Giraffe Forum

Not only do many websites have unreliable metrics; they’re usually measuring the wrong things.

“75% of the data Web marketers collect are either misleading or inaccurate,” according to MarketingExperiments, a website optimization research company.

According to MarketingExperiments, poor data quality can be due to:

• Inadequate tracking;
• Improperly configured measurement tools;
• Faulty test structure and protocols;
• Validity threats;
• Inconclusive results.

However, many websites have an even deeper problem; they are obsessed with volume. You’d be surprised how many web managers measure their success by how many pages were looked at, and/or how many people visited the site.

Every month my website gets about 20,000 visits and about 40,000 page views. These measures are as close to meaningless as any set of measures can be. One thing I do know is that most of these visits come from search engines and most of these visitors leave pretty much straight away. What does that mean?

For many websites, search engine traffic is a great polluter. For most websites, search engines throw huge quantities of useless traffic at the website. The behavior of the small fraction of people you would actually like to track is often smothered under the huge piles of search data junk.

Does anybody actually look at all those log files generated by website traffic analysis software? I’ve never met anyone who had the time and energy to dig into the huge reams of data they spew out and find anything meaningful.

Example: A customer clicks on page A, then leaves after 1 minute. What does that mean? If they stayed for 3 minutes would that have been better? Why? Supposing the person who spends 3 minutes on the page finds it cluttered and full of verbiage?

Example: A customer clicks on page C, then clicks on page M, then goes back to page C, then leaves. What does that mean? Did they think they were going to get something on page M that they didn’t get? Or did they get what they needed on page M, and were simply using the Back button to navigate out of the site?

We need to radically simplify how we measure the success of our websites. Here’s how:
Identify the top three tasks of your website
Give these tasks to your customers and measure whether or not they are able to complete them.

If you’re a university, a top task should be to find a course. Observe potential students as they try to find a course on your website. If you’re a health website, finding out the symptoms for a particular disease is probably a top task. How easy is it to do that? If you’re running an intranet, finding other people is unquestionably a top task. How easy is it to do that?

Web managers can’t spend their days hunched over screens. That is quite simply not management. Metrics are the lifeblood of management. The essence of web metrics is the observation of our customers as they are hunched over their screens. Were they able to quickly do what they came to do? Web metrics can be boiled down to two words: task completion.

Marketing Experiments

The Web is showing us that in a great many areas of human endeavor the best intelligence lies in the network as a whole, rather than any one element.

‘The Origin of Wealth’ by Eric D. Beinhocker is full of wisdom. In it, Beinhocker challenges a lot of the principles of traditional economics. Like, for example, that markets are predictable and that there is some sort of perfect equilibrium. (If markets are indeed predictable then most economists should be fired because of their awful predictions.)

Beinhocker believes that we live in a world of unpredictable complexity that is evolutionary in its behavior. However, while you can’t predict the future, you can seek to be more fit and flexible, so as to adapt quickly to what the future throws at you.

There are hardly any companies that achieve excellence over the long-term, according to Beinhocker. In fact, most go extinct. This leads us to a “brutal truth” about companies. “Markets are highly dynamic, but the vast majority of companies are not.”

I recently had the privilege of working with a company called Vanguard. You’ve probably never heard of them. (They never advertise on TV.) They are an investment management company that has well over a trillion dollars under management. (That’s a lot of money.)

My understanding of the Vanguard approach is that investing in individual stocks is like gambling. Instead, you invest in the market as a whole and invest for the long-term. That’s because over the long-term the market tends to rise. Vanguard focuses on keeping costs as low as possible, meaning it has really low fees. You retire richer with Vanguard.

I used to be a big fan of the heroic individual. I used to have contempt for the crowd. But the Web changed all that. As I watched what succeeded and failed on the Web, it struck me that nearly every major website that succeeded had one thing in common.

Google, EBay, Amazon, You Tube, MySpace, Facebook, etc., all leverage the intelligence of the customer. These, and countless other successful websites, have ways to find the average of customer opinion and behavior. They allow us to discover in a systematic way what people like us think about a product, service, or idea.

The network is wise and the more we embrace and understand it, the wiser we become. We may not be able to predict the future but we can become fitter so that no matter the future throws at us, we can adapt.

So, how do we do that? One way is by using the Web to have more friends of friends. It has been proven that if you’re looking for a new job, you are more likely to get that job through a friend of a friend than a friend.

Fitness in a network is about making connections, getting linked. The organizations that are fittest in a network are those that actively link out and let others link in.

Press releases are a form of propaganda. Publishing them on your website shows your customers how you are attempting to spin the media.

The Web is where we go because we don’t believe the hype, because we don’t like being spun. The Web is the land of the thinking customer. So, why do so many organizations still publish press releases prominently on their websites?

Have you visited any North Korean websites lately? If you did, you will have come across lots of pictures of heroic leaders, and read glowing eulogies of magnificent achievements. It is easy to laugh at these ham-fisted attempts at propaganda until, that is, you have the need to visit a government website for your own country.

Last year, I lost my passport. I needed to go to the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs website. The first thing I saw was a big picture of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, followed by a slightly smaller picture of the Junior Minister for Foreign Affairs. How North Korean.

The Irish government is not alone in its amateur ham-fisted attempts at using the Web for propaganda and electioneering (even when there is no election). Vanity publishing is alive and well on most of the government websites that I review. (And I have reviewed a lot of government websites in a lot of countries.)

Press releases abound. Were press releases published before the Web? No. They were released to the press in the hope of generating media coverage. A website is a publication. The website editor should review the press release, and if there is something interesting in it, turn it into a well-linked story.

A press release nearly always begins with the name of the organization. Why? Because it needs to exist among many other press releases. Journalists will often look for a specific press release based on the organization name. You should never start a web heading/sentence with the name of your organization. Why? Because they’re at your website. They know who you are.

A press release will always have a couple of contextual paragraphs. Why? To give the busy journalist some context. But if someone comes to your website, the context has already been established, and reading such paragraphs will be a waste of time.

The first sentence of many press releases includes the word “today”. Why? Because press releases are like bread; if not consumed quickly they go stale. How do you think a press release with “today” in its text reads tomorrow, or next week, or next month?

Bismarck said that you should never see how sausages and laws are made. The press release shows customers how the story is being made. It shows how the organization is trying to spin the media. The press release has a behind-the-scenes function. It was never meant to see the light of day.

The Web is not where you announce; it’s where you do. Let’s say you have launched a new program aimed at encouraging more men and women over fifty to get screened for colon cancer. How should you use your website? Make it fast and easy for people to sign up for such screening.

When people arrive at your website, you already have their attention. Let them do what they came to your website to do.

The Web allows us to marry collective intelligence with expert knowledge. This is an unbeatable combination.

I grew up in a small farming community in Ireland. You never questioned the expert. The teacher, the priest and the doctor ruled. The idea that they might ever be wrong was not even an idea.

Well, the teacher, priest and doctor don’t have it so easy in the Ireland of today. They are being actively questioned. When they get it wrong, it is being clearly pointed out to them. The good ones embrace this new environment and are becoming better by continuously listening and learning. The bad ones get exposed.

The Web is where ordinary people go to opine, to organize, to debate, and to hear what other people just like them think. The Web is the Global Square in the Global Village. It’s very empowering.

The early years of the Web have seen a revolt against the expert. This has reflected a wider societal shift towards the belief that ordinary people have important things to say. We’re not just consumers anymore; we’re also producers.

“The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals, Tony Dokoupil wrote in a Newsweek article, Revenge of the Experts, published in March 2008.

According to Dokoupil, “the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web.” But has the expert ever really gone away?

Wikipedia, on the surface, may seem like the ultimate experiment in the wisdom of crowds. However, as Dokoupil later states, “Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site’s users make more than 50 percent of its edits.”

The Web has never been the enemy of the expert. What it ushered in is the ability to find out what “people like me” have to say. What was their experience with this product? Did they like this particular book? Is this as nice a hotel as its website says it is?

The Web has also allowed the up-and-coming experts and artists to state their case for why they have created something interesting and worthwhile. YouTube and MySpace would fall flat if there wasn’t a way to allow the cream to rise to the top. (Sometimes just the weird and quirky rises, but that’s okay too.)

I like websites like CNET and Amazon because they have both expert and customer reviews. That’s a nice balance. As the Web matures, we are thus likely to see “a hybrid approach built around entirely new business models,” as experts at Wharton state, in an article entitled “The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media,” published in March 2008.

The Web is a network and strength in a network is about connectedness and openness. 200 years ago, an expert could claim to be an authority on a particular subject. Today, an expert is someone who is expert in the network; connecting, sharing, sifting, ordering, and always taking the pulse of the wisdom of the experts and the crowd.

The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media

Revenge of the Experts (Newsweek)

The Web offers one of the most significant opportunities to communicators in modern history, but requires a total redefinition of what communications is.

Traditional communications is one-way, passive and past-tense. It is all about telling people what you have done, what you are doing, or what you are about to do. There is a core belief among certain traditional communicators that people need to be “educated”.

Traditional communications is not all that different from traditional journalism. There is a saying in traditional journalism: “The reader is not as stupid as you think they are. They’re more stupid.”

There might have been some truth in such a view forty years ago, but we are now in a different age. It is not the digital age. It is not the information age. It is the informed age. The very success of the Web is based on a questioning society. We are a society that searches because we want to find out.

The Web is where we go to know, to be informed. Those societies that want to control what people know, who fear independent thought and action, will always fear the Web. Those societies who think it is exclusively the job of the elite to inform the masses will always fear the Web.

But the people love the Web. They love the Web because they can find out for themselves, from people like them. They love the Web because the Web is many messages, and the Web gives people the chance to compare, rate, question, talk back, and-most importantly-act.

The essence of the Web is action. We go to the Web because we have a task; there is something we need to do; there is a problem we need to solve. What helps us do? What helps us act? Written words. The oxygen of the Web is written words. There is no life on the Web without written words.

Written words are the tools of the communicator. But these written words have a very different function on the Web. I analyze a lot of government websites. Unfortunately, too many overflow with vanity, pomposity and waffle. Some of them are little more than campaign websites full of puff pictures of preening peacock politicians.

Many web teams still struggle to convince their PR and communications colleagues that on the Web you communicate by doing. A friend of mine was worried about his wife, who had just given birth. She was not well and he believed that the doctor has misdiagnosed her.

He went to the Web, and on his journey to find out, ended up on some government websites, where he was faced with puff PR about how much the government was investing, and what the Minister for Health had for breakfast. He didn’t want to know how much was being invested. He wanted help; he wanted to read content that could help him find out what exactly was wrong with his wife.

He found answers, and he was right-she had been misdiagnosed. This is the power and potential of the Web, and this is the challenge and opportunity for the communicator. Show by doing. Inform with active verbs. Make your words work for your customers.