Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Statistics - what do they really mean


 Okay I know I said that I would be blogging about the conditions that lead to the deterioration of organic material, particularly paper and I will next time, but first I have questions.  Maybe some of you out there have answers.  The questions are about the statistics provided by Google for blogs, specifically the tracking of views. I am having trouble making sense of those figures. What do they actually reflect? I particularly don’t understand some of the time frames.

1) For example, the program gives total blog views since inception - I understand that - then for the month and last the day. When does the day start? That’s my first question. I think it must be at the International Date Line.  Is it?
2) Is the month total really last month, i.e. 31 days of August, for example?    Or is it the last 30 days or what?
3) Page views are listed for each post.  What is the time frame for those numbers?  Is it views today or since the beginning?  Or what? Does it reflect a particular click from a search engine list or a view from within the blog? It must be clicks from search engines
4) A last question - The statistics list the page views by country.  These are very amusing.  For a while there I was more popular in Latvia than in the United States.  Go Latvia!  Anyway what is the time frame that the country page views are reflecting?  It isn’t just today because the numbers seem different from the total day views. What is it?

Statistics are great, but one really needs to know more about what is being measured and how.  Otherwise they have little meaning.  Remember that when you read that this or that percentage of people believe this or that.  To make sense of it you need more information - sample size, sampling technique, questions asked.  Help me out here and let me know about the Google blog statistic reports and exactly how they are measuring each category.  Maybe Google has it on a website somewhere. Do you know? Thanks.

Next blog will be about the damage caused by light.  Stay tuned.

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