Christopher Butler

Sometimes less is more. Sometimes, more is more (see this huge collection of infographics).

4:14 pm • 14 July 2010 • 2 notes

Jer on a recent dataviz piece he did for WIRED UK:

…we are all leaving digital trails behind us, as we make our way around our individual lives. These trails are largely considered individual – even ethereal – yet technology is making these trails more visible and more readable everyday.

1:34 pm • 13 July 2010

Storytelling Strategies for Digital Marketing

We’ve heard quite a bit over the past few years about how the web has changed the way we read, even the way we think. In particular, the often publicized worry is that the change has been a negative one—that we no longer read deeply, and that we can no longer focus our thinking as we did before. There are plenty of voices in dissent on this opinion, though they don’t tend to dispute the fact that the web has changed us rather than the judgement that said change is for the worse. As a result, those of us in the digital marketing space are caught up in a quite tumultuous time, seeking out any trick we can find to get people to pay attention to our messages online.

But I don’t think there is any “trick” to be discovered. While I may personally worry about the effects of the web on our brains, the reality seems to be that we do not actually have an attention problem. The problem lies in our failure to imbue marketing with information worth paying attention to.

What We Pay Attention To

No matter what happens with the web, people still fervently seek out entertainment. Every year, more books, television shows, movies, music and the like are created and voraciously consumed. But if that is the case, why do we believe this idea that the web has killed our attention? Perhaps the volume of content is increasing but the demands it makes on our attention spans are less? (In other words, is it possible that the web is helping us to create and sell more books, for example, that people aren’t actually reading?) I decided to take a closer look at the books, movies, and television we’ve consumed over the past twenty years to see if a clearer picture of what’s happening might emerge.

I began by looking at the the top-selling books from the last twenty years, wondering if I might see any trends in length or subject matter. If our attention spans were truly waning, I guessed that shorter self-help books might be the most popular books in recent years. After gathering the top three books from each year, both in the fiction and non-fiction categories (which you can see plotted out in the graph above), I saw that my suspicions were completely wrong. In reality, the bestselling fiction books were longer and outsold the bestselling non-fiction…

Read More >

9:00 am • 13 July 2010 • 1 note

My Web Reading Stats

…Ten months later, I’ve accumulated a ton of material. As I already mentioned, I’ve read 732 articles since I started organizing and keeping track of my reading in this way. The general trends that are clear from the graph above—which shows the number of articles read in 25 categories over the course of ten months—are similar to what was shown by visualizing only one week of material. “Design” had the highest number of articles—over 60% more material than the next top categories. Based upon my own memory, I wouldn’t have guessed this. I knew that “design” would be high, but thinking back over the material I read this year, the “digital literacy” material stands out the most…

4:37 pm • 10 May 2010

Matt Jones from Berg writes about the idea of ‘humanizing’ data and shows the above example- they have been riffing on the idea of Chernoff faces as a means to differentiating school performance based on a variety of factors. Read the entire post and watch the quick demo he provides. It’s a really wonderful idea!

8:03 am • 24 November 2009

Neat project by Christiane Keller:

dataMorphose is an interactive installation which projects data into real space and visualizes it three-dimensionally. Information is represented by spanned and moving sails directly in the room. Thus abstract and virtual data becomes real and tangible. As the user takes new positions and perspectives, he can experience a completely novel and sensual perception of data.

Three spatial displays visualize statistical data, web activities and the current time. The coding and procurement of data is visualized by the tension of the canvas, the pace of movement, the position of the canvas and the change of their shape.

1:42 pm • 23 November 2009

Another day, another set of data… I’ve been investigating what I call “peripheral” data sets in order to get a different perspective on how previously unseen or unmeasured activity affects the overall operation of our company. In my last post, I looked at how our busyness could be represented by the volume of communication over our internal project management system from one month to the next. In looking at that picture, I realized that the volume of activity is much more drastically affected by maintenance work for our clients than by new projects. I classify “maintenance” as any work done for an existing client- it’s a pretty broad spectrum, but since our new project process is so regimented, the split in categories is pretty realistic as far as our company’s day to day experience is concerned. When I noticed that October of 2008 had the highest volume of communication, I wondered what our maintenance sales were that month and how they related to new project sales. Sales data is the easiest information for me to dig up, but I wasn’t interested in the particular sales totals as much as the relationship between the numbers.

This brings me to the graph you see above. As I said, I wasn’t so much interested in how much we sold from one month to the next as I was about the breakdown of sales- how much of it was new business and how much of it was maintenance. So, I determined the percentage of each month’s sales total for the past few years that came from new projects and maintenance. For example, the graph above shows that in October, 2008, 37% of the month’s sales total came from new project sales while 63% came from maintenance. No wonder we had so many posts to our project management system that month! As you can tell from glancing at the graph, this is a relatively infrequent occurrence; more often than not, the new project sales account for the majority of the total. When I first plotted the data, I didn’t add the percentage values because I was more interested in the general relationship, as well as any trends that might be perceivable from visualizing the data. Again, glancing at the graph seems sufficient to conclude that there are no obvious patterns, nor an obvious trend in any direction (i.e. maintenance percentages trending upward or downward).

Averages and Average Averages
Then I wondered about averages. The data set covers three years, but it isn’t three full years. Additionally, the current year has a couple of extreme cases (January, in which maintenance accounted for only 19% of the sales total, and September, in which new projects accounted for only 2%), so I decided to look only at 2008’s average.

In the chart above, I plotted out a spectrum displaying only the percentages of total sales accounted for by maintenance sales— the lowest, 24%, came in July of 2008, while the highest, 71%, came in August. Two concurrent months bookending the spectrum seems to clearly show that there isn’t a seasonal correlation. But back to averages, the average maintenance sales percentage for 2008 was 41%. What’s interesting about this is that 8 months out of 12 were less than or equal to the average, leaving only 4 months in 2008 that exceeded it. If I isolate 2007, the average maintenance percentage for the 7 months plotted is 42%. If I isolate 2010, the average maintenance percentage for the 10 months plotted so far is 38%. These numbers are pretty close together. In fact, only 11 months out of the plotted 29 had maintenance percentages that exceeded 41%, which is a “score” of 40%. Maybe there is some significance to 40%…?

Ultimately, I’d love to see the percentage of maintenance account for more consistently higher amount. I think doing more work for fewer clients is to our and our clients’ advantage- it fits in with my motto of what we want to do: Serve fewer clients at a higher level. I believe we’ll get there.

One last thing: The graph above doesn’t show the number of new projects sold on a month to month basis. In 2007, the average was 4.1. In 2008, the average was 4. This year, the average so far is 2.6. To me, that’s the kind of decrease I want to see. It means that we’re selling fewer projects on a monthly basis this year, but at higher costs each (fewer at a higher level). So, all in all, one more piece of the puzzle…

9:00 am • 20 November 2009

Measuring “Busyness”

In my last post in what is becoming series on measurement, I started off with my hypothesis that our company is like an ecosystem, “comprised of many areas of unseen activity” in addition to the sort of seen activity you’d expect (sales, individual projects, relationships, etc.). So, in trying to verify my hypothesis, I’ve been gathering data representing all kinds of unseen and unmeasured activity to see how it relates to the big picture as I’ve understood it so far. I started with looking at our blogging activity over the past three years and noticed that the months where we posted less loosely corresponded to what we tend to think of anecdotally as “busy” times for our company. That made me wonder- how else could I measure “busyness”? Looking at sales data wouldn’t quite do it, because those numbers would correspond to the beginning of a project, so the trendline of sales may not match up exactly with that of volume of work over time. However, looking at the volume of communication using our internal project management system might help me discern at trendline for “busyness.”

Unfortunately, there was no simple way to do this…

Read On >

9:00 am • 19 November 2009

If I had to identify one of the biggest themes from the past year at Newfangled, one of them would definitely be measurement. In fact, ever since we started a serious resourcing effort back in 2007, we’ve been learning just how valuable data is to us in general. Having access to real data is necessary to evaluating just about anything—whether it’s the performance of a newlsetter campaign, the pages of your website, or even the people at your firm. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to answer the questions that really matter:

“What is this worth?” “Is this working?” “What should we change?”

Ok, so you should be pretty psyched about data. If you’re not yet, I’ve done you a favor and gathered together nine posts from the past year that are all about data. Don’t worry, they’re not terribly technical, and each includes a helpful visualization that is created to help communicate the key point concluded from the data collected. Go nuts!

10:00 am • 17 November 2009

These sculptures by Andy Huntington are renderings of actual sound:

…instead of using code to generate complexity we turned our attention to capturing natural complexity. Taking sound frequencies within the range of human hearing over a short period of time we rendered them in a tangible and permanent manner, as sculptures representing a sample of time.

(via Information Aesthetics)

9:02 am • 5 November 2009

$When asked how they initially found out about us, many of our clients will recall searching for something online and finding our site among a search engine’s results. Great, SEO win! But that’s not really the full story. They usually go on to say that landing on our site began a long relationship with our content, sometimes lasting years, that preceded becoming a client. These people’s extended use of our site speaks to the high value of our content to them. But what this ultimately shows is that, no matter how long their “vetting” process, a site’s visitors offer very little value to you until you have converted them to prospects. So, think about this in terms of your site: How much site traffic is actually converted and where does it come from?More conversions come from human referrals than from search engine traffic. Take a moment to let that sink in. More conversions come from human referrals than from search engine traffic. Knowing that our site received the vast majority of its traffic from search engine referrals, and that we performed quite well for phrases directly related to what we do, like “defining a web content strategy,” “how to do SEO,” or “website development pricing,” I would have assumed that most of the people subscribing to our newsletter, registering for our webinars, or requesting meetings with us are referred by search engines. But after reviewing the data, I have concluded that this is not the case at all. The image above depicts the 9 top referrers of traffic to our website, showing how many unique visits and eventual conversions came from each over the past 6 months. As expected, the top referrer to our site, exceeding direct visits by almost 5 times, was search engine traffic (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). However, out of the 71, 233 visitors who came to our site from a search engine, only 333 of them ended up converting to an actual lead. That’s a paltry fraction of a percent (.47%). Our miscellaneous referrals, on the other hand, which include any other website on the web that has chosen to link to us, deliver far fewer visitors by comparison to search but far more conversions. Out of the 10,350 visitors that came from direct links to our site on other websites, 475 ended up converting to actual leads. That’s 4.5%- almost 10 times the percentage by proportion of conversions originating with search! While I can’t say for certain that my conclusions about our site traffic would apply to every other company like ours, I’d bet it’s pretty likely. When you stop to consider why search traffic delivers fewer conversions than other referrals, the data makes perfect sense. Think about it: When you search for something online, you scrutinize the results for relevance before you choose one to click, and even then, you often realize that the site you’ve visited isn’t quite what you’re looking for. No hard feelings; you don’t expect search engine bots to organize the web based upon just what you want. That would be like going to your local library and finding a card catalog with your name on it. But when a site you trust links to another site, you do expect that recommendation to be much more closely aligned with your interests and intent than a search engine’s results to your query. You assume that the people behind that website are like you, and when they link to another site, it’s for a really good reason. They’ve read its content and found it valuable enough to recommend to you. Put simply, people trust people and people act upon trust. I think the chart above makes this principle very clear, but if you need any further evidence of how direct human referrals lead to more conversions, read what happened when Smashing Magazine referred to our site among its list of useful email web design newsletters. Read More >$

When asked how they initially found out about us, many of our clients will recall searching for something online and finding our site among a search engine’s results. Great, SEO win! But that’s not really the full story. They usually go on to say that landing on our site began a long relationship with our content, sometimes lasting years, that preceded becoming a client. These people’s extended use of our site speaks to the high value of our content to them. But what this ultimately shows is that, no matter how long their “vetting” process, a site’s visitors offer very little value to you until you have converted them to prospects. So, think about this in terms of your site: How much site traffic is actually converted and where does it come from?

More conversions come from human referrals than from search engine traffic.

Take a moment to let that sink in. More conversions come from human referrals than from search engine traffic. Knowing that our site received the vast majority of its traffic from search engine referrals, and that we performed quite well for phrases directly related to what we do, like “defining a web content strategy,” “how to do SEO,” or “website development pricing,” I would have assumed that most of the people subscribing to our newsletter, registering for our webinars, or requesting meetings with us are referred by search engines. But after reviewing the data, I have concluded that this is not the case at all.

The image above depicts the 9 top referrers of traffic to our website, showing how many unique visits and eventual conversions came from each over the past 6 months. As expected, the top referrer to our site, exceeding direct visits by almost 5 times, was search engine traffic (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). However, out of the 71, 233 visitors who came to our site from a search engine, only 333 of them ended up converting to an actual lead. That’s a paltry fraction of a percent (.47%). Our miscellaneous referrals, on the other hand, which include any other website on the web that has chosen to link to us, deliver far fewer visitors by comparison to search but far more conversions. Out of the 10,350 visitors that came from direct links to our site on other websites, 475 ended up converting to actual leads. That’s 4.5%- almost 10 times the percentage by proportion of conversions originating with search!

While I can’t say for certain that my conclusions about our site traffic would apply to every other company like ours, I’d bet it’s pretty likely. When you stop to consider why search traffic delivers fewer conversions than other referrals, the data makes perfect sense. Think about it: When you search for something online, you scrutinize the results for relevance before you choose one to click, and even then, you often realize that the site you’ve visited isn’t quite what you’re looking for. No hard feelings; you don’t expect search engine bots to organize the web based upon just what you want. That would be like going to your local library and finding a card catalog with your name on it. But when a site you trust links to another site, you do expect that recommendation to be much more closely aligned with your interests and intent than a search engine’s results to your query. You assume that the people behind that website are like you, and when they link to another site, it’s for a really good reason. They’ve read its content and found it valuable enough to recommend to you. Put simply, people trust people and people act upon trust.

I think the chart above makes this principle very clear, but if you need any further evidence of how direct human referrals lead to more conversions, read what happened when Smashing Magazine referred to our site among its list of useful email web design newsletters.