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.
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As a new WordPress blogger, going back and forth editing pages and making sure they look terrific — I’m generating most of my own Google Analytics page views. When I get a real page view, I want to know it! Fortunately, if you already have Google Analytics installed, it’s very simple to accomplish in WordPress. Continue reading →
Data analysis begins with understanding the available data. To social scientists, this usually involves understanding your data type — nominal, ordinal, scalar, ratio. Web analysts, however, must always be concerned with the level of measurement as well — page level, session level, user level. If Omniture SiteCatalyst is your data source, understanding SiteCatalyst’s levels of measurement is key to being a good analyst. Those esoteric SiteCatalyst variables: sProps, Success Variables, and eVars, are easy to remember once you’ve seen their levels of measurement and Continue reading →
Experimental psychologist and 13-year Internet veteran driving revenue and profitability through applied measurement strategies and advanced analytical techniques
About Jeb Stone
