I find stats very interesting. My daughter took a course in high school that was a statistics class for a math credit. She hated it. She has since taken it in college, with a different teacher and loved it. I have always loved statistics, hmm, maybe a new career?

When I first started my website, there were very few stats and I had to add a plugin to get more information. However, I rarely looked at the stats for quite some time. Probably because they never changed early on. Now, I look at them almost every day. Not that they change hugely even now, but there is now more to look at.

The last book I wrote, In The Details, I published through a publishing company. I never realized how much I like being able to see real time stats until I couldn’t see them. This publishing company only publishes sales reports once every quarter.

They have no other stats for authors to look at, like how many people have clicked on that particular book on their website, and because they published the book I can’t look at any stats on companies like Amazon, or Barnes and Noble. I have found it to be very frustrating to know whether the advertising I am paying for is actually working or not.

Maybe because I’ve just always had the stats for everything else I’ve ever done. This website, for example, when I put art, other books, and products on it. Other sites like Etsy, YouTube, and Spoonflower, literally every other site I’ve ever worked with, I just took the stats for granted.

This past 2 weeks I have really learned the value of knowing the results of something you are paying for. That way adjustments can be made to what I’m doing, to make it more beneficial to the end result I’m looking for. That is the power of statistics, and keeping track of them.

I am advertising through google ads, so I can see how many people click on and view the ads, as well as how many times the ad was shown. This is somewhat helpful, I just can’t see if anyone actually purchased, which is the end result that I’m finding frustratingly missing. People can click all day long and never buy.

I have been creating a different website, much cheaper than WordPress (my blog will remain here), so I will be adding all this to that website so that I can better track the end results. I just never realized how important all the stats are, beginning to end. I am learning.