This question of noisy data is becoming more and more relevant as new web technologies emerge. Here I'm thinking of what I posted in What's a PageView (Ajax)? and that post's ending comment, "After all, isn't a human what you really want viewing your page?"
The seminal question (to me) of noisy data occurs when going from one set of analytics tools to another (tag to or from log based, for example).
Time on site, for example, is a metric that's being changed by new web technologies. Angie Brown, Strategic Services Consultant for Coremetrics originally explained Time on Site as follows (and this was explained to me a while ago):
"I'd point you to Eric Peterson's Web Analytics Demystified (page 150) where he discusses "Average Time Spent on Site". What he's describing is what we call "minutes per visitor" in the SurfAid tool: the average number of minutes each visitor spends on the site over a certain time frame. It's used as a rough measure of interaction with the site, although the numbers are not precise (we can't measure how long was the last page view in any visit since the duration of one visit is simply the last timestamp minus the first one). It's not a given that increasing this metric is good: for a customer support site or intranet we might actually prefer a decrease (get them the information they need in as little time as possible)."
Obviously Angie and others know that Ajax has changed this metric because now last page measurements are doable (NextStage collects last page data, for example. If we can do it others can do it, I'm sure).
Currently discussions are going on about defining new metrics (or adding new concepts to old definitions) in lieu of 2.0, RIA, Rich Media, take your pick of buzzwords to enter here.
It is at this point that the anthropologist in me kicks in; does something exist because we define it or do we define it because it exists? This gets into the area of differentiating behaviors from actions or, using a more concrete example, "I'm typing at my keyboard right now but the fact 'I am typing at my keyboard right now' is the act expressing the internal state (psychological behavior). When you type at your keyboard are you expressing the same internal state that I am right now?"
(more to follow...)
Links for this arc:
- Articles on noisy data affecting analysis:
- Eric Peterson's Web Analytics Demystified
- Posts mentioning WAA:
- Posts on new web technologies:
- The Noisy Data Arc:
- WAA
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Tracked on: January 12, 2007 8:44 AM | Permalink to Trackback