Tuesday December 12, 2006

Two Types of People One more comment on a similar topic to my last entry.  I guess I've always known this, but have never digested it quite this way.  And that is: there seem to be two types of people in the world: those who can take a fact and make it more complicated, and those who can take a fact and make it simpler.

Consider again the issue of "new visitors".  When this data was presented at a meeting an audience member said "So, this is just the number of  people coming to our web site who do not yet have our cookie?"  Well, yes indeed.  Well simplified. 

Somebody else could have looked at the same piece of data and asked, "If a user is using tabbed browsing, will he show up as a new visitor if he visits from two different tabs?  What if he is using two different browser profiles? Then what?"  Good questions as well.  I suppose we ought to understand that.

So, let me ask.  Is a web analyst more like the first person or the second?
( Dec 12 2006, 12:45:57 PM MST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Monday December 11, 2006

White Lies I lied to my VP the other day, and if he ever finds out...

I think he'll thank me.

So, why would I be such an unscrupulous wretch, deliberately passing untruths to the person who has so much power to make my career successful or painful?  Because that's my job.

I better start explaining.  I was preparing some web data for him to use at a presentation he needed to make to his peers and his executive VP.  Part of the materials included data about new and returning visits as well as visit number (i.e. is this the user's first, second, Nth visit?), and as I was assembling the slide I found it to be horribly complicated, burdened with nuance and caveats  Were cookies deleted?  What if the user used multiple computers?  How long had we been capturing data for that web site compared to the other we sites? How do I explain the difference between a return visit and a return visitor? (I'm still struggling with that last one!)

So, I simplified the whole mess and  gave him a simple sound bite.

The next day I was fortunate enough to be in the meeting when he presented this information. It was received by a smattering of nodding heads which subsequently proceeded to some valuable discussions about marketing strategy, rather than a rat hole trying to figure out what in the world that chart was trying to say.  Thus, I successfully removed some trees so that they could see the forest.

So, am I advocating fudging of web data  because it is too complicated?  No!  In fact, if  an analyst on my staff were to pull the same trick with me I'd run him up the flagpole for not understanding the data (even if he actually did).  My point is that as analysts you need to remember that it is your job to translate web data into business information and that process sometimes requires a judgment call if some details can be safely left out.
( Dec 11 2006, 09:44:25 AM MST ) Permalink Comments [1]