“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and stat­ist­ics.” Ben­jamin Dis­raeli once fam­ously quoted.

This is one of my favour­ite quo­ta­tions that I often drop into con­ver­sa­tion when I’m presen­ted with a load of stats which may look great at first glance: par­tic­u­larly if presen­ted in a pie-chart or line graph format, but don’t actu­ally tell me any­thing!

How­ever, in the world of sales and mar­ket­ing; the use of mean­ing­ful stats is a great way to gain the atten­tion of a poten­tial cus­tomer, build cred­ib­il­ity about your products or per­haps present proof of a par­tic­u­lar concept that you’re try­ing to get across.

I know this to be true, as a recent sur­vey told me that 8 out of 10 cats said so!

Get Online, Get Measuring!

One of the great things when it comes to sales and mar­ket­ing on the web, is the vast level of stat­ist­ics that are avail­able to you as a web­site owner.

Whether it’s the wealth of data your web­site stats applic­a­tion churns out, through to the click-through-rates your online advert­ising cam­paign gen­er­ates or the effi­ciency rat­ing that your email mar­ket­ing cam­paign mon­itor soft­ware gives you, there’s one thing for sure; you’re never short of a few stats to show you where you’re going right or wrong with a par­tic­u­lar strategy. Much of this data if often access­ible imme­di­ately after a par­tic­u­lar event has occurred thanks to the response rates of web serv­ers and mon­it­or­ing software.

Email Mar­ket­ing Stats

For example, if I send an email cam­paign to my list of sub­scribers; using our email man­age­ment soft­ware; I can tell within a few seconds of the emails land­ing in people’s in-boxes; who has opened the email, how many times, at which time, which links they clicked in the mail and even which email cli­ent they’ve used to read it etc, etc.

Power­ful stuff, par­tic­u­larly when try­ing to refine and meas­ure the suc­cess of a par­tic­u­lar email mar­ket­ing campaign.

You don’t get that level of detail using tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing meth­ods such as mail-shots or print advertising.

Google Inter­net Stats

Google knows how web mar­keters value a “good stat­istic” to quote at people; so to help us out, they’ve launched a web­site that acts like an aggreg­ator of stat­ist­ical facts it finds across the web.

The Google Inter­net Stats web­site was launched on Octo­ber the first and is described by Google as a ” …a cool new web­site that can help your busi­ness by giv­ing insights into what’s going on online.”

The site offers stat­ist­ics on the eco­nomic envir­on­ment, con­sumer beha­vior and media trends that are hap­pen­ing in the UK.

Yes, you read cor­rectly; “in the UK”! Not the US. Which makes a refresh­ing change!

So if you’re look­ing for some stats to bol­ster up a point you’re try­ing make either in a present­a­tion, on your web­site or in an elev­ator pitch; then take a look at the Google Inter­net Stats web­site for some inspiration.

Stat­ist­ic­ally speak­ing, you can’t go wrong!

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