Measuring the web

If You Didn’t Measure It, Did It Really Happen Online?

Measuring the webBecause of the commerce side of things, the web has given us the most measurable form of communication ever. Print, television, the telephone, all pale in comparison.  Because we can sell things online, really smart people have come up with ways to track everything that happens on the internet. Everything.

It started with tangible, black and white metrics- how many people visit your website, where they came from, what words they used to find you, how long they stayed.  Hard facts. You can measure everything about the way people use your website.  You can track the path of a visitor’s cursor  to measure how their attention flows through your content.  You can track where they click and if they follow the path you want them to take through your site (track them through your funnel).

Because of the shift to a more social web, the shift in online measurement has moved to more abstract metrics like reach, influence and sentiment.  Really smart people have built tools that have started to be able to measure these things with increasing accuracy.

So if you can measure all of these things, mostly for free, why aren’t more companies doing it?

The answer, I suspect, is because it’s hard.  It’s hard the way math is hard.  Actually, it’s hard because math is hard. It’s also not an exact science.  Things that should add up to equal each other, often don’t.  The inexactness (word?) throws people off.  Business owners are used to math like financial accounting.  For every credit there is a debit, and if they don’t add up, the numbers are wrong.  Someone screwed up.

Analytics is not like accounting.  Web analytics are more like statistics.  The actual numbers are not as important as the story they tell.  Are the numbers going up or down? Are these shifts gradual or sharp? Like statistics, they can also be skewed to tell a story the storyteller wants you to hear.

I feel bad for a lot businesses out there.  They know that the old ways of marketing are dying, and they have a general understanding that the internet provides an opportunity to connect with current and potential customers like never before.  They know that they are falling behind, but even hiring an “expert” is not easy.  Just ask J.C. Penny or Overstock.com.

So what’s a business to do?  Homework.  There is no way around this one.  You go into this blind, you get what you deserve.  Like EVERYTHING, you have to have at least a general understanding to make good choices.  And if it seems to good to be true, it is.  Talk to a consultant that guarantees a top spot, page 1 google rank?  Quickly show them the door.

Want to learn more about analytics or SEO?

My favorite blog for learning about web analytics and measuring online activity is Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik.

My favorite resource for keeping up with best practices for search engine optimization is SEOmoz. Need a place to start? Read their Beginner’s Guide To SEO.  You can read it online, or they will trade you a PDF for your email address.  It’s a good trade.

In carpentry, they say measure twice, cut once.  On the internet, if you measure once, you’ll never want to stop.

photo credit: aussiegall

 


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2 responses to “If You Didn’t Measure It, Did It Really Happen Online?”

  1. David Mills

    i got my copywriting start at Maclean Hunter 25+ years ago where we sent out an endless barrage of magazine subscription and renewal mailings, and constantly tested one list against another, one premium against another, one offer against another. while i’ve done a ton of direct mail writing since then, it seems that no one today is taking the time or spending the money to truly test/analyze their direct response results. i imagine it’s the same with the internet…the analytical tools are all available but 90% of advertisers are too lazy or too cheap or too uninformed to use them

    1. You’re right David. I like to hope the majority fit into the “too
      uninformed” but I suspect it’s often one of the other two.

      Ironically, we turn to the internet now to measure the effectiveness of
      direct mail and other forms of off-line promotion. By using unique web
      addresses in ads (amongst other methods), we can measure the response of a
      particular ad or publication.

      I guess it comes down to how comfortable you are with guessing. Me? I like
      to make business decisions based on having the best information available.
      It sounds like you do too.

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