There is a perennial question in Web analytics: “Are the numbers up?”
Certain web metrics can be highly variable on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. Daily Unique Visitors (UVs) and Daily Visits are just two examples of metrics that can change dramatically from one day to the next. These big swings in day-to-day numbers can make it difficult for managers to tell whether their KPIs are really trending up or down.
Let’s start with a simple premise: The more often something happens, the more often people write about it.
Sounds reasonable, right?
Albert Saiz and Uri Simonsohn, in their article “Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds,” demonstrate that the relative frequency of documents returned by a search engine can be a good measure of how frequently a phenomenon occurs. For example, if you want to know the relative cost of living in all U.S. cities (or the relative amount of corruption, or perhaps even how good the golfing is) then simply searching for “Dallas cost-of-living” and “San Francisco cost-of-living” may give you a great index. If it works as advertised, this is a fantastic general research tool for analysts and marketing researchers. Let’s take a look.
Continue reading →
Things have come a long way since the days of analyzing Web server logs (raise your hand if you were at THAT party.) Web analytics tools like Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, and WebtrendsAnalytics have brought basic site tracking and reporting to the masses, often with little more than dropping some javascript on the page. Closer to home, Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing tools such as MicroStrategy and Microsoft’s suite of tools provide a structured view into in-house data. Google Site Optimizer, SiteSpect, and tools like Omniture Recommendations go so far as to provide intelligent testing, targeting, and recommendation abilities to companies that even a few years ago would have met serious challenges developing these competencies in-house.
But these tools are not how you compete on analytics. Continue reading →
In 2003, Frederick Reichheld published a Harvard Business Review article entitled The One Number You Need to Grow. Reichheld’s article described a method for computing a simple, easy-to-understand customer satisfaction metric called the Net Promoter Score — and ushered in a flavor-of-the-month management practice that has left a bad taste in the mouth of academics and serious marketing researchers Continue reading →
A few days ago, Frédéric Peters (Cupidon at Cupidon.be) posted an interesting question to the LinkedIn’s Internet Dating Executive Alliance group: Given the oft-cited success of the online dating industry, what percentage of Google’s ad revenue is driven by the online dating industry?
Based on Frédéric’s question, I felt compelled to run a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate of the share of Google’s ad revenue contributed by the U.S. online dating industry based on Continue reading →
Experimental psychologist and 13-year Internet veteran driving revenue and profitability through applied measurement strategies and advanced analytical techniques
About Jeb Stone
