The quote reminded me of several conversations I've had over the past month with some very knowledgeable and well respected web analysts, none of whom use web analytics on their own sites. First, let me write that neither I nor NextStage do web analytics. When potential clients ask if we do web analytics, I mention the names of several analytics vendors and help the client decide which vendor best suits their goals and needs. That offered up front, on with this post...
Each of the analysts I talked with had reasons for not using analytics on their own sites. As one analyst said, "I know. Kind of funny, isn't it?" Frank Della Rosa of Edge Strategies explained web analytics to Progress Software by saying, "It's like driving down the road by staring in your rearview mirror."
But that doesn't answer why so many cobblers' children have no shoes, does it? Well, yes and no. It depends on how you define shoes.
Web analytics is growing and expanding well beyond answering the questions of "How many visitors did our site get this week?" and "How much did our site earn this week?" Today's questions are more like "How come we had that many visitors and only earned this much on our site this week?"
Answering those questions requires some advanced understandings of fields unknown 10-15 years ago when web analytics got started. The children are growing and shoestyles are changing. For example, research started in 2004 and soon to be concluded indicates that the time a visitor stays on a page prior to taking some action on that page is directly related to their trust in the page's content. There's a lot that goes into this, it's not a simple "Visitors stayed on this page 2 minutes, I guess they don't trust it" or "Visitors stayed on the page 10 seconds, I guess they really trusted it" (You can get on a email list to be notified when this research is published here).
But think about how something as simple as this can help put shoes on all those children; it won't matter how much traffic you get because this type of metric is a) anonymous and b) measured on a visitor by visitor basis.
Again, no single metric is enough. Each single metric is but a small step onto a vast landscape of necessary information. Want to walk that entire landscape and plumb all its depths? Then you need to take many steps.
Time to put some shoes on those children.
» Nothing New Under the Sun (Fahrenheit 451) from BizMediaScience
Nothing New Under the Sun - Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 [Read More]
Tracked on: January 1, 2007 1:28 PM | Permalink to Trackback