Settling for Packaged Metrics and Reports Can Be a Dangerous Game

If you were a kid once, and I suppose we all were, you may have learned that no single manufacturer of bikes got every part right. So, in order to improve the quality of the finished unit, you have to purchase and install superior components which lighten the bike, make it operate more efficiently, offer comfort or convenience to the skillful rider. In the end, you might have upgrades and customization over 30-35% of your bike. The same idea applies across the board for just about everything.

So, why then, settle for the factory state of your web analytics tool?

Looking around for people to discuss many of their calculated metrics can be difficult. Joseph and Eric and their ongoing banter on “Engagement” certainly merits its share of attention. This was the primary topic recently at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco and a tremendous panel discussion between the aforementioned as well as Gary Angel from Semphonic and moderated by Robbin Steif from Lunametrics. Aside from the ubiquitous topic of Engagement, there is so little available on what to do to hammer stats together for better understanding. People seem to guard their special configurations very closely. A few resources, however, are making their way into the world.

Dustin Wallace is at least one resource whom appears to want to share. Dustin is, according to what information is available on his posts, a relatively new blogger working in analytics at Sun Microsystems. 2 of his 5 posts available discuss manipulating packaged metrics for a better understanding of performance indications. In these, he discusses a formula to help draw comparisons over particular time frames and goes in closer on Bounce Rate (he breaks these up into ‘Exit Rate’, ‘Soft Bounce’ and ‘Hard Bounce’ and lays out there craft and execution in Omniture SiteCatalyst).

Another guy, Vijay Bathula, is doing analytics for Hewlett-Packard, publishing a blog discussing ‘advanced web metrics‘ and trying to develop some interesting concepts. A particularly attractive metric which Vijay brings to light is what he calls ‘Time2Click’. He states:

“Time2Click is the metric that tells the average amount of time that was taken in order to click a link on a web page. This metric helps web masters and marketers on how much time at an average, visitors are taking for making a decision to click a link or button on the web page. This metric is simple to calculate and great use to optimize the call-to-action buttons, positioning, anchor text in the links and much more without using any other expensive Split-Testing or multivariate testing tools.“

This promotes a clever angle for thinking about testing and a great sense of what I’m trying to relay by posting here. Formal metrics a great for the purpose of executive reporting, however, when being used by the analyst, especially one involved in heavily process-oriented practice, thinking outside of the box means going beyond what comes in the box.

An Invitation to a Discussion and Pending Project to Build Collaborative Set of eCommerce Calculated Metrics

My work recently, and in the context of this highly charged discussion of engagement, has focused on trying to build a series of powerful calculated metrics to try to get a better understanding of how people are interacting with eCommerce websites. It has brought me to the point where I’m willing to assert that, with regard to online retailers, a series of operations and statistics can be gathered and placed into major commercial reporting interfaces to ad value to the suite as well as promote a more complete functional model of interaction.

Among these I have decided to research, study, and pursue defining the following:

• Appraisal - This is the behavior of seeking information on product queue for a potential purchase. These are broad strokes in navigation based on general term and phrase usage, non-transactional focus and
• Acceleration - The point where the brain begins to move from a general information processing state to a more focused channel. During acceleration, a subject should (ideally) only move toward action and curtail further lateral navigation.
• Impulse - Having collected and been presented with one or several points where a call-to-action or option to execute an objective occurs, the confidence and slightly adrenal motivation carries a subject through an action and transition to a state of risk assessment.
• Commitment - Acting on the information and the excited state of having executed a checkpoint in a system of obligation; this measurement should seek to imply reduced regressive states when continuing through to additional actionable areas and streamlined return to transactional navigation due to acquired trust and familiarity.
• Conviction - The completion of the desired final action. Conviction should be measured by the degree to which a subject does or does not participate in building trust by gathering information as to policies, security, examining financial options, and other potentially pertinent information associated with going forward with a purchase.
• Affirmation - Presumed to be existing in both a natural and provoked state, affirmation is post-transactional and is the return to the site with an abbreviated or non-existent appraisal process. The degree to which the initial experience was positive and powerful should, hypothetically shorten time to accelerate and kindle the impulse state.

I have spent a fair amount of time looking into how these particular points work into the process of making a decision to invest money in return for a product with a perceived value. My resources in being able to do this, at this time, are limited. For that reason, I would love to hear from anyone who is willing to allow me or our team to look at site metrics and frequencies to identify these points in their business model and help build support for a larger, more universal application of these proposed transcendant metrics.

Anyone who is interested, please comment or write to me directly using the contact information provided. Any company who submits for the ability to aggregate and scruitinize data will receive a complementary copy of the publication as well as promise that any sensitive data used in the studies will be protected by the appropriate legal instrument.

Mature Process Reporting Should Become Seedbed for Discoveries, Patents, and Broad Practice Foundations

With constant data streams passing over the minds of analysts everyday, it seems higher than likely that, over time, the team which deals with this data should start to construct ideas and applications built on consistent experiences. The amount of information which is aggregated about visitor and customer information over time gives a specific picture about who needs what with regard to navigation, structure, and assistance within the website. That information, paired with analysis, should produce a list of items for IT and stakeholders to brainstorm on solutions and short-cuts to help users achieve navigational nirvana.

The idea of the web analytics process is the continued production, analysis, and decision support for the business in which it has been installed; as well as the obligatory feedback from the action which takes root within the agency. Therefore the establishment of process is, at least in my eyes, a goal for online businesses with more recent adoption. In the case of mature and refined analytics process practitioners, this should be a means to success of a single entity, and feed into the larger sphere of markets, industries, and eventually, universally adapted technologies which could feed macro-improvement of the user experience globally.

Look Past Process: Visitors Deserve Your Attention and Devotion

We are all users who are visitors. As a collective group, we can attest to the number of half-baked ideas which are thrown on the net for one reason or another. Many of us who matured working with computers have a few we hide away from the world. Hell, I have ten of my own. We all find sites which we thought were going to meet our expectations and fail miserably. Our arrival on pages often misses the original intent of the search or slightly misdirects the concept. We blame the search results, but, broadly, this is the output from lousy understanding of SEO taxonomy (i.e. Silos) and/or usability issues.

With usability testing, search marketing and SEO information as widely available as they are, the only explanations for a lack of progress in these subjects are:

1. Finances: Marketing budgets fail to consider the possible positive primary outcomes of efforts to improve these aspects of a site, much less the periphery value of the research contributions and application value abroad
2. Hesitation: Generally, businesses in practice tend to be ‘bearish’ when it comes to expenditure on technology which discusses returns. Intent might be pure, but the risk clearly does not merit the restraint.
3. Ego: In contrast to the previous item, trendy businesses based on whimsy and willingness to engage in risk view using data as somehow ‘cheating’ on creativity or lacking in true inspiration. Therefore, they overlook or suppress buy-in through a flurry of logical fallacies.
4. Perceived Complexity: To some, creating an in-house usability program, building a lab, standardizing reporting and inciting discussions on stats and quantified experience data is an ENORMOUS undertaking. It becomes a sociological hurdle for the company and eventually, with enough steam, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With little or no participation in gathering an understanding of how YOUR site visitors respond to content, you, in essence, neglect their voice. By neglecting them, you inhibit your growth and deprive a community of people dedicated to evolving our world wide web experience of data which can contribute to greater understanding. Gaining this perspective is the key to unlocking the true potential of a process-driven analytics practice and a wildly valuable means to building the new architecture of the world wide web.

A Lofty Prediction with Exponential Considerations

If I had to place a bet on the future of web analytics, it would be on services and solutions. Commercial vendors like Omniture and Coremetrics (and Google Analytics when/if that time comes) will provide a series of broad tools, which, at least Omniture, has started doing. As the analysis and application of insight suggested actions cascades down from those platforms, industries, and markets will eventually respond with vertical groups and practices zones. Some will split specifically into advertising, others into expertise on eCommerce, still others into Social Media or Branding or what have you.

Over time, probably a couple years before enough talented analysts can blossom and contribute, markets and geographies will develop their own identities where conversations and comparing notes will likely drive highly-predictive analytics and scaled systems for buy-in by the most frugal small/medium business ventures. Shared resources will again be the natural progression (outsourcing is a natural evolution of industry). Small but incredibly effective micro-solutions based on research compiled by ambitious teams driven by numbers will dominate each niche feeding more information back into the collective process.

As Wikipedia defines it, Web 2.0 is…”a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.”

This definition has a few bugs, but the point is clear. The idea of having two-way communication, or dyadic communication, is the goal of those applications seeking the illustrious designation of 2.0, at their very minimum. Ultimately, the concept, at least in my opinion, is that the posting of information in a social context, is to share ideas and incite discussion about the topics that are discussed by a relatively informed and intelligent readership. Although, readership still implies one-way communication, doesn’t it?

Maybe a more appropriate Web 2.0 term should be ‘dyadership’ or ‘commership’ (implying commenting-readership) or some other clever bastardization of technobabble. I honestly can’t think of an appropriate massaging of ‘Dyad’. Of course, having that opens a whole new rabbit-hole for measuring and discussing how a blog measures its engagement and its apparent value to the public. Not how many people “See” or “Read” your stuff, but what percentage of those visitors volunteer perspective to grow your footprint for that specific subject on the web.

Recently, while attending a Shop.org conference event in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation given by David Weinberger, PhD (a Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School). While a portion of this was dedicated to bridging the gap between his two major works: ‘”The Cluetrain Manifesto” and “Everything is Miscellaneous“; a significant idea advanced by Dr. Weinberger was the inversion of a long-established social and commercial truth that the agency which controlled data, controlled the message. This is, by many standards, no longer considered absolute, and much less manageable with respect to the internet and the infinitely exponential calculations of people x opinions x venues.

Controlling the message now has a negative reaction from the perceptive open dialog of the world. Whether your site’s purpose is informational, functional, or commercial there is a measurable population comprising a ‘well of opinion’ about your brand, your product, your message, and, sadly, your personnel. To paraphrase Carrie Fisher as ‘Princess Leia’: ‘The more you tighten your grip…the more (insert Web 2.0 term) slip through your fingers”.

As a high profile example of this behavior, I would like to point to exhibit “A”: Washington Wizard’s Gilbert Arenas making predictions on his “Blog” about scoring and upcoming games, as well as compiling a catalog of excruciatingly calculated self-laudatory injections about his skill set and value as a player. Disclaimer: I’m a huge Boston Celtics fan. I also do not personally know Mr. Arenas and limit my commentary to his publication.

If anyone has been paying attention, the NBA season tipped-off last week. With its commencement, the Boston Celtics, a team which I am a lifetime fan, amped up their crowd in a pleasing display of teamwork and success with new additions Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, a determinant Paul Pierce, and the sharp-shooting of Rajan Rondo. Late in the third quarter of this collaborative clinic on teamwork, the rowdy and playoff-starved crowd, and the newly knighted Red Auerbach Court began rumbling and repeating the word “Gilbert”. I became curious. The commentators eventually divulged that the Gilbert to whom the crowd referred was Gil Arenas.

Mr. Arenas days prior posted on what he and others call his blog:

“So listen here. On November 2nd, we’re going to go into that building, we’re opening up Boston. Right now I’m telling the Boston fans: You guys are going to lose. It’s not going to be a victory for Boston. You might as well just cheer for me, because Boston isn’t winning in Boston for the season opener. I’m sorry.”

The outcome was a decisive Boston win: 103-83 final. A fitting start to a season which began with a gift from former Celtic Kevin McHale trading out Garnett from Minnesota. The win was apparently the only comment which held any meaning as far as Arenas, the Washington Wizards, or the NBA was concerned. No other commentary is allowed on his blog.

Sure, there are certainly reasons why this makes sense. There are too many people in Boston willing to comment on such statements before and after the game - memory consideration. The platform is hosted on NBA.com - obscenity and liability considerations. He talked trash in the town where it was invented - bandwidth considerations. But, no matter what the consideration, this ‘Blog’ is really no more than bad single-mode PR. On the other hand, what if commentary was allowed? How would that affect his play? How could he improve his image, his accuracy, and his public perception if he could be so bold as to gain insight from the feedback he received? What about Gilbert Arenas - the Open Brand….?

From an analytics and a Web 2.0 perspective, this is an example of a hit-counter. Nothing more than sophisticated than the electronic media equivalent of the tree in the woods. If a blog exists and produces information that nobody can share in and help define, it will soon be relegated to dusty shelves like the Atari and the Betamax.