Linear thinking can make you draw wrong conclusions.

[kgun]

Humans have a tendency to think linearly, even if the nature around us is mainly nonlinear. Predicting linearly, can be compared to driving by looking out the back window.

Jacop Nielsen has a recent article about website traffic analysis and linear thinking (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/visualizing-traffic-analysis.html).

With a nonlinear (logaritmic) transformation of the data, he draws this conclusion:

"It's now clear that we have a drooping tail: the site simply doesn't have enough content to supply the predicted demand at the low end.

Without this fancy log-log plot, we would have never seen the site's potential for increasing traffic by adding large amounts of low-volume content. I'm amazed at how often articles analyzing Web traffic or "long tail"-type businesses use linear plots that fail to show what's really going on".

And if you use a spreadsheet like Excel for your traffic analysis, a loglinear analysis is done by simply double-clicking each axis, choosing the Scale tab in the resulting Format Axis dialog box, and checking the box for Logarithmic scale.

[khurramali]

analyzing web analytics is a difficult process. everyone who looks at the same reports will extract different prospectives and conclusions.

because the reader or the customer comes from different cultures and backgrounds so their understanding level is also different, so the complexity of the web analytics / traffic report has to take into account the level of the persons for whome the reports are made.

then their past experiences also impacts thier conclusions, a webmaster wil derive different conclusions from an SEO.

One should use Google Analytics to appreciate the variety and the user friendliness of the web analytics reports.

I still like and use AWSTATS tough.