Irreverent Thinking

It that so unusual? It’s probably rather dependent on whether I go in there a lot, which I don’t. He does, however, know quite a lot about me and stores it away in his memory. From what he said to me he knows:-

1. My favourite drink is Guinness and that’s pretty much all I drink

2. He knows I go on the train to London a lot as I will pop in for a pint on my walk back from the train station

3. He knows I smoke as I have to go outside and will leave my money on the bar whilst he’s pouring my Guinness

4. He knows I am male

Ok, so why the irreverent twitter about my local pub? Well, I was thinking that my company builds websites that learn about its visitors by their behaviour and was this a violation of privacy? The answer is “no”. The local barman sees me coming though the door and sometimes has a pint on the go, he says “hello” and if I’m in a suit and it’s around the time that the London train gets in he will ask if I had a good day in London. What he is doing is improving my experience, he’s treating me personally even though he doesn’t know my name - in fact sharing my name would seem wrong and too personal.

So why aren’t more websites like that? They should learn what I like and slant the content towards my interests. YouTube doesn’t do it; it only shows the most popular and latest videos of the day, which I hardly ever watch, so why waste my time downloading the content on that page - take a leaf out of Google’s book and just show the search bar.

More sites will certainly start to work this way and our new VITES platform certainly lets companies do that - it’s just a matter of time before it becomes the standard way to operate.

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?

The New Media world finally shows that it has lost the plot by the great and mighty Nielsen deciding somewhat belatedly that page views are now not the way to measure sites and the way to measure them is by time spent on the site. What is going on?

I think, aside from the obvious mistakes that time-based measurement causes we need to realise that the web is used for different things by different people. Comparing Google’s page-view/time connected metric against, say, Facebook is just plain wrong - it’s like comparing time spent in your car versus time spent in the office - it is completely unrelated.

What it did make me think about was the (sort of) obvious next step of putting a Google search onto Facebook. No ones really goes to Google with the aim of staying there, it is a transit place and in fact the better the answer means the quicker the journey starts (so a huge poke in the eye to Nielsen!).

Many of us now certain forums, communities and other such places as regular drop-in centres and it would be so convenient to integrate these together. I know some people would argue that the Google toolbar means you don’t need to do this but it would be a great chance for Facebook (and Google) to start to tailor the results to the search request based on what they (jointly?) know.

Google is pretty innovative, actually it is very innovative and despiter having some obscene amounts of money to throw at projects a lot of good comes out of what they are doing. The latest Google “toy” that I am playing with is Google Suggestion Labs the idea is simple…..you are now too thick to search properly so we will make suggestions as to what you search for. You start typing and Google guesses what you are looking for and (usefully) tells how many matches it is likely to find. Very clever.

Except. It could “serve” you prefered answers from such sources as (gasp) commercial partners and advertisers. I noticed when I searched for Playstation 3 the first real prompt was in fact “Play.com” a well-known e-boutique selling, amongst other things, Playstation bits. Play.com had only 1 match but the entry beneath had (the word Play by itself) had 196 million matches. Ah, I here you say - it’s clever and showing the one with the least matches as that (quite rightly) would produce a better match should you stop typing there…..except that when I continued to type “Playst” it then gave me Playstation 3 (15m matches) above Playstation Portable (4m matches).

I am sure that true to form Google will also keep this algorithm secret and periodically update it so that once the SEO spammer brigade has sussed it out (ruining it for everyone) they can change it again and hurt hard-working regular sites that stay within the guidelines.