WEB METRICS: DON'T BE A SLAVE TO THE NEXT HIT
by Gerry McGovern
Early website management was obsessed with volume. Today, an
increasing number of page impressions can mean a website is
failing rather than succeeding.
I still hear senior managers and journalists quoting HITS when
they want to say something impressive about the Web. (HITS
stands for How Idiots Track Success.) A HIT is a totally
meaningless measure, so why is it still being quoted?
Many years ago, when the Web was still young, the web team was
desperately trying to prove their worth. A message came down
that a vice president was going to give a speech and in that
speech he'd like to mention the website. He needed something to
say that would sound impressive.
So, the web team got together and brainstormed. Somebody got out
the website behavior data and began to pore through it. Then
suddenly they shouted: "I have it! I have it! I know what we can
tell them. We've got a zillion billion HITS!! Look, look, have
you ever seen a number like this?" And then they all gathered
round and marveled at such a big number. Then they danced around
and drank orange juice.
Senior managers don't particularly like being made to look like
fools. One of these days, someone is going to explain to them
that HITS is worse than useless as a measure. Okay, so page
impressions or visitors are a little better. But are they
really? If you are a site that lives off advertising revenue,
then yes, but if you are any other website, then no.
The Web has given rise to the phenomenon of the "word farm."
Websites that generate their revenue from advertising pay as
little as possible to get writers to churn out low-quality,
high-volume content. Multiple versions of the same article are
created with just enough modifications to fool the search
engine.
"Collections of articles are sold in packages, for as little as
$1 per 500-word piece," Danny Bradbury of The Guardian writes.
"Customers spin them into thousands of articles designed to draw
traffic to sites laden with adverts or other profitable payloads
such as email collection forms or credit card payment
systems."
I have talked to people who ran websites who refused to take
down out-of-date content because it would reduce their page
impressions and mean that they were less findable in Google.
Think of a website filling up with products that you no longer
sell, analysis that has been proven to be wrong, conferences
that were cancelled, events that happened in 2002, and all
because someone is a slave to volume, desperate for another
HIT.
Let's say you launch a new product and there's a problem with
it, and you get lots of confused and annoyed customers coming to
your website. Is that a good thing? Let's say your website is so
confusing that it takes 20 clicks to do something that can be
done on a competitor's website in 5. Is that a good thing?
Gerry McGovern
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