Kaushik Explains Why You Might ‘Suck’
As I have suggested in a previous post, the metrics for measuring websites are greatly out-of-date. Click-thru rates and unique visitor counts are so primitive that they are almost quaint. Avinash Kaushik not only agrees with my position, but he also aggressively accuses the ‘hippos’ of the business world as the ones at fault for still using these outdated metrics. ‘Hippo’ represents the “highest paid person’s opinions,” and he believes that these six-figure gurus are disconnected with what is actually important in the evaluation of a website.
Kaushik is the newly crowned “analytics evangelist” at Google (seriously, that’s his actual job title…if only we could all sound so grand), and he is taking steps to teach the members of the Google team how they should be measuring website success. Kaushik employs the word “sucks” frequently when he talks about the traditional metrics used for measuring online marketing. He’s even went so far as to say that online marketing sucks as well, and likened it to a “faith-based initiative.”
Kaushik wants website owners to stop looking at the ‘what’ of numbers, and to start looking at the ‘why’ of the users. He implores that website creators use free online surveys such as ones offered by Iperceptions.com to measure exactly why the users are visiting the site. The company touts that it can help answer the following questions:
- How satisfied are my visitors?
- What are my visitors at my website to do?
- Are they completing what they set out to do?
- If not, why not?
- If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?
Surveys like this can aid website designers in perfecting their creations to better suit the masses. Let’s face it; the [online] world would be a lot better place with fewer poorly designed sites.
Kaushik also takes the time to remember which company signs his paychecks and praises Google Analytics. He states, “Google is giving the same tools that, only prior to Google, you had to get at a big advertising agency or digital firm for free.”
I agree that Google Analytics is a decent program, but this article from Six Revisions highlights some other excellent (and free) analytics tools for websites.
Hopefully, as metrics used for analysis and evaluation change, so will the quality of corporate websites.
[The author thanks you for being a ‘unique visitor’ to this blog post]
