October
31
2007
I caught the rumors on this earlier today, but didn’t post cuz I don’t like rumor-mongering:
Greg Drew was colleague on the Web Analytics Association board of directors and I always valued his opinion and insight.
I’m sure that he will land on his feet but it’s sad to see him as a casualty of market conditions.
September
27
2007
I just upgraded this blog to v2.3 and I’m very happy about it. I’ve had RC1 running on a blog in development for a couple of weeks and I couldn’t wait to see if what I was seeing there was true.
IT IS.
WordPress 2.3 appears to make significant improvements in speed. I’d say the load time has improved between 30-40% (although I have no data to back that up), just seems that way to me.
So, thank you Automattic and all you wordpress developers for the new version. I’ve barely peeked under the hood and I’m very, very pleased.
Now, the one, um, oddity that I noticed is that the inbound link module on the Admin dashboard now uses Google Blog Search instead of Technorati. Since WordPress is quite the juggernaut in the blog platform space, I have to ask…
Is Technorati doomed?
What do you think?
September
24
2007
In his keynote at the inaugural SEMPhonic XChange Conference, Eric T. Peterson said he was going to be controversial, that he wanted to stimulate the discussion. That he was tired of the ‘me too’ and ‘that’s exactly what I think’ commentary. Fast-forward a bit and Eric goes ahead and lobs a controversial bomb my way…
"Reporting Is Evil"
You might as well say Seeing is evil.
Seeing, after all, is just your eyes reporting received electromagnetic stimuli to your brain.
I can understand the sentiment behind it – I really can. It comes from a frustration with organizations and people who think web analytics is nothing more than regurgitation of data. A frustration with people and organizations that don’t "get it" and can’t "grok it". The frustration comes from web analysts within those organizations (I’ve felt it, believe me), from consultants trying to help companies get to the next level and vendors trying to sell their wares.
The problem is that reporting is NOT evil. It is vital to the web analytics process.
Analysis, web analysis, is a process – or at least it should be.
Analyses, like any process, have outcomes. The outcomes might be changes to the website, changes to advertising creative, changes in SEM strategies, changes to the web analytics implementation itself and many more that I’m not thinking of at the moment. One of the over-arching deliverables of a process is communicating its results. If the results of the web analytics process are not communicated, then no outcomes are possible. How can recommended changes to the website be made if they aren’t communicated and substantiated with an analysis of the data?
Yep, that’s my way of saying that reporting is an expected outcome of the analytic process. A process that doesn’t communicate its results is a failed process. Thus, if we excise reporting from web analytics because it is evil, we are left with a process that can give us no insight because there is no way to extract information from it. What is the point of going through the process at that point? We might as well use ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’ in all its blindfolded glory to make a decisions.
There are many definitions of reporting, but in this context I think that there are two that are most important:
The frustration that leads people, Eric included, into thinking and saying that reporting is evil derives from organizations treating reporting as the whole analytics process.
So, if you are spending time, money and resources on web analytics and all you are doing is reporting the data, then you probably feel like you’re not getting nearly enough value out of your investment.
Heck, without reporting there is no feedback loop in analytics and then your just running one blind test after another – throwing spaghetti at the wall as it were – until something sticks.
Reporting without analysis is just a regurgitation of facts. Analysis without reporting is impossible because then there is no mechanism for creating the feedback loop within the process.
September
14
2007
Hut! Hut! … HIKE!
photo credit: bigeoino, creative commons license
Hey, I’ll be at XChange next week, leading a huddle on developing reports. The focus will be Excel because
The huddle will hopefully be a discussion of best practices for developing sustainable web analytics reports – I really don’t want to talk at people for 2 hours, I want opinions, experiences, tips and tricks and discussions that will make us all better at report development. As the huddle leader I will come armed with questions and opinions that will serve to facilitate the discussion. It will be my job to get the huddle going, keep it on task and make sure we have a positive environment for discussion. It will be your job to bring your brains and experience. If we do our job well we should be able to come up with some substantive wisdom that everyone can use – not just us.
Interested? Today is your last day to get your huddle preferences into the folks at SEMPhonic.
Other huddles that I am interested in? (I know I won’t be able to attend them all – alas)
The full agenda is here.
August
29
2007
well, maybe not everyone but certainly you can sympathize with the sentiment. We all dream of getting that rare GTO (ok, that’s just me) but the point is, we all dream about owning a great car but not buying them. Why is that? Well, the dealership is a high-pressure sales environment. Every move, statement and eye wiggle is scripted to get us to buy a car.
"I’ll have to check with my manager"
"What will it take to get you to take this baby home with you today?"
<endless waiting designed to make you willing to do anything to leave>
<forms, upon forms, upon forms>
Any of this sounding familiar yet? Why am I bringing this up and making you sweat, cringe and shiver all at the same time?
-glad you asked-
Over on the Lunametrics Blog, Robbin Steif has published part four of her interview with Avinash Kaushik about his book "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day" and at one point she asks
Why do you care so much about the customer experience and discount conversion rate so much? (We can say, p. 340, but you address this elsewhere too) The way that I look at it, there are either other conversions (like applying for a job, or getting help on the website), and the analyst is just forgetting to include those conversions. Or, it’s important that the customer have a good experience so that when he is ready to buy, he will (and it is a long term problem, but it is still about conversion rate.) Or, he will tell other people or write about what a good experience he had, and *they* will come and convert, eventually. So it is still a conversion rate problem. Ultimately, it is always about conversion rate. (Go ahead. Tell me that I’m wrong.)
Avinash goes into a long and informative response detailing why focusing on just conversion rate is a bad idea. For me, it boils down to ‘visitors at your site have all kinds of tasks in mind – other than buying – so optimizing for just one task neglects (or worse) the other visitors.’
However, it got me thinking … well that’s unfair … I had a little flash of an idea and here it is:
So, even if you are there to buy, it can be (and often is) a massively uncomfortable experience. If, instead of optimizing for conversion, you optimize the user/consumer experience in effect what you are doing is creating a comfortable and reassuring environment where your visitors can feel confident in doing whatever it is they came there to do.
Does anyone have a story about how optimizing for the user (versus a metric like conversion rate) had unanticipated positive results? Please share your story in the comments here.
Hey, I’m equal opportunity – if you have a UX horror story share it here too…
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