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Yes, I know that statistics can be rather dull and boring. Graphs, pie charts and all those other facts and figures that you can find just about anywhere you look can easily put you to sleep but I like to look at them. If you look beyond the bars and slices of the pie and think about the people that those symbols represent you can begin to get a feel and an understanding for the people that you're trying to sell a product to.

Getting that understanding for our market place can be very difficult if you only work online. You never see the individual and you can never communicate with them in a way that makes understanding them easy.

Even though you may be able to follow them through your site in real time if you're using the right stats package you can never look into their eyes and get a real understanding of why they have come to your website in particular. And that's one area where bricks and mortar businesses can do things better than online stores can.

But if you want to know more about the people who visit your online shops then don't despair because we can access important data that the bricks and mortar businesses may well miss. You see, in a bricks and mortar business you've got people coming into your shop all the time. If the business is particularly busy then you have a constant flow of people coming through the door and, while you may be able to learn some important facts from them other important data will be missed.

In a real-world business you may not know what actually prompted the customer to come into your shop. You may have such a steady flow of customers that you're so busy it's difficult to obtain any reliable demographic data too. And it's in those two areas where online businesses do much better at gathering data.

It's relatively easy to find out where your customers are coming from ... that's something that any server-stats package should be able to tell you with some degree of accuracy. The amount spent by customers coming from different sources is also something that it's quite possible to track. And the demographics of your customers are generally tracked for you by others.

When you add those three sets of figures together you begin to get a very clear picture of your average customer and as you follow trends in those figures you can begin to forecast what the future might hold for you.

The end of year holiday season is one season where it's always very important to be able to identify trends and so you might be interested in some interesting figures produced by Hitwise earlier this month. The data that Hitwise used was taken from online shopping sites during the four weeks ending November 3 and compared to the figures from the same period last year.

The figures are interesting for they show a decline this year in the number of visitors to online shopping sites compared to last year in every age group but one. In some age groups the decline was quite minor but in the 25 to 34 year age group the decline was very noticeable at around 6%.

The one age group that actually recorded an increase was the 55+ group and over there the increase over the 2006 figures was 9%. It seems that even though we're going through some hard economic times the silver surfers are discovering how easy it is to buy things online and they're ready to spend their money.

Now what happens when you carry those figures over to our industry? Compare them to your figures and what do they tell you? Are you seeing increases in sales in the BBW, big tit and mature niches?

It's always been the view of many adult marketers that those three niches have been the ones that attract older surfers so if you're seeing increasing sales in those areas it could be that you really are getting older people to your sites. If you think that is what the figures are showing then perhaps you need to think about ways of making your marketing to that older group more effective.

How you might do that is something for you to decide but perhaps the choice of words in your marketing message may be important. Perhaps the size of the text and the fonts that you're using could be important. Perhaps the colors of the backgrounds on your sites compared to the text might be important too.

Even if you're not working in those niches I just mentioned you may still be able to see some interesting trends when you compare your sales data with the Hitwise data I mentioned above.

You see, statistics are only going to be dull and boring if you let them be that way. Statistics can be valuable tools to help you make money if only you're prepared to take the time and learn the lessons that they want to teach you.