A friend of mine recently overhauled their company website. The result has been a massive improvement with a simple navigation and tidy redesign. What they hadn’t considered, however, was how each part of their site would be measured. To me, that’s critical.

The website uses Google Analytics – which is a big tick – but their gap was using modal pop-up boxes for their key conversion goals. This approach meant tracking conversion goals would not work by matching the URLs. Instead, each action in the journey to goal conversion had to be tagged as ‘onClick events’.

In the past this would have meant the conversion metrics would not be deemed a ‘goal’ – thankfully, version 5 of Google Analytics has finally allowed this function. However, what my friend can’t do with the new site is create goal funnels using the events. I see this a real gap in analysis.

Being able to quickly create the goal conversion funnels and present them to clients and site managers is terrific. You can all see where people are coming from and where they’re dropping out. That knowledge is particularly valuable as it serves as the centre-point of the ‘tweak, measure, tweak, measure’ approach that makes online promotion so simple.

Good site design is important. But if you don’t have a clear, simple metric reporting platform underneath, you’re limiting your website’s potential.

At the weekend my family participated as a team called “Ray On” in the Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. Our connection to this particular charity event stems from losing my father seven years ago to cancer – which has motivated my ever active 73 year old mother to become chief organiser of a wide team of walkers to raise funds for this worthy cause.

Anyway, the weekend was a great success. Wellington’s dependable weather turned on a superb 24 hours and my wife, kids, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces (and a number of generous family friends) all turned out and did a superb job of walking their way around 205 laps towards our fundraising target.

But what really amazed me (apart from the nice weather) was the enthusiasm of loads of teenagers with HIBS and WEGC on their tee-shirts, who fair sprinted around the course for some 600+ laps.

At 11pm on Saturday night as I did my shift, I felt totally knackered. But their effort never seemed to flag. Aside from youth (and the money they were raising), what kept them all moving at top pace right through the night?

I’d say statistics. Who got the fastest round? Who did the most laps? Did we do better than last year’s team? Standards have been set – how do you beat them? That’s the challenge.

Now it may be a stretch of parallels, but with websites and online advertising it’s similar.

Statistical comparisons are an amazing driver towards getting the best out of what you’re doing. Are we improving? How did that compare with last week, with last month? What worked? What didn’t?

If you have a website, the first thing you should do is set up some site traffic monitoring. Google Analytics is the easiest option and I tell you, the moment you start understanding your site’s performance you’ll begin to appreciate the infectious interest statistical benchmarks create.

While I promised myself I would never again be a beta user for another start up product (Skype 4.0 is just painful) the opportunity to use Google Ad Planner was just too good to be true. Google’s latest application presents site demographics of websites so people can plan targeted online advertising.

A friend in Vancouver put me onto it and it’s safe to say that when this application connects with NZ demographics it will become a very useful tool.

Using Google Ad Planner I thought it’d be interesting to sort New Zealand’s top 10 sites by unique visitors and compare it with some other analytic services.

Seeing the sites compared like this I think of Benjamin Disraeli’s “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” quote. Trade me are the only site who could look at all three measures without complaining. All the data is processed through different parameters so it’s hard to say one’s right or wrong.

Google’s data is missing a date and is presented as a collection of “New Zealand” sites which removes the international players like YouTube, Facebook and Bebo. They also conveniently leave out MSN and Yahoo!

And Nielsen’s data is collated from their members so most global players are missing. Nielsen often negate this issue in their PR by making industry or session time comparisons which does a nice job for forming the basis of a 300 word article in the technology section of national newspapers.

Alexa is a slightly different proposition with their data coming in from people who’ve downloaded their toolbar along with a mix of other ambiguous measures which are loosely explained on their site.

So which one’s right? It’s hard to tell but Google is the one that stands out for me. Google Ad Planner combined with Analytics and Trends are an excellent suite of products and their wealth of data is unmatched. If they can accept Yahoo exists and get their channels and geo-targeting sorted I’m sure they’ll be the best comparator down the track.