I should be considered the most loyal user of 51LA Statistics. From the time I started building websites in 2005 until now, I must use 51la Statistics for every website. Maybe it’s because I’ve developed a habit after using it for many years, and because of some particularly practical functions of 51LA, that’s why I still highly recommend 51LA to this day.
I have written several empirical articles on statistical tools before. Every time 51LA statistics are mentioned, there are more praises than criticisms (search "51la" on Baidu News and you will find that many articles mentioning 51LA were written by me). A friend who makes statistical tools even asked me if I have a good relationship with Ajiang, so the website uses 51LA statistics (in the eyes of competitors, one's own products are always better). Ajiang and I have never said a word on the Internet, so we can't even be considered acquaintances, let alone a relationship. So in my previous article, when I mentioned that 51LA had good statistics, there was no falsehood at all, just because I liked it.
But today’s article is not to continue to praise 51LA statistics for how useful it is, but to find fault with it. The purpose of writing this article is to hope that everyone can understand more uses of statistical functions, and at the same time, I hope that 51LA statistics can do better.
1: Why did you think of writing this article?
Last week, I took the initiative to find a friend who is a webmaster and exchange text link ads, hoping to recommend my new website on his website. On his website, there are 2 locations that I can choose from. One is a text link advertisement on the first screen of the website, but this position is called by JS and is not an effective external link. The other is the friendly link position at the bottom of the website. If you choose this position, you can add a high-quality external link, which will help improve the PR value of the website. However, the traffic effect may not be as good as the text link position on the first screen.
I weighed it for a long time, and finally chose the text link on the other party's first screen, thinking that it would be more affordable to get traffic. Later, the other party also posted a text link advertisement for me at that location. On the second day, I looked at the 51LA source statistics and found that the effect was pretty good, with dozens of IPs coming in. At that time, I was glad that I had made the right choice. But when I looked at another statistical tool I had that could see source conversion rate analysis, I realized that my choice at the time might have been wrong. At the same time, I also thought that many webmaster friends might encounter this kind of mistake, so I decided to write it down to remind more webmaster friends to notice it. Why is it wrong? Please look at the picture below carefully.
2: Source conversion analysis, basic functions of statistical tools
The traffic situation of the new website (chaxun.la) on a certain day (as shown in the picture)
Through the picture above, you can see the subsequent effects produced by the nine largest sources of the website. You can see "number of pages per visit", "percentage of new visits", "average residence time", "bounce rate" and so on. The seventh source is the traffic from that text link advertisement. The lowest stay time for other links is more than 1 minute, while for the seventh link, the average stay time on the website is only 2 seconds. Basically, I just open the webpage and close it before I even read it. The per capita PV is only 1.09, which is the lowest, and the bounce rate is also the worst.
Friends with experience like this will know at a glance that it is fake traffic. If it is a visit from a real user, it is impossible to have such a low conversion rate. Among the sources with the highest conversion rates, in addition to direct input, the remaining four are all webmaster websites of their own. Because the website types correspond to each other and are clicked by real users, the conversion rate is relatively much higher.
Friends who look carefully will find that the conversion rate of Baidu and Google is also particularly low. Why is the conversion rate of search engine sources so low? Because although the users of these sources are real, they are not the corresponding target user group. My website is for webmaster tools, but it has also been included as a page by Baidu and Google. It is inevitable that some users will search for some keywords that are not related to webmaster tools and enter the website. It's like this user originally wanted to find pictures of beautiful women, but when he opened it and saw that it was a webmaster tool, he would definitely close it. The reason why there is still a one-minute dwell time is because some of the keyword traffic from search engines are also target users, so the overall conversion rate is boosted.
I used my blog to deliberately optimize the word "erotic Mayday" before. At that time, I found that people who searched for this word and came to the blog stayed there for only about 3 seconds. Without subsequent source conversion rate analysis, it is not easy to know the true effect of these traffic flows.
51la has not launched this feature yet. I think based on their technical experience, it is definitely not due to the technical threshold, nor is it possible that they have not thought about it. There may be unknown considerations in not launching it. Competition in the statistics market is fierce now. If 51LA can make up for this shortcoming, I believe it will be of great help to 51la in occupying market share. On the contrary, this function has never been available, which gives loyal 51LA users a reason to use other statistical tools.
3: Other minor flaws
In addition, 51LA has always been proud that IP statistics are very accurate and will not count an IP repeatedly. This is something I have appreciated in the past, because the statistics produced by 51LA are often smaller than other statistics. I have always liked statistical tools with less statistical data, because the traffic is low, which can promote my promotion. However, IP statistics also have the biggest flaw, that is, IP is easier to fake, and it is easier to fake than UV (unique visitors). Most of the cheating software nowadays are IP-based.
The last small flaw is well known to most webmasters. Occasionally, data statistics will be lost or data statistics will be suspended. This happens basically once a month. It doesn't matter to my own small website, it won't have much impact if I don't look at the data for one day. But for regular websites with relatively large traffic, daily statistics are very important. As far as I know, some advertisers who do traffic transactions also often use 51LA to count advertising data (because 51LA statistics are low, especially advertisers who buy pop-up ads, they like to use 51la statistics). If the statistics are suddenly lost one day, It still has an impact on this group of people. Because of this flaw in 51LA, it is also the reason why some websites do not continue to use 51LA.
4: Final conclusion
The ultimate purpose of writing this article today is mainly to remind webmaster friends who are doing traffic cooperation and advertising purchase. When doing these collaborations, never only have 51LA as a statistic. Because there is no website source analysis, it is difficult to identify some false and fraudulent traffic, resulting in economic losses. For my own website, as long as I am more concerned about promotion and operation, I will not only include the 51LA statistic, but will also use other statistical tools to assist it. In addition, the website source analysis function cannot guarantee that 100% of the sources of false and fraudulent traffic can be identified, because some cheating methods are also improving, and more needs to be accumulated by the webmaster's own experience to analyze.
If you are interested, I will have the opportunity to continue writing articles about traffic statistics, online promotion, website operation, and the most important thing is data analysis. And data analysis is based on having a good statistical tool. Especially e-commerce websites have a higher demand for statistics, and what they need to know is not just traffic conversion rate analysis. E-commerce websites pay more attention to performance conversion statistics such as CPA and CPS, which require more powerful statistical tools to support.
Mou Changqing (mcq0544) stayed
2010-1-27
The first address of this article is Mou Changqing’s Internet Promotion Blog: http://www.muchangqing.com (please keep it for reprinting)