Comments on: eric peterson poll results

By: Web Analytics Demystified » Blog Archive » Example uses of the visitor engagement metric

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:20:11 +0000

[...] exhibiting highly-engaged behavior on my site (see late August and early September.) Given that Clint proved that conversion is a poor measure of success when trying to evaluate traffic from other… I think visitor engagement is useful for examining the non-revenue value of referring sources [...]

By: Clint

Clint — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 20:17:37 +0000

Sample size, depends on your point of view…Feedburner says I have 291 readers so the sample size there is just under 8%. However, if I look at visitors to the site, HBX says I have 140 weekly visitors so far so the sample rate is 16.4%. On a pure percentage basis, the sample size is probably ok, but since we both know the sample doesn’t really have any statistical rigor (random sample, etc) take it for what it’s worth.

I was feeling pretty lazy when I put up the poll so I didn’t hack the MajikWidget code in order to segment around respondents vs. non respondents. Therefore, I can’t prove the second part of my hypothesis, which, as we discussed, is whether or not the readers who were predisposed to not answer were those who find their way here through search engine referrals – just over half my visits this week came from search keyword referrals and a quick eyeball of what keywords were used tells me that the majority of my search traffic comes from excel and/or report design based questions and not web analytics questions.

I can tell that click-through from the feed to the site was relatively low for the poll (27 for the last 7 days) Does that agree with what you see in Workstation?

By: Eric T. Peterson

Eric T. Peterson — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:03:25 +0000

Clint, excellent poll and as I suspected, your learned audience is already full of (hopefully satisfied) book owners. The only question I would ask is how large of a sample did you get relative to your total readership?

I’m not at my Workstation right now but I think you have more than 33 readers. I guess I have to wonder if the non-responding readers were uninterested in the poll, didn’t respond to the title of the post, or are just sick of reading about me in the blogosphere of late (I am a bit over-exposed due to the AMA event …)

Anywhoway, have a nice long weekend!