Entries Tagged 'Web Analytics' ↓

An Open Letter to the Web Analytics Professionals at Nashbar.com:

I’m sorry. Really. I realized today what I’m doing to you, but I can’t stop myself. I’m messing with your metrics. At least let me try to explain.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that I recently took up cycling. I’m training for RAGBRAI, as a matter of fact. Naturally, I need a few things: shorts, jerseys, a new helmet and a bike rack for my car. The problem is that I’m a really picky shopper.

You can’t track this, but several friends told me about your site, so I started there first. That was probably a week or so ago, but I still haven’t bought anything. Like I said, I’m a picky shopper. I can’t decide which jersey I want, but I’ve got a few in mind. They’re all open in different tabs in Firefox. And almost once a day, I sit down at the computer and try to choose. All I’ve really done is end up with different items in each of the different tabs. Until two days ago, when I added a pair of shorts and a helmet to my cart! Maybe tonight I’ll complete my purchase, but please don’t get your hopes up.

I know this is causing you all kinds of problems. I’m sure you use persistent cookies, so if you want to track me from start to finish, you can find out my initial visit was direct. But you’ll probably notice a few abnormalities–visits supposedly referred by your own site, for instance. Or a high number of days to purchase or visits to purchase. On the flip side, if you’re measuring Engagement, you might want to thank me. Visit duration, page views, recency… it’s all there in spades.

All in all, one of the metrics that matters most will come your way soon: conversion. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for the trouble I’ve caused to your other reports. Or maybe I’m not that unusual after all…

Paths Forward is my new recurring series featuring interesting links and stories from around the web. Woohoo! Let’s get started:

The Accuracy of Web Analytics (Marketing Pilgrim) takes a look at research on whether you should implement your JavaScript tag at the top or bottom of your page source, depending on the load time of your page. It’s interesting, and I’m all for greater accuracy in measurement, but I can’t help referring you to Accuracy or Precision, which is jump-started from Jim Novo’s theory that precision (repeatable and reproducible) is more important than accuracy (error-prone and doubtful). I happen to agree. Web analytics data isn’t 100% perfect, but if you can generally expect it to be imperfect in the same ways, so you should be able to derive the actionable insights you need.

Penelope Trunk shares Research That Reveals News Paths to Productivity. The most interesting to me was the suggestion to “stop obsessing over your choices and just decide” since most people tend to overestimate the regret we’ll feel after an emotionally involved choice.

The Dieline has a great post on Sennheiser Eco-Friendly Packaging. It’s a couple weeks old, but I was really excited about it for a couple of reasons. One, it’s consumer electronics, and that’s the industry I spent two years in doing graphic design, including packaging, among other things. The second reason is that as much as I love The Dieline, they seem to focus primarily on food and health/beauty products. It was great to see a change of pace.

Finally, Get Rich Slowly has a post on Personal Currencies. My personal currency for many months was, of course, the iPhone. That is, until my lovely wife bought me one as a “Christmas/Birthday/Anniversary” gift.

If you’ve been following web analytics commentary in the blogosphere (talk about a micro-niche), you’re probably aware of the ongoing debate about Eric Peterson’s proposed Engagement model. Peterson and fellow analytics guru Avinash Kaushik have respectfully disagreed back and forth on their blogs about the nature and value of such a metric for some time, and I have been torn between the two perspectives. It seems well suited for a site that is not commerce-driven, so I decided to just give it a try and see for myself whether or not it was worthwhile.

I spent a bit of time on Friday working in WebTrends to see how easily I could put together the different components and start tracking Engagement on our site. It wasn’t going too well, and I commented about it on Twitter. A brief conversation ensued with Chris Grant and by the end of the day, our conversation was referenced in a blog post by Aaron Gray of WebTrends about Eric Peterson’s dismissal of Twitter as a marketing tool.

I commented on Aaron’s post to come out in favor of Twitter, but also to say that I disagreed with Eric when he implied that something could not be valuable if it were not instantly measurable. For whatever reason, this stuck with me as I went about my afternoon until finally it hit me. The engagement model is trying to create a qualitative metric out of quantitative metrics. I thought this was a revelation until I reread Avinash’s post on Engagement, where he says basically the same thing:

“At the heart of it engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative. Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative.”

At the end of the day, I think I’d be better off looking for a way to bring in real qualitative data from our users and letting my quantitative metrics be quantitative. Next up on Friday Night Running, I’ll take sides in the “Web Analytics is Easy/Hard” debate.