Ask HN: How often do you look at stats?

Posted by medianama on Thursday December 25, 2008 @01:43AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I spend a lot of time every day looking at daily visitors/pageviews numbers grow from morning to end of day.

Its exciting but doesn't seem to be the best approach. This leads to - 1. Wastage of time 2. Anxiety leading to sub-optimal decision making, in shorter term

What is the best frequency to monitor and review user metrics? Hourly/Daily/Weekly/Monthly?

( 4 comments | 4 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How often do you look at stats? by aaroneous on Thursday December 25, 2008 @03:42AM (#409506)

Everyone in our (tiny) co watches them throughout the day. If the info is valuable enough it can give you very useful insight into the "life" of your startup organism.

If it's wasting your time there's something wrong with your system or way your presenting the data -- it takes me about 5 secs to pull up and understand a solid snapshot of all our stats.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How often do you look at stats? by medianama on Thursday December 25, 2008 @06:49AM (#409551)

I use google analytics and awstats.

The point is variance in data tends to decrease with frequency. Weekly or Monthly data tends to make lot more sense than hourly or daily stats. But its difficult to resist the temptation to watch is hourly/daily

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Re:Ask HN: How often do you look at stats? by gsmaverick on Thursday December 25, 2008 @08:20PM (#409874)

I think you should probably look at them once a week. Don't get too obsessed with pure traffic stats as they can be misleading!

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Re:Ask HN: How often do you look at stats? by agentbleu on Thursday December 25, 2008 @03:19AM (#409497)

GF is addicted and she has hardly any visitors, i stopped looking after the traffic went v high and it was all just boring then.

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