Irreverent Thinking

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?

You can imagine the scene, Henry Ford is looking to expand car production and he knows to do that he has to buy another factory and a lot of machinery - it takes a lot of capital investment and that is all upfront. He also needs a workforce and they need wages, heating and lighting - that is revenue spend. Add the two together and there is a balance of financial needs, the machinery might last 10 years, each weeks wages last just, erm, 1 week so if we can buy machines that do the work of many it is good because although the machines cost more they actually reduce the ongoing costs.

This is a simple analogy because machine produces the parts for 100 cars per day and it can therefore be measured. It might be the latest and greatest machine in the market but over time it will become the worst machine in the market. On the other hand, the workers over time actually become the best in the market after (often) starting as the worst in the market. So what’s happening is that we are replacing machines (humans) that can improve with machine (physical) that actually get worse with time. Does that sound like a good idea? No, not to me either.

But what has this got to do with Stone Age accounting. Well a client recently asked me to separate out the revenue (ongoing) element from the capital (major project) for his rolling monthly contract. This is proving quite tiresome to do and he is paying for my time to plough through timesheets and control systems to dig out the information and it crossed my mind that we really need to update our accounting systems, practices & taxation in the 21st Century.

I can see the point of having capital and revenue systems in a world of big machinery but I struggle to see how the procedures and practices sit in this new world, a world heavily focussed on services. Maybe everything becomes revenue expenditure but I know that causes problems for the corporate world as they like to invest in capital projects.

Best of all - we are paid to think, to create novel approaches and great ideas that transform businesses. This items come under the somewhat grubby title of consultancy when the are central to much of the business process and generate the highest RoI.

I’m just starting a project with a well known UK medical company around the popular topic of “user generated content”. Aside from intensively disliking the word “user”, I wonder sometimes how big corporate Britain is going to survive the next stage of e-growth.

We have have blog, forums, social networking and now so much activity that exists outside of the sphere of corporate influence. Old marketing is dead - we all pretty know that by now - and is being replaced with what customers think they want. They cannot have been made clearer when a post on said company’s forum from a new visitor asks an opinion on a particular surgeon. Great, an opportunity for the board admin to help out and she does this by posting a link to the main web-site showing what the marketers had written about this surgeon. The original poster summarily dismissed the comment, really quite off-hand actually and asks for REAL opinions from real people. Wow.

If this person, who subsequently got great comments about their surgeon and went ahead with the procedure, didn’t believe the corporate bullshit but would listen to the idle ramblings of Joe Average then that says a great deal about the role of the corporate site.

This episode has somewhat accelerated my drive in this project. Which, ironically, is struggling to get proper funding as we are unable to illustrate a measurable RoI for it!