Numbers Don’t Lie: What Website Analytics Tell About Human Behavior

When my peers wanted to become singers or doctors , I wanted to become a statistician. I was spending hours and hours as a kid reading about economy statistics and making up my own countries. I know, I would have been worried about myself too.
So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that since I quit my job and developed a few websites, I’ve enjoyed checking analytics far too often. How many people visit my websites? How do they arrive there?  Today I want to share a few observations I’ve made about the data I have and draw some potentially far-fetching conclusions about human behavior, another big interest of mine.

1. Calculer IMC
   I developed a website that helps you calculate your Body Mass Index. Bear with me, it’s in French, but we’re not going to discuss red wines and bread here. Actually what I wanted to share is some interesting pattern on the number of visitors my website receives.
   If you look at the graph showing the number of visitors between November 21 and January 21, you can see a peak occuring on January 3rd and a very strong January month so far. It seems to indicate that the peak of interest for New Year’s resolutions happens on January 3rd.It remains strong in January but gradually declines as people interests in calculating their BMI and reaching their fitness goals decrease (Or you can see it in an optimistic light and say that people are too busy reaching their fitness goals to check their BMI again). It would be interesting to compare these numbers with attendency figures in a gym for example.
2. Gift Certificate Factory
   This website provides free gift certificate templates for professionals to print and give to their customers. December was a very high usage month, as you can see on the graph.
   
   1. Usage is increasing slowly until December 18th when it starts going higher and higher until it skyrockets on December 24 (the day with the most visitors, and by far).
   2. Two days after Christmas, there’s less than 10% the number of visitors during Christmas’eve. The decrease almost looks like a cliff!
   3. Activity is at all-time lows in January.
   What can we deduce from this graph?
   
   1. People favor doing things at the very last possible moment (24th december for Christmas is when you have to face the fact that you need to download a gift certificate)
   2. People think about gifts more during the week than during the weekend. It might be just an opportunity thing: they’d rather spend some time at work to find some gift certificates than sacrificing their free time for that. That is, except on Christmas’ eve where people couldn’t escape anymore (see 1)
   3. People don’t want to hear about gifting in January. Enough is enough!
3. Partage De Fichier
   My biggest project by far is providing secure file sharing for small companies. I’ve focused it exclusively on the French market for now.The data here isn’t all that interesting, but we can notice a small decrease around Christmas and New Year’s. Professionals are not all that concerned with improving things at their company during holiday time. I can understand that!

What have we learned in the end? That new year resolutions don’t last long, that people will delay doing something as long as possible, and that holidays are not a good time to market stuff to the business software market. Ground-breaking stuff, as you can see