Are you measuring the right things?

Having enormous quantities of people visit gargantuan numbers of pages on your website is the only metric that matters. (Santa Claus is a woman who lives in the Bahamas.)

Health websites around the world have been thriving as a result of swine flu. Millions upon millions of new visitors and countless millions of new page views. “It’s really wonderful,” said a web manager for a major health website. “What we need are more pandemics like this. It really helps the page views.”

The manager for a major software company’s support website was recently overheard to say to a friend. “I only wish this company would make worse software. That would really help the page views.” This is a very clever manager, who came up with a brilliant idea for making money out of a loss-making activity (support). This clever manager sells ads on the support website. What a wonderful new revenue source.

Now, at a senior management level strategies are indeed being discussed for making more inferior software so that more people will have problems. Thus more people will have to visit the website, and of course the more people who visit the website the more this company will make on advertising revenue. It’s a win-win business model. Spend less money on software development, thus resulting in worse software, and make more money from the ads on the support website. What genius!

Sheepboy is a new search engine, a “Google killer” with a business model that is making venture capitalists drool. “I got the idea from how supermarkets put the milk at the back, so that you’re forced to walk through the aisles so maybe you’ll buy other stuff as well,” Timothy Lamb, founder of Sheepboy stated. Sheepboy’s amazing idea is to put the right results on the second page of the search results. That way they will double page views for every visitor. (And we all know how important page views are!)

Tom Volume is an entrepreneur with an idea. He was developed software that sucks sentences and pages from the Web’s most popular websites, randomizes them and then sells this new content for a penny a page. Tom has a wonderful special offer. If you spend 100 dollars you get a bonus of an extra trillion pages thrown in for free absolutely. You will have one of the biggest websites on the Web, full of keyword-rich webpages. This will unquestionably lead to a rise in visitors, and of course, more page views.

James Vague has designed his website in a very clever way. There is a frontpage that says “Hello” with a link that says “Click here to enter website.” When you click that, you get to a flash intro that goes on for three minutes, thus increasing visitor time on the page. (James’ website has won an advertising industry design award, so it must be good.) However, the cleverest idea of all is the fact that every task on the website involves visiting at least 20 pages (when you should only have to visit 4). But wait, there’s more. You’re never able to complete the task first time around. You have to come back. Thus James has an exceedingly high repeat visitor rate. Amazing. Truly.

 

22 responses


  1. You made me Google for this new search engine called Sheepboy. Then I noticed the manager was called Timothy Lamb.


  2. Oh, you old cynic … take that tongue out of your cheek, you’ll have people thinking you are serious


  3. Thanx for loads of new brilliant ideas - new thinking indeed!


  4. Gerry
    Re today’s ‘measuring things’ newsletter:

    Don’t be sarcastic.

    Wendy


  5. They like some of the clever business people that I’ve worked for. Telling them to set a good user experience as the site’s goal is met with blank stares… or worse


  6. Gerry, I am very scared - these are jokes, right?


  7. I too must sheepishly admit that I Googled for Sheepboy.

    One day the unsustainable web content “bubble” will go pop, just like the debt bubble and every other one before it.

    In the meantime Gerry, your satire will go right over the heads of many people.


  8. Like the cynical perspective. And the names of the people; Tom Volume and James Vague. :)


  9. I was definitely joking, alright, but it’s true, I have met quite a few people over the years who will think these are good strategies.


  10. For a brief moment you nearly lost a disciple … but thankfully the Monday morning feeling hadn’t dulled my senses too much!

    Spot on as ever. I’m sure you’re chuckling away to yourself at some people’s gullibility!


  11. Gerry: Nicely put. In a boys-led, numbers-laden business like this, IT Content Strategies & Solutions make so much sense! Sometimes only satire can stem frustration…


  12. Beautiful response to the horrendous backwardness of misplaced design and un-knowledgeable use of analytic.

    The article’s set me up for the week.


  13. Gerry, I have heard of road rage. I think you just invented web rage ..


  14. Great Satire Gerry! Trouble is that the people who don’t realise it is a joke may be the ones who will think this is a real example.

    Like David, this put me in a good mood for the week.


  15. You had me going until para 2 - then the oxymoronic activity you describe sunk in. ;-)

    Maybe next time you should append SARCASM ALERT to your subject line.

    On second thought, DON’T. Better that readers should have to THINK!


  16. Thank dog I checked the forum before Googling Sheepboy. Would Gerry pull my leg like that? Never! Great post. Thanks


  17. And one other thing: you should compile numerous examples of this sort of silliness (real or imagined) and sent it out annually as your March 32nd issue.


  18. Most of the tricks that Gerry wrote about on getting more PVs, I have seen in year 2000 when I was news editor of Lycos Asia. There was an employee briefing in which an announcement was made that Lycos software engineers in China had developed a program which somehow showed you 2 or more pages each time you clicked a page, thus doubling and tripling page views instantly. There was spontaneous applause from the audience! I can’t remember whether the software team got an award for their achievement.


  19. Gerry, you’ve used this content to increase your page views haven’t you. I have to send everyone here so they know you were kidding. Very clever.


  20. Short term is rarely a good strategy,
    abusing consumer is always a stupid strategy from now on !


  21. A colleague of mine once noted that, “when people die, web stats go up”.

    However, that maxim cannot be sustained forever, as there needs to be a minimum number of people alive to visit our site. Dead people don’t click.


  22. Gerry, I have heard of road rage. I think you just invented web rage ..

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