Vice President of Newfangled.com, Writer for PRINT and F+W Media, blogger, infrequent designer, reader, science fiction enthusiast...

January 4th 2012

60 notes |#

My latest article for Newfangled is out…

Why You’ll Start Paying for Analytics in 2012

Months ago, while planning the topics I’d cover in this newsletter through the conclusion of 2011, I had in mind to write something about search. It had been a while—almost two years at that point—since I last wrote anything about search specifically, though I had covered all sorts of things related to search many times since then, like search engine optimization and measurement. So, as is my habit, I created a text document called “search article” and began adding notes as ideas or reference material came up.

As I reviewed those notes, I realized something. Most of them were really about measurement. That’s when it hit me: Search as a topic is interesting—there’s certainly academic value in exploring how search engines work and how we use them—but for all practical purposes, there’s very little perceptual difference between search and measurement. After all, we’re not that interested in what people are searching for in general; we’re interested in what queries people use when they are searching for the kinds of products and services we offer, and especially in how they get from their search to our websites. In other words, what we’re really looking to understand is the feedback loop that exists between search engines and websites, and the key to doing that is in measurement.

In the past year, however, there has been at least one major change to how Google participates in that feedback loop—one you’ve probably noticed and have urgent questions about. I’m going to get to that. In fact, discussing that single change will be the bulk of this article. But before I get there, let me offer a prediction for the coming year that is, for better or worse, largely the result of decisions Google made in the last few months: 2012 will be the year that many of us start paying for analytics. Whether for specific web analytics applications, API integration, or AdWords, we are going to start discovering that consistent, reliable access to data and analysis is well worth budgeting for.

If you haven’t already come to that conclusion yourself, let me try to convince you…

Read the whole thing here

Posted at 1:02pm and tagged with: measurement, search, web-development,.

My latest article for Newfangled is out… Why You’ll Start Paying for Analytics in 2012 Months ago, while planning the topics I’d cover in this newsletter through the conclusion of 2011, I had in mind to write something about search. It had been a while—almost two years at that point—since I last wrote anything about search specifically, though I had covered all sorts of things related to search many times since then, like search engine optimization and measurement. So, as is my habit, I created a text document called “search article” and began adding notes as ideas or reference material came up. As I reviewed those notes, I realized something. Most of them were really about measurement. That’s when it hit me: Search as a topic is interesting—there’s certainly academic value in exploring how search engines work and how we use them—but for all practical purposes, there’s very little perceptual difference between search and measurement. After all, we’re not that interested in what people are searching for in general; we’re interested in what queries people use when they are searching for the kinds of products and services we offer, and especially in how they get from their search to our websites. In other words, what we’re really looking to understand is the feedback loop that exists between search engines and websites, and the key to doing that is in measurement. In the past year, however, there has been at least one major change to how Google participates in that feedback loop—one you’ve probably noticed and have urgent questions about. I’m going to get to that. In fact, discussing that single change will be the bulk of this article. But before I get there, let me offer a prediction for the coming year that is, for better or worse, largely the result of decisions Google made in the last few months: 2012 will be the year that many of us start paying for analytics. Whether for specific web analytics applications, API integration, or AdWords, we are going to start discovering that consistent, reliable access to data and analysis is well worth budgeting for. If you haven’t already come to that conclusion yourself, let me try to convince you… Read the whole thing here

November 3rd 2011

1 note |#

Making Sense of the Data

This week I’ve had the privilege of attending and speaking at the HOW Interactive Design Conference. Rounding out a program that included many fascinating topics presented by a fantastic, talented group of people, I focused on what, comparatively, is the boring side of interactive design: making sense of the data.

For those of you who couldn’t make it out in person, this article will compose everything I shared, just moments ago, at HOW…plus a bit more.

What You’ll Learn

  • How to start regularly gathering data that provides enlightening, qualitative insights
  • How to meaningfully connect metrics from analytics tools
  • How to gather data from real, live people

Ready? Let’s get started…

Posted at 10:25am and tagged with: measurement, web-development, design,.

Making Sense of the Data This week I’ve had the privilege of attending and speaking at the HOW Interactive Design Conference. Rounding out a program that included many fascinating topics presented by a fantastic, talented group of people, I focused on what, comparatively, is the boring side of interactive design: making sense of the data. For those of you who couldn’t make it out in person, this article will compose everything I shared, just moments ago, at HOW…plus a bit more. What You’ll Learn How to start regularly gathering data that provides enlightening, qualitative insights How to meaningfully connect metrics from analytics tools How to gather data from real, live people Ready? Let’s get started…

June 15th 2011

3 notes |#

The Two Things About Web Measurement

Last month, I keyboard-mashed a quick brain-dump of things I wish I could tell everyone about analytics, which was pretty much a reaction to a couple of troubling trends I’ve noticed within the realm of website measurement. First and foremost, troubling-trend #1 is the notion that data are meaningful in and of themselves. No. Wrong. I’ll get to that in a moment. Troubling-trend #2 is the generally quantitative focus that really should be qualitative. That’s why I wanted to start out with quoting Joshua Yaffa’s piece on Edward Tufte—his (and Tufte’s) indictment of us is, I believe, spot on. We are a hyperactively quantitative culture. This is not good!

So, in my introduction to the Two Things meme, I promised a forthcoming “two-things” post on measurement. Here it is. The two things about website measurement are:

  1. Proper measurement is slavery infinitely cyclical.
  2. There are no independently meaningful metrics.

Read the rest >

Posted at 7:44am and tagged with: measurement, web-development, the-two-things,.

The Two Things About Web Measurement Last month, I keyboard-mashed a quick brain-dump of things I wish I could tell everyone about analytics, which was pretty much a reaction to a couple of troubling trends I’ve noticed within the realm of website measurement. First and foremost, troubling-trend #1 is the notion that data are meaningful in and of themselves. No. Wrong. I’ll get to that in a moment. Troubling-trend #2 is the generally quantitative focus that really should be qualitative. That’s why I wanted to start out with quoting Joshua Yaffa’s piece on Edward Tufte—his (and Tufte’s) indictment of us is, I believe, spot on. We are a hyperactively quantitative culture. This is not good! So, in my introduction to the Two Things meme, I promised a forthcoming “two-things” post on measurement. Here it is. The two things about website measurement are: Proper measurement is slavery infinitely cyclical. There are no independently meaningful metrics. Read the rest >

November 10th 2010

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My latest Print blog post is up…

The Accountability of Reality

Do you like working with data?

I’m guessing your answer was a quick yes. So I’ll ask again: Do you really like working with data?

Before you answer, let me clarify something. What I don’t have in mind is the kind of data visualization work that we all probably dream about, the kind that indulges our fantasies of Tufte-esque glory. I mean the boring stuff: gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of evaluating the performance of what we’ve designed—in particular, our websites. Much less flashy work, for sure, but certainly more useful. The good news is that anyone can do this kind of data work. The bad news is that few do.

Those who are realizing that maybe they don’t like working with data after all are encountering a critical barrier that prevents the long term success of just about anything we create: the accountability of reality. The truth is that very few things are perfect on first launch; most require some evaluation and refinement before they can attain their original goals, as well as ongoing guidance to keep from falling below expectations as the conditions around them change. For websites—remember, permanent works in progress—the reality of their performance can be almost impossible to discern without access to real user data. Without the data and a commitment to measurement as a discipline, your work will likely be in vain.

Read the full article here >

Posted at 2:41pm and tagged with: measurement, web-design, web-development,.

My latest Print blog post is up… The Accountability of Reality Do you like working with data? I’m guessing your answer was a quick yes. So I’ll ask again: Do you really like working with data? Before you answer, let me clarify something. What I don’t have in mind is the kind of data visualization work that we all probably dream about, the kind that indulges our fantasies of Tufte-esque glory. I mean the boring stuff: gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of evaluating the performance of what we’ve designed—in particular, our websites. Much less flashy work, for sure, but certainly more useful. The good news is that anyone can do this kind of data work. The bad news is that few do. Those who are realizing that maybe they don’t like working with data after all are encountering a critical barrier that prevents the long term success of just about anything we create: the accountability of reality. The truth is that very few things are perfect on first launch; most require some evaluation and refinement before they can attain their original goals, as well as ongoing guidance to keep from falling below expectations as the conditions around them change. For websites—remember, permanent works in progress—the reality of their performance can be almost impossible to discern without access to real user data. Without the data and a commitment to measurement as a discipline, your work will likely be in vain. Read the full article here >

June 2nd 2010

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The Familiarity Spectrum

Here’s where things get interesting. For a site like ours, which receives quite a lot of referral traffic from search engines, simply plotting out the top ten referrers is pretty much a waste of time. We’ve got thousands of pages on our site, which bring in visitors with all kinds of interests—a very small sample of which are actually looking to learn more about a web development company. So it’s no surprise that the percentage of visitors referred by search engines that convert would be low compared to other sources. Last October, I wrote an article on this very subject and included a graph of six months of referral traffic to our site that really emphasized the point that more conversions come from human referrals than from search engines2. The principle makes perfect sense when you think about it—and remember, we’re talking about organic search engine traffic here—people trust people and people act upon trust.

But I think there’s an important nuance to that principle that’s worth considering. When I plot out the top referrers to our site, the general point still stands: Organic search traffic accounts for the largest portion of incoming traffic, but a comparatively small amount of conversions (.3% in 2008/2009 and .7% in 2009/2010), while LinkedIn brings far fewer visitors but performs much better in terms of conversions (2% last year, 5% this year). But then I noticed something else. Smashing Magazine has referred to us a few times over the past two years—not enough to make the top 15 I pulled in my report last year, but plenty this year—and is proportionately one of our most frequently converted referrers (22%). But our own newsletter blasts, which offer conversion opportunities by linking to upcoming webinars or being forwarded to non-subscribers, fall below Smashing when it comes to conversions (9%). In the grand scheme of things, its performance is still great. I consider anything above 1% as worthwhile. But, it’s less than Smashing despite targeting an audience that is far more familiar with us and what we do than Smashing Magazine’s diverse audience of over 200,000 readers. Why is this? Here’s where the familiarity spectrum comes in.

At the top of the familiarity spectrum are those referrers that are the most unfamiliar with their own audience, like search engines. Search engines are robots and, though they’re used by millions to find information every day, their “recommendations” drop in value compared to those users receive from other human beings. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a social network that is shaped by its users—where proximity in connection tends to increase familiarity. We have a few thousand participants in our Web Development for Advertising Agencies group, and can reach a bit further in our “network” by asking and answering questions and polls, so the familiarity here between participants and others that recommend our content is obviously higher than search engines. Smashing Magazine, on the other hand, tends to have a more brand-loyalty connection with its readers. Like any magazine, Smashing’s readers trust them to give valuable information and recommendations and are likely to act in response. This is evident from the participation level of the readers on Smashing’s own site, and from the value of the traffic we’ve received from them—the familiarity here is what keeps the magazine afloat. At the bottom of the spectrum is our own subscriber base, who are as familiar with us as anyone could be without being a client or employee! They already converted in the past—when they signed up to receive our newsletter—and it’s going to take a bit more for them to convert again. Think about it this way: given the choice of professional recommendations from a robot, a stranger, the president, or your grandmother, which one are you going to act upon?

Read the full article >

Posted at 11:34am and tagged with: measurement,.

The Familiarity Spectrum Here’s where things get interesting. For a site like ours, which receives quite a lot of referral traffic from search engines, simply plotting out the top ten referrers is pretty much a waste of time. We’ve got thousands of pages on our site, which bring in visitors with all kinds of interests—a very small sample of which are actually looking to learn more about a web development company. So it’s no surprise that the percentage of visitors referred by search engines that convert would be low compared to other sources. Last October, I wrote an article on this very subject and included a graph of six months of referral traffic to our site that really emphasized the point that more conversions come from human referrals than from search engines2. The principle makes perfect sense when you think about it—and remember, we’re talking about organic search engine traffic here—people trust people and people act upon trust. But I think there’s an important nuance to that principle that’s worth considering. When I plot out the top referrers to our site, the general point still stands: Organic search traffic accounts for the largest portion of incoming traffic, but a comparatively small amount of conversions (.3% in 2008/2009 and .7% in 2009/2010), while LinkedIn brings far fewer visitors but performs much better in terms of conversions (2% last year, 5% this year). But then I noticed something else. Smashing Magazine has referred to us a few times over the past two years—not enough to make the top 15 I pulled in my report last year, but plenty this year—and is proportionately one of our most frequently converted referrers (22%). But our own newsletter blasts, which offer conversion opportunities by linking to upcoming webinars or being forwarded to non-subscribers, fall below Smashing when it comes to conversions (9%). In the grand scheme of things, its performance is still great. I consider anything above 1% as worthwhile. But, it’s less than Smashing despite targeting an audience that is far more familiar with us and what we do than Smashing Magazine’s diverse audience of over 200,000 readers. Why is this? Here’s where the familiarity spectrum comes in. At the top of the familiarity spectrum are those referrers that are the most unfamiliar with their own audience, like search engines. Search engines are robots and, though they’re used by millions to find information every day, their “recommendations” drop in value compared to those users receive from other human beings. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a social network that is shaped by its users—where proximity in connection tends to increase familiarity. We have a few thousand participants in our Web Development for Advertising Agencies group, and can reach a bit further in our “network” by asking and answering questions and polls, so the familiarity here between participants and others that recommend our content is obviously higher than search engines. Smashing Magazine, on the other hand, tends to have a more brand-loyalty connection with its readers. Like any magazine, Smashing’s readers trust them to give valuable information and recommendations and are likely to act in response. This is evident from the participation level of the readers on Smashing’s own site, and from the value of the traffic we’ve received from them—the familiarity here is what keeps the magazine afloat. At the bottom of the spectrum is our own subscriber base, who are as familiar with us as anyone could be without being a client or employee! They already converted in the past—when they signed up to receive our newsletter—and it’s going to take a bit more for them to convert again. Think about it this way: given the choice of professional recommendations from a robot, a stranger, the president, or your grandmother, which one are you going to act upon? Read the full article >

June 1st 2010

1 note |#

Measuring What Really Matters

Measurement means all kinds of things to different people. In the early days of the internet, webmasters, content to simply count traffic to their site, slapped visitor counters onto their homepages. The higher the number, the more the glory (and, oh, the glory when that counter advanced into the thousands!). But once database-driven websites became more common, the coveted hit—the metric everyone had come to obsess over—became irrelevant. After all, the number of times a call is made to your database, especially for graphics-heavy sites, is irrelevant to any measure of success. We eventually did get a bit more sophisticated, thanks to tools like Urchin and WebTrends, and began talking about true visits—unique website user sessions—and measuring them with gusto. But these metrics really don’t tell us much. We all know that now. The truth is that the volume of traffic a website receives is far less important than what those users do when they get there. That insight is what led Google Analytics to sweep us all off of our feet and begin our new romance with website data. By setting goals and coordinating them with website user actions, we could truly see if our investment in the web was paying off. We learned that measuring user engagement with a website’s content is what really matters.

But have we really learned it? I think we all believe we have. But my experience has been that, in order to tell the real story of what’s going on with your website, you’ve got to do a bit more work than just tracking the numbers that Google Analytics provides to you in their pre-configured reports. You’ve got to create your own custom reports that answer the questions only you can ask—why you built your website in the first place, what you hope to achieve with it, and how you’ve nurtured it over time as your business has changed. Those are the fundamentals that should focus your measurement. This month, I want to go back to the basics, looking at the fundamental metrics of visits, referrers, bounce rate and conversions, in order to advance forward to a new level of measurement understanding.

Read the whole thing >

Posted at 12:22pm and tagged with: measurement,.

Measuring What Really Matters Measurement means all kinds of things to different people. In the early days of the internet, webmasters, content to simply count traffic to their site, slapped visitor counters onto their homepages. The higher the number, the more the glory (and, oh, the glory when that counter advanced into the thousands!). But once database-driven websites became more common, the coveted hit—the metric everyone had come to obsess over—became irrelevant. After all, the number of times a call is made to your database, especially for graphics-heavy sites, is irrelevant to any measure of success. We eventually did get a bit more sophisticated, thanks to tools like Urchin and WebTrends, and began talking about true visits—unique website user sessions—and measuring them with gusto. But these metrics really don’t tell us much. We all know that now. The truth is that the volume of traffic a website receives is far less important than what those users do when they get there. That insight is what led Google Analytics to sweep us all off of our feet and begin our new romance with website data. By setting goals and coordinating them with website user actions, we could truly see if our investment in the web was paying off. We learned that measuring user engagement with a website’s content is what really matters. But have we really learned it? I think we all believe we have. But my experience has been that, in order to tell the real story of what’s going on with your website, you’ve got to do a bit more work than just tracking the numbers that Google Analytics provides to you in their pre-configured reports. You’ve got to create your own custom reports that answer the questions only you can ask—why you built your website in the first place, what you hope to achieve with it, and how you’ve nurtured it over time as your business has changed. Those are the fundamentals that should focus your measurement. This month, I want to go back to the basics, looking at the fundamental metrics of visits, referrers, bounce rate and conversions, in order to advance forward to a new level of measurement understanding. Read the whole thing >

May 12th 2010

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The Economist report on managing information

Posted at 9:03am and tagged with: quote, data, measurement,.

“

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
”

November 24th 2009

Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Analysis

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Posted at 3:18pm and tagged with: measurement,.

November 19th 2009

1 note |#

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 >

Posted at 9:00am and tagged with: measurement, graph, visualization, data-visualization,.

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 >

November 17th 2009

2 notes |#

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!

Posted at 10:00am and tagged with: data-visualization, measurement, infographic,.

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!

October 21st 2009

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You may have an easier time following along with my post if you look at a larger version of this chart. Click here toopen this chart in another window at it’s actual size.

Over the past several months, I’ve tried to keep a closer eye on how our newsletter campaigns are performing to see if I can draw any conclusions as to what makes one more successful than another. What I’ve decided is that it all depends upon what you mean by successful…

If It’s All About Clickthroughs…
If I evaluate success in terms of the amount of readers who click through to our website from the campaign emails I send out each month, then the winner over the last six months is clear:Doing More with Less came in with more than double the clicks of the next highest performing newsletter, A Practical Guide to Social Media, which had 229. I have some pretty clear ideas as to why this particular newsletter had so much immediate interest:

  1. Adapting the Title
    The title “Doing More with Less” is nice and short, and communicates something that would probably appeal to many in our industry, but it’s not very specific. That’s why I adapted the title a bit in the email version of the newsletter that I sent out. I retitled it to read: “Doing More with Less: 9 Simple Ways to Get More from Your Website.” It’s much longer, but it quickly communicates what this newsletter is going to be specifically- a list of 9 potential website upgrades that will enable you to do more with less with your website.
  2. Imagery
    On the site version of “Doing More with Less,” I used an image of Buckminster Fuller next to a quote by him about the idea of doing more with less. The entire lead-in to the article was about him and why he said, “Call Me Trimtab (read it to find out why).” But I had a feeling that an image of Buckminster Fuller would probably not interest many of our subscribers, so they might be likely to ignore this email. I decided to replace it with a simpler image of two screens (see it here).

My guess is that the combination of a more specific title with a simpler image in the email created more interest in the material than had I used the same title and image from the website version.

As you can see from the chart, I’m comparing stats from the first month each particular newsletter article is on our site to the all time stats, so I’ll need to wait to see how “Doing More with Less” compares to the others in the months to come.

If It’s All About Conversions…
However, if I evaluate success in terms of value added to Newfangled, particularly which articles generated further interest in our material, then I might decide upon a different “winner.” The Future of the Web, Part 1 seems to be a contender here. Though it received fewer clickthroughs in its first month (177) and had a higher bounce rate (56%), the average amount of time spent on the site was longer (3:09), the comment string longer (25 comments), and the number of goal conversions highest (60).

Take a Long View
But take a look at what happens when you consider the long-term, or in this case, the stats representing the full amount of time this content has been on our website. From that point of view, I think that A Practical Guide to Social Media may be the winner. It did have more clickthroughs in the first month than “The Future of the Web, Part 1” (229), and a lower bounce rate (44%), but notice the all time numbers: this page has been viewed 1092 times since it was published with an overall average bounce rate of 45%, and has lead to 142 goal conversions- significantly more than any other in the past 6 months.

Evaluating the success of this content strategy is clearly a nuanced procedure that requires some time for data to accrue. Sometimes I find myself disappointed in the immediate response to the newsletters we put out, but in light of this data, it stands to reason that it takes several months to get a realistic picture of the success or failure of any individual article.

Are there any other aspects that I should be looking at? Do you agree with my conclusions?

Posted at 10:14am and tagged with: analytics, measurement, web-development,.

You may have an easier time following along with my post if you look at a larger version of this chart. Click here toopen this chart in another window at it’s actual size. Over the past several months, I’ve tried to keep a closer eye on how our newsletter campaigns are performing to see if I can draw any conclusions as to what makes one more successful than another. What I’ve decided is that it all depends upon what you mean by successful… If It’s All About Clickthroughs…If I evaluate success in terms of the amount of readers who click through to our website from the campaign emails I send out each month, then the winner over the last six months is clear:Doing More with Less came in with more than double the clicks of the next highest performing newsletter, A Practical Guide to Social Media, which had 229. I have some pretty clear ideas as to why this particular newsletter had so much immediate interest: Adapting the TitleThe title “Doing More with Less” is nice and short, and communicates something that would probably appeal to many in our industry, but it’s not very specific. That’s why I adapted the title a bit in the email version of the newsletter that I sent out. I retitled it to read: “Doing More with Less: 9 Simple Ways to Get More from Your Website.” It’s much longer, but it quickly communicates what this newsletter is going to be specifically- a list of 9 potential website upgrades that will enable you to do more with less with your website. ImageryOn the site version of “Doing More with Less,” I used an image of Buckminster Fuller next to a quote by him about the idea of doing more with less. The entire lead-in to the article was about him and why he said, “Call Me Trimtab (read it to find out why).” But I had a feeling that an image of Buckminster Fuller would probably not interest many of our subscribers, so they might be likely to ignore this email. I decided to replace it with a simpler image of two screens (see it here). My guess is that the combination of a more specific title with a simpler image in the email created more interest in the material than had I used the same title and image from the website version. As you can see from the chart, I’m comparing stats from the first month each particular newsletter article is on our site to the all time stats, so I’ll need to wait to see how “Doing More with Less” compares to the others in the months to come. If It’s All About Conversions…However, if I evaluate success in terms of value added to Newfangled, particularly which articles generated further interest in our material, then I might decide upon a different “winner.” The Future of the Web, Part 1 seems to be a contender here. Though it received fewer clickthroughs in its first month (177) and had a higher bounce rate (56%), the average amount of time spent on the site was longer (3:09), the comment string longer (25 comments), and the number of goal conversions highest (60). Take a Long ViewBut take a look at what happens when you consider the long-term, or in this case, the stats representing the full amount of time this content has been on our website. From that point of view, I think that A Practical Guide to Social Media may be the winner. It did have more clickthroughs in the first month than “The Future of the Web, Part 1” (229), and a lower bounce rate (44%), but notice the all time numbers: this page has been viewed 1092 times since it was published with an overall average bounce rate of 45%, and has lead to 142 goal conversions- significantly more than any other in the past 6 months. Evaluating the success of this content strategy is clearly a nuanced procedure that requires some time for data to accrue. Sometimes I find myself disappointed in the immediate response to the newsletters we put out, but in light of this data, it stands to reason that it takes several months to get a realistic picture of the success or failure of any individual article. Are there any other aspects that I should be looking at? Do you agree with my conclusions?