“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
If department store merchant John Wanamaker were alive today, he would find no shortage of firms wanting to sell him answers. The field of Web metrics (also called Web analytics) is exploding, as data analysts get better at sifting through data on site visits and telling Web content managers what they all should want to know:
- When people come to your site, what do they do?
- How do they feel about your organization and its Web site?
- How do you stack up against your competitors?
- What results from all these visits?
These are the broad concepts that were laid out at Friday’s invitation-only Web Managers Roundtable by metrics author and consultant Jim Sterne. The reports delivered by his firm and others like it run into the hundreds of pages For a good overview, see his blog post “Tough Times Call for Tough Measures.”
Who could fail to be thrilled by the diagnostic potential of Web metrics? But making sense of it all and figuring out what to do next – those jobs still fall to the Web content manager.
To provide a good example of where strong interpretation of good data can lead, the Roundtable paired visionary Sterne with AARP, which spiffed up its stodgy image in recent years but still applies level-headed management practices to its membership organization of 40 million.
AARP (full disclosure, a client) routinely sucks up information of all kinds about its 50+ demographic and applies it in the interest of better services. I’ve observed that AARP will settle for pretty good data, and when they think they have a good idea, they’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, they’ll scrap it and try something else.
That opinion was bolstered by the remarks of Kit Cody, General Manager of the AARP Web Strategy Group. Cody shared with the Roundtable some entertaining lessons he and his colleagues learned on their two-and-a-half year journey to Web 2.0, the recent shift in web design to a more participatory model that allows users to network and create their own content.
For instance: Having done their homework, AARP knew that the competitive landscape was diverse. The number one Web site site visited by 50+ is The New York Times – no surprise there. Number two is …. MySpace. Huh? Maybe they’re checking up on their children, AARP thought. No, it turns out: they’re using it themselves.
This discovery helps to explain why AARP’s Web 2.0 looks so kicky. Also why they have game pages, which get a huge number of hits. Plus places to post photos, chat about cars, share experiences of caregiving and grief, talk about vacations, dogs, sex, Kentucky, and just about every other experience imaginable.
AARP also learned not to change popular site features (like their Bulletin Board) without first checking with the biggest users. Especially in an era when user feedback is immediate and networked, it’s important to remember that numbers alone only tell part of the story.
