Web Site analytics are painful to decode at the best of times. But one metric that is usually sound is the number of unique visitors that your Web Site gets.

Unless your web site is super sticky commercial companies rely on being able to be found in Internet search engines like Google.

I monitor and report on the web stats for several companies spread over many different business classifications. In July 2008 on average and collectively the number of unique visitors dropped by 7% and this was unusual based on the pattern of web traffic in the preceding months.

July should have been a big month as it had 23 working days compared to June’s 21. My clients are UK based so would not have been affected by the American July 4th Holiday.

So what happened:

There are two possible things happening here:

1) Google changed dramatically the ranking algorithm.

or

2) The doom and gloom in the economy has affected the number of unique visitors looking for products and services from commercial companies.

I actually think its bit of both 15% Google and 85% the economy.

At some level there is a link between consumer confidence and web traffic to commercial companies.