Irreverent Thinking

As organisations become ever more fleet of foot it becomes clear that the “old world” approach of making huge, long range policy decisions is no longer appropriate. For some time now I have been advocating a “test, test and test again” approach mixed in with a quasi-Kaizen methodology when it comes to improving the performance of websites. This is borne out of being able to have a complete view of what happens when we make changes to a site (thanks to our VITES™ platform); when combined with statistically correct sample sizes and A/B testing, this gives you the clearest (probable) indicator of how successful a change is.

I note that a search on Google turns up some interesting results, with some companies, such as Nike, embracing the idea, and no less than Forbes Magazine citing it as the reason for the wealth of creativity that comes out of our US cousins across the pond. Thomas Edison was once quoted as saying “I HAVE not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This approach has its problems which need to be addressed, but the greatest problem is with its name- Trial and ***ERROR*** - which states clearly that mistakes will be made. Sadly most of today’s inwardly-focussed corporates seem to lack the courage to take this step. Even worse are the companies that make sweeping changes without trialling them first; in the case of AOL a $75m loss in revenue.

The companies that do test fly; the ones that don’t end up stagnating and die.

The moral?

To succeed you have to fail occasionally

I frequently see organisations, large and small, using Google’s Analytics (GA) as their method to measure RoI or whatever else they think they need to establish and I wonder what drove them to that decision. I know it’s free and I know that Google is all cuddly but there are a couple of issues that I am torn on:

1. Google’s role as an advertiser and a reporting agent are in direct conflict. I am sure that one does not directly affect the other but they will gather market data and the temptation to mine this for commercial gain must be huge. Avoiding using GA would remove this all together. Have a read of “Google minding your own business” from Donna Bogatin to see an expansion of this topic

2. Session-based analytics are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. Knowing that 1000 people visited your site today and 10% of them converted from the search term “blue widgets” might, on the face of it, tell you a lot but misses out so much important information such as “which people are the 10%” and “how much did these 10% go onto spend over x months”. These are real e-business questions that Google Analytics fails to answer.

3. GA works by running a script on the page, this script has a size over 5k - doesn’t sound a lot but the Google search page is just 12k. A good target size for your landing pages are 25k so this is a 20% increase in size = 20% longer to load the page.

4. There are some legitimate privacy concerns as Google is acquiring information about private individuals such as their IP address and their buying and browsing history. Now you could argue that this is not personal information but I think if you look at it from a moral standpoint it is, in many ways, far more personal than, say, my date of birth or maybe even my name. Tracking me via my IP address is far more reliable and finds every place I go - tracking me by name only works where I use my name so I can choose whether I can be found. You don’t have the option to switch off your IP address.

5. If GA is so good then why does Google not use it themselves?

Our CEO, Martin Dower, recently posted a story describing how our philosophy came into being.

We decided to publish this as a page because is it so intrinsic to our beliefs as a company. As a post it would have fallen off the radar after a while and it is too important to allow this to happen.

Enjoy!