Thursday August 16, 2007

Inaccurately Precise Sometimes this job makes me crazy. 

I was discussing some web analytics reports the other day with a colleague who was fairly new to analytics.  He wanted to know  what pages were referring traffic to his web page.

"Do you want to know what external sites sent you traffic or  internal sites?"

"Well, both I suppose!", he responded.

So I explained that there were different reports for each.

We then went on to discuss external referrers that sent traffic directly to his page as an entry page, or referrers that  sent users to his page after entering on  another page and navigated to his page.  And that search engines were a different question altogether.  After a bit of going in circles I paused to explain to him that half the battle with analytics is precisely determining what you want to measure.  There are many subtleties.

"Gee, it's amazing how accurate these tools are." he commented.

To which I had to explain , that, no, they are actually rather inaccurate given issues around JavaScript being disabled, blocking of third party images, blocking of cookies (but not all cookies), deleting some cookies (with some unknown frequency and probability), surfing with multiple browser tabs and windows and computers, improperly tagged sites, dropped tags, non-html content, RSS syndicated content, and on and on.

"We  inaccurately measure very precise things!", I boasted with a heavy degree of schizophrenic pride and distain for my own profession.

I haven't heard from him since.

( Aug 16 2007, 08:31:59 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [1]