Twenty-Six Million Reasons To Quit

I designed a new website for a client. Their old site had no analytics installed, but they told me they were getting “really healthy traffic”, so they wanted minimal downtime. I didn’t ask how they knew this.

When I finished their new site, there were a few options for analytics. I was going to use Google, but they wondered whether Amazon’s premium Alexa service might be a better option. When I asked why, a few things started to become clear.

Client: “Well, I’m looking at Alexa’s website right now, and they say our site has had more than twenty-six million visitors. See?”

The Alexa page said: “No data available for this site. We do not have enough data to estimate these metrics. Global rank: 26,643,839.”

Client: “Pretty cool to think over twenty-six million people have visited our site!”

I haven’t had the nerve to tell them what “rank” means, but I have a bad feeling they’ll be disappointed when I install Google Analytics and they see what their actual traffic is like.