

Numbers Don’t Lie: What Website Analytics Tell About Human Behavior - toumhi
http://www.sparklewise.com/?p=1211

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jabkobob
While numbers don't lie, the conclusions you draw from them can still be
incorrect.

Look at the second graph (website visits peaking on Dec 24th for
giftcertificatefactory.com). The author concludes the following from this
peak: "People favor doing things at the very last possible moment."

But this is nonsense. Such a conclusion would require a model for how people's
preferences affect web page statitics. If you don't have a model, your
intuition is going to fool you. Let me illustrate this with a simple example:

Assume that in our model world you have two kinds of people: Early-Buyers and
Late-Buyers. Early-Buyers buy presents on a random day from Dec 1 to Dec 20.
Late-Buyers on the other hand buy presents on a random day from Dec 21-24.
Assume that 80% of people are Early-Buyers and 20% of people are Late-Buyers.

If you looked at the number of presents bought per day, you would see that the
rates are 25% higher in the days from Dec 21-24. Your intuition will tell you:
"People favor buying presents late". But that is not true, because in our
model world 80% of the people are actually Early-Buyers!

Now, to explain the web page statistics shown in the article, we would need a
more elaborate model; but constructing such a model and working with it is
difficult, and that's why people avoid thinking about models, just post raw
numbers, and then write whatever their intuition tells them, and then claim
that it must be true because "numbers don't lie".

~~~
toumhi
Easy tiger. Maybe it's a problem of vocabulary (non-native english speaker
here) with "People favor doing things at the very last possible moment." ?

What I meant was that of all days, people buy on the very last. Which makes
sense according to our intuition indeed. I didn't mean to imply that (number
of people buying the last 5 days) > (number of people buying before during the
whole year) as you seem to argue against. I was only observing that absolute
numbers increase day by day starting 5 days before Christmas.

Your early buyer-late buyer model is interesting but as you said, it would
require more thorough research to set it up and was not in the scope of the
article.

I thought the data was interesting and wanted to share it with the community,
and I had no ambition to draw a complete buying model from it.

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TeeWEE
Hey Tommy! Im Tjerk your former collegae.

Anyway nice article. However your conclusions are not well founded. For
example. what if majority of the traffic to your Gift Certificate Factory came
from a website that went offline at the point in the graph. Then there is a
different correlation.

Also i have never seen a huge drop like that. Are you sure there are no other
reasons for the drop?

The peak for your MBI site might also be because some other guy linked to it
from a favority website. This is often the cause for spikes like that.

Just saying, that the conclusions you make might feel right, you can never be
sure with only the graphs. So its a bit of speculation.

~~~
toumhi
Hey Tjerk, welcome on HN ;-)

You're right sometimes peaks can be coverage from other websites and drops can
reveal a problem with a website however here it's no such case. It's pure
seasonality, which is why I felt compelled to write about it :-)

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mbesto
With no discredit to the author (because this is a decent piece) but numbers
sometimes do lie. Outliers? Correlation != causation?

You know what really shows human behavior? Speaking to someone face to face.

~~~
Anderkent
>You know what really shows human behavior? Speaking to someone face to face.

Well, not really. People lie all the time.

~~~
MindTwister
Also, lupus.

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GigabyteCoin
I remember being absolutely amazed after seeing the same number of unique
visitors hit my site two days in a row.

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Anon84
I was expecting something more along the lines of this:

Human dynamics revealed through Web analytics

<http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.4018>

