A Little Math .. .

I am a faithful reader of Seth Godin, once you've read his blog I'm sure you'll get hooked as well. Today I read something that made me stop and think about the analytics programs we use and how we are interpreting the information.

In particular, the average number of pages a visitor looks at on each site. The average is the "mean" number if you remember your math and is calculated by the total number of pages viewed divided by the number of visitors on the site. We get excited the more pages we see on average page views and changes in that area are generally part of the goal process.

But - what about the median number? The median is the number of pages visited in the middle of all pages visited. Half of all values are smaller than the median value and half are larger. In other words, people to your site visit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . . etc. pages in the site. The median for you may be 10 pages - because you have 20 pages in the site.

Now let's say the average visitor to your site looks at 3.5 pages. They aren't even touching the mean of 10. (You can find the median number for your site under "depth of visit.")

So you have a few visitors who look at 7 pages, some who look at 4 pages and a bunch that hit the front page and go no further. The idea is NOT to look at incremental increases in the average number of page views but to look for an increase in the number of people who are looking at a large number of pages.

What's your mean and median?