Quick’n'Dirty 96: Facebook Shows My Wife I Searched for Nude Photos of Scarlett Johansonn

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What a difference a week off makes for the Q’n'D! Both Aaron and Kyle came back to show 96 ready to rumble, and it was obvious by the amount of information we dished out in this episode. Perhaps it was the fact that Aaron was on the road and not in the famous Q’n'D studios in Austin, but the show was loose from the get-go, with as much ‘quick’ as there was ‘dirty’.

Why even waste time, let’s get right to the show and hear the boys discuss:

1. Amazon Kindle Fire: Pretender or Contender?
2. Facebook Shows My Wife I Searched for Scarlett Johansonn’s Breasts
3. Google Analytics FINALLY Introduces Real-Time Stats and Premium Services
4. NASA Invites Twitter Followers To Mars

Quick’n'Dirty 95: Facebook Shows My Wife I Searched for Nude Photos of Scarlett Johansonn

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Will The Bill James of Web Analytics Please Stand Up

Web analytics opinions are as rampant these days as penny stocks. The blessing, and curse, of free tools like Google Analytics makes everyone an “expert” on how to measure web engagement. No matter the industry the blog posts and tweets continue unabated, claiming amazing new finds on measuring and analyzing web visitor data. Unfortunately there are only a few actual analytics experts, everyone else, including myself, are simply amateurs.

And while an amateur I might be, I can still tell you that using “time on site”, “time on page”, “pageviews”, and even simple “page conversion rate” as measurement tools are not making you look intelligent, and I can point you to dozens of deep analytical reports that help me each day. However, analytics is still lacking, we have not witnessed our sabremetric revolution.

Would Bill James Measure Time on Base Path?

Bill James gave credence to the idea of “sabremetrics” within baseball, which attempts to answer objective questions about the sport. Out of this came a revolution in baseball statistics and analysis that seemingly measures nearly every aspect of the game, many of which we could never have imagined. But at the core of all the statistics is the quest to gather data that can help teams make better decisions about personnel on the field.

Web analytics should serve the same purpose. Each time you analyze the data you should be gathering information that can actually help you make decisions for your site, your business, and more. Yet, even today, I see people blogging and tweeting about the importance of “time on site” and how they use it to make decisions. Interesting, but pointless, because TOS can mean several different things:

1. People LOVE your site and/or page so much that they can’t help but spend minute after minute perusing your amazing content (sarcasm heavy enough for you?).
2. People HATE your site so much that they visit, and immediately head to another tab and keep your site open (and forgotten) in the background, only to click away at some point in the distant future.
3. People can’t find ANYTHING they need on your site and they are spending an incredible amount of time flailing around your site.
4. People can find EVERYTHING on your site and they eschew time with their family to read and download it all.

What’s Next for Web Analytics?

Yes, simplistic examples abound above. Yet why do we still go back to things like time on site, pageviews, conversion rates, and other legacy web analytics? This would be like baseball continuing to put credence on only RBIs, HRs and batting average. Part of it, of course, is the fact that web analytics is still in it’s infancy. Take baseball again, it took more than a hundred years for us to move away from typical analysis to today’s modern day analytics. Will it take us the same amount of time to move web analytics, or do you think we are already entering a new era?

NEXT: Featuring some of the experts that might be the “Bill James” of web analytics, make your nominations below.