Barbara,

Don’t you just love statistics? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to statistics. You can look at a set of statistics and decide which ones look more favourable.

Sometimes though it’s not to deceive. I’ve been setting targets for our engineering. And the target I originally set is not easily being reached.

But looking at them more deeply, I spotted a statistic that I think clients (and prospective clients) will like better – the last few days, we’ve got our average resolution time down for every incident to less than 2 hours.

But our average resolution time within 4 hours has been 80-90+ percent. That’s because of the number of jobs we solve fast as compared to those that take a few hours working at it.

I was going to use the percentage of “95% of your incidents solved within 4 hours”.

But prefer to use “100% of your incidents are solved within 2 hours on average”.

Both of them are true, but the second one proves the power of reading the stats as you see reflects you best.

But it’s not lies! It’s true, but one of those stats is more powerful!

Ian Denny’s last blog post..EMail Marketing Is NOT Spamming

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Catherine, you can test your feed just by subscribing to your own blog, and making sure that your posts always come through. It’s possible that making a change to your blog can break the feed, so it’s good to know that your readers are still getting your posts.

Barbara, this is interesting. I hadn’t considered that people might subscribe to a blog but not read it. Thanks for the link love–in that post, I said “I wish I understood how people can keep up with 50, 100, 500+ blogs.” I’ve heard someone say they subscribe to 600 blogs, and I didn’t understand how that was remotely possible. I guess it’s a lot easier if you’re not actually reading them.

I read every post on every blog I’m subscribed to. If I start to lose interest in a blog, I’ll move away from reading every word and start scanning the posts. When that happens, I’ll probably unsubscribe at some point. I only want to be subscribed if I’m actually going to read all the posts.

Hunter Nuttall’s last blog post..Happy Singles Awareness Day

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I read in “The Tipping Point” about research which suggests that humans, as compared to animals, have a maximum limit of 150 individuals with whome they can maintain a meaningful relationship.

So if you think about that, how many family do you have (who you have a meaningful relationship with), friends, work colleagues and fellow bloggers?

I loved that bit of research and won’t bore you with the rest. Suffice it to say that there are limits. Certainly for me that bears out. I’ve deliberately not spread myself too thin blogging – there are only a handful of sites I visit regularly.

And in fact, we have decided that we will break our business into units which serve the needs of 150 clients each. That will help build a kind of shared knowledge base that can easily be handled by that group.

I saw that the magic 150 number applied to a company in the US called Gore who did that with employee numbers – every time a branch reached 150, they opened another.

I’ve read the science behind this which quite frankly goes over my head, but it does feel right that beyond 150, things start to become less manageable when applied in the business world.

Ian Denny’s last blog post..EMail Marketing Is NOT Spamming

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Hi Barbara – now I’m totally lost. How do I check this? I must admit – I’m pretty hopeless at stats.

I do have WEB CEO but I’m way too lazy to switch it on. And also they keep wanting extra money for some sort of updates and I’m not prepared to pay them more – it’s a big scam.

So I just check in the bluehost awstats thing and I just see how many people came and what keywords they use.

Sometimes I google the keywords to get an idea what page I’m on.

How do I find the feed readers in the stats?

CatherineL’s last blog post..Are Your Customers Reading Your Message?

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Hi Catherine,

In your AWStats, look under “Pages-URL (to 25)
There you should find /feed/ It then shows “viewed” (pages) and “Entry” and “Exit” numbers. I believe these are the number of visits you received via your feed…not the number of subscribers. If you have a Feedburner account that shows the number of subscirbers

Hi Hunter,

So, this guy doesn’t read that many, he scans titles and probably reads some only some full posts.

Barbara’s last blog post..RSS Feed Reader Numbers – A Farce

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Thanks Barbara – I’ll try that – there’s so many things in stats that I’ve never looked at.

Hunter – that is what I do to. It’s like reading a newspaper – I just scan thru for the posts I’m interested in reading. It does become overwhelming though – going through your blogroll and I have nowhere near that amount.

CatherineL’s last blog post..Are Your Customers Reading Your Message?

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Hi Sterling,

Welcome to my blog!

Yes, high RSS feed readers is a boost to the ego, and subscribing is a great way to follow a blog. For me, it has become a real time saver.

I just visited you blog. So far, I like what I’m seeing. Based on your past experience, it’s obvious your posts will continue to be very informative.

I’ll be back to read more.

Barbara’s last blog post..RSS Feed Reader Numbers – A Farce

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Hi Nez,

That would be a great question to ask, and one many forget to consider. For a new blogger, you certainly have the right outlook.

Great advice to Catherine too.

Barbara’s last blog post..RSS Feed Reader Numbers – A Farce

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Nicole,

Thank you for sharing.

All the more reason, not to get hung up on the numbers.

Barbara’s last blog post..New Commenter Becomes NBOTW

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Hi Natural,

Isn’t a feed reader great? I like the fact that everything is in one spot.

You aced this one too. You’re good.

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Hi David,

I agree. Hits aren’t visits, and sometimes visits aren’t visits. I wrote about this earlier–how stats can be so misleading.

With numbers being able to be manually manipulated, you do have to wonder which numbers are accurate.

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