The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

This Awesome Interactive Flow Chart Answers All Your Questions About Google Analytics

If you have anything to do with running or judging the effectiveness of a website, then Google Analytics is a vital tool. And if you've ever had questions about how to set up or use Google Analytics, here's an awesome flow chart of resources from Simply Business: The Small Business Guide to Google Analytics. This interactive beauty gathers together a dozen very helpful lessons from all over the Web. You can easily find answers and tutorials dealing with most any basic question. --Bill Paarlberg, editor

 

Avinash Kaushik: You Are What You Measure, So Choose Your KPIs (Incentives) Wisely!

Avinash Kaushik writes Occam's Razor, and he's always interesting and eloquent and funny. You should read his blog regularly.

Don't miss his recent post "You Are What You Measure, So Choose Your KPIs (Incentives) Wisely!" This lengthy post discusses several pairs of metrics, and why you should or shouldn't choose one over the other (and along the way you get a fairly good education in web marketing analytics):

1. Page Views vs. Visitor Loyalty
2. Revenue vs. Economic Value
3. Time on Site vs. Task Completion Rate
4. % of Search Traffic vs. Share of Global Search Volume
5. # of Followers (or Fans or +1s) vs. Conversation Rate
6. # of Installs vs. 30 Day Actives

Go read Avinash Kaushik right now. --WTP

(Thanks for the image to MyTechOpinion.)

Why Are Organic Click-Thru Rates Dropping?

Here’s an intriguing comparison of search click rate research over the past five years from search engine land: “Organic Click-Thru Rates Tumbling; Only 52% Click On Page One, Study Suggests.” This article presents research from five different studies to show that clicks on the first page of search results have been dropping, and are now down to about 50%.

Here is the most recent study (thanks to Slingshot SEO), which shows click rates for the top ten results (typically the first page of results):

Why is this happening? The article points out that search results are presented in a very different fashion now than previously, with many more options to click on than just the ranked results. But, “Ultimately, there’s no easy explanation for why click-thru rates are so much lower in this study than in past attempts to measure organic CTR.” —WTP

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--Bill Paarlberg is editor of  The Measurement Standard blog and newsletter, and of Katie Paine's new book Measure What Matters. The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

JCPenney Games Google Gigantically: Fraud or Flim-Flam?

Link fraud and a hint of under-the-table quid pro quo at the universe’s largest Web analytics company? Measurement skullduggery doesn’t get much better than this.

See last Saturday’s NYTimes for David Segal’s article “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.” Therein, department store giant JCPenney, one of Google’s largest advertisers, is shown to have seriously played Google’s organic search rankings during the recent holiday shopping season:

For months, [JCPenney] was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).
This striking performance lasted... most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping.

Investigation by the NYTimes revealed a massive link farming scheme that for months pushed JCPenney to Google’s #1 spot. Somehow Google, which had caught JCPenney doing something like this on three previous occasions, remained clueless to the scam throughout the lucrative online shopping season. Could it have anything to do with the fact that JCPenney was spending $2.5 million per month on Google ads?

Nothing suspicious there.

When confronted with the evidence, both Google and JCPenney were stunned and appalled. “We are just shocked—shocked!—that anything like this could happen,” is definitely not a direct quote from spokespersons for either company.

Coincidence or back-room bamboozle? Read the article and decide for yourself.

For related commentary, see:

—John Battelle’s “JC Penney’s Black Hat Link Farms—This Is News?” at Business Insider: “The never-ending battle between Google and link-baiting sites is as old as search itself. The story told in the Times' piece sheds absolutely no new light on the tale...”

and

—Link Farm Evolution: “High quality one-way links. On thousands of unique domains. Fully automated. Sounds like something you would be interested in? Then read on for a bullshit-free description...”

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

Review of Tools to Predict and Monitor Competitor Web Traffic

Check out Sam Crocker's post “Tools to Predict and Monitor Competitor Web Traffic” at The Daily SEO Blog. Includes reviews of: Alexa, Compete, comScore, Google Ad Planner, Google Insights, Google Trends for Websites, HitWise, Quantcast, and SEMrush.

(KDPaine&Partners uses Compete for most of its clients.)

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement.

Gapminder Unveils the Beauty of Statistics

Gapminder presents the world's most important macro trends and statistics in amazing video-enabled charts. Here's an example for Internet users by country. Which country has the highest percentage of Internet use? You may be surprised.

I couldn't find "social media," "Twitter," "Facebook," or "public relations" in their list of 430 graph-able data sources. But you are definitely going to want your next measurement report presented like this.

Here is a video of Hans Rosling, Gapminder's CEO, explaining their philosophy:

Should We Trust Web-Based Studies? (This research says Yes.)

This comparative study of Web-based survey samples and paper-and-pencil surveys (by Samuel D. Gosling, Simine Vazire, Sanjay Srivastava and Oliver P. John and which appeared in American Psychologist) is now four years old, but its conclusions are probably still valid: Yes, Web-based self-report and self-selected samples can be trusted for surveys. From the study's summary:

"Internet data collection methods, with a focus on self-report questionnaires from self-selected samples, are evaluated and compared with traditional paper-and-pencil methods. Six preconceptions about Internet samples and data quality are evaluated by comparing a new large Internet sample (N
361,703) with a set of 510 published traditional samples. Internet samples are shown to be relatively diverse with respect to gender, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and age. Moreover, Internet findings generalize across presentation formats, are not adversely affected by nonserious or repeat responders, and are consistent with findings from traditional methods."

Get the whole study here.

NYTimes Article on Web Stats: Is Web Measurement Technology Stymied by Human Beings Just Being Human?

Don't miss this NYTimes article in today's paper that nicely sums up the on-going Web visitor counting controversy (at least from the public's view). Makes me wonder about the reputation of public relations and of public relations measurement: Here we are congratulating ourselves on being able to measure relationships, and being able to measure trust and transparency and various other esoteric things, but we can't nail down something simple like measurement for Web visits.

What's the problem here? It's not lack of data, there's piles of that. And you'd think that there would be plenty of motivation, what with all the money hanging in the balance. Is it as basic as a battle for business dominance; human beings just being human? "My number's better than your's!"

Maybe the real measurement problem lies someplace other than in the Web traffic reports--like between the ears of the people who use them. Geeze, this relationship measurement stuff might come in handy. (And, on a completely different note, how about those Red Sox, eh?) --Bill Paarlberg