers because they want this information.”
The Deputy Prime Minister has looked at the statistics (2.7 million visits sounds like a lot), and made some conclusions about what Australian parents want. Statistics should be able to help us come to educated conclusions. However, statistics can be interpreted in many different ways, and website statistics need to be considered in context. For example, the following should be considered when looking at the raw data.
Of the 2.7 million visits to the site:
- how many visits were by Australians?
- how many visits were by parents?
- how many of the visits were by the media, or the website developers, or the usability testers, or Education Department officials?
- how many of the visits were unique (i.e. was it one person visiting the site 2.7 million times?! Obviously not, but what are the actual proportions?)
- how many of the page views were unique? (i.e. how many different people viewed the 140 million pages?)
This post isn’t political commentary - it’s drawing up some lessons for churches and Christian ministries. And so the lessons here for our websites are simple:
- consider statistics in context - raw data means very little on its own.
- beware of making conclusions based off one or two website metrics.
- set-up filters (to prevent staff traffic from being included in the statistics and muddying the waters).
To learn more about the differences between page views, visits and visitors, check out this 4 minute tutorial.
