Orthogonal Thinking

Trust seals such as the ubiquitous Better Business Bureau or the online equivalents such as Hacker Safe are designed to put the consumer at ease when doing business with a stranger. A website displaying Hacker Safe should yield better conversion rates since the consumer has confidence their credit card data cannot be stolen by hackers.

In line with the recent focus on teaching best practices for testing, we recommended to a Market Motive subscriber that instead of assuming Hacker Safe improves conversion rates they actually test it. Subscribing to Hacker Safe is not cheap and it must be justified through ROI.

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We all periodically receive emails from social apps requesting that we add a contact, confirm a contact is a convicted mass murderer, or that we trust a website to divulge the pecadilloes of everyone we know.

In the distant past we had only a few social media apps. Plaxo might have been the first business oriented one (am I wrong?) and LinkedIn got going eons ago. I’m a late adopter of such things, so I got into Facebook only about 6 months ago. Now it seems like a new social media app spams me every week.

On the one hand, I’m supposed to keep tabs on all the new developments in social media so I can help Market Motive subscribers understand the new online marketing stuff that works, vs that which is new and irrelevant.

On the other hand, I am very unlikely to accept an invitation to join someone I barely know in a social media app I certainly don’t know. There are just too many of them, and I’m not going to contribute to the problem by having it automatically spam everyone who ever emailed me.

The issue is that most of these apps do not solve my problem (finding people) but instead are focused on solving their own problem (acquiring subscribers). Unfortunately for such new sites with small numbers of subscribers, the most compelling aspect of LinkedIn is that everyone already uses it. Established sites are very hard to beat because of their superior network effect.

I feel bad that I’m contributing to the failure of a VC funded startup, and in so doing I am causing the stock market to deflate and thus putting my long term finances in jeopardy, but so be it. Not every social media app that can scrape hotmail for a list of contacts and spam the bejesus out of them deserves to succeed. I won’t join you, trust you, or interact with you in a social media app that I’ve never heard of, because chances are I’ll never hear of it again.

You are now seeing the long tail of social media apps. The blood flow is poor at the extremities.

During Webmaster World last week I had the opportunity to see what surely must be the best show in vegas : Blue Man Group. I’ve found other shows failed to meet the expectations I had. Not so in this case. The experience was moving and thought provoking.

The Blue Men are puzzled or indifferent to the physical world around them. They might be space aliens or time travelers. They might understand some of the world they see, and choose to remain above it, or they really don’t grasp it at all. One can imagine a future in which human interaction looks more and more like this, with online being the only place we’re really comfortable. While I enjoy the online world a lot, such a future frankly scares me.

I highly recommend the show. Whether you treat it as intellectual or just plain fun, it’s great.

You can’t beat a good cliché, especially when mangled.

Anyway, a Future Now survey of online retailers illustrates just how dire most online retail sites truly are. We all know it’s true. They (we) could do so much better. Those that try just a little bit are held up as shining beacons of mediocrity.

Recommended reading if you run a retail site.

My phone just rang and I took the call. A very effective sales guy offered me traffic. Every functioning neuron in my under-caffeinated brain fired with the instinctive response ‘no no no!’. I resisted the urge to just hang up, because Dear Reader, part of my job is to listen to such pitches and sift through them on your behalf. Should I stumble upon a diamond, or anything else made of carbon, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I may well be packed-to-the-gills with hubris, but why am I so sure that paying for traffic is always wrong?

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Those that know me will recall I periodically rant about bone-headed features in software, especially web analytics tools. One of the things that really makes my blood boil is a funnel report. The user/analyst typically adores this report because it seems to focus all attention on the crucial problem of abandonment, ie I have a form on my website and 97% of people fail to fill out the form having arrived there.

Web analytics vendors in turn have designed their funnel reports to be incredibly pretty, and to highlight this abandonment in bright red with arrows showing the countless visitors who reached sight of the goal but jumped over the precipice instead, to be lost in the seas of competing sites like so many ecommerce lemmings. The WA vendors wisely realise that a demo of a funnel report creates a strong desire to purchase the product. All those abandoning visitors, and finally you get to see why!!! Sign me up!!!

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I recently had the opportunity to directly compare products from two of the most respected names in web analytics. Each product has distinct strengths and weaknesses, but perhaps most interesting is how much the designs share in common, as this inside look at the tools will reveal.

Accuracy

My first priority was to analyze the accuracy of each tool. In the past I have been known to dismiss accuracy as unimportant, but with the possibility to directly compare each, very close-up, I simply couldn’t resist. I carefully set out the parameters for my accuracy test, and performed the comparison under the strictest conditions possible.

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Randomness and causality

All my life I have been a late developer, and it’s never really bothered me. I was close to being the shortest kid in my school year until I reached 16, and then suddenly grew to one of the tallest. I founded ClickTracks long after other web analytics products seemed to make the market space impenetrable, and yet ClickTracks established a firm position. While there is such a thing as first mover advantage, more often than people give credit you’re actually better off examining the successes and failures of others and learning before you move.

I therefore hope a recent discovery of mine will be seen as late mover advantage, and not that I am hopelessly behind the times. I was browsing a bookshop and picked up, at random, a book named ‘Fooled By Randomness’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I have been enraptured by the insight, eloquence and sheer intellect of this author. If you’re reading this article then I assume you need to make rational, data driven choices, in which case you simply must read this book now. If you’ve already read it, forgive me.

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