The other day a colleague at the same office building, comes to see me in my room. We have an informal chat about some topics we’re both involved in, and then he says:
”Anyway, I wanted to ask you something, before I start chasing around.”
”Go ahead”, I say, ”how can I help you?”
”Open your web browser”, he says with some enthusiasm. I have Internet Explorer active on my screen already.
”Go to Google”, my colleague continues and I’m thinking that I’ve missed some big change on Google, so I actually type in ‘google.com’ in the URL bar.
”Search for ‘US states and capitals’, and then click the second search result.” Now I’m thinking there’s a new Easter Egg or bug on Google, so I type it in and hit Enter. Nothing strange happens, the search results page loads as usual.
”Click on the second search result”, my colleague repeats. So I do, but as I click the link, and before the www.50states.com/cap.htm page has fully loaded, my colleague says:
”No, wait, it’s the first link on your Google! Click the first one.”
So I go back to the search result page and click the first link, www.50states.com loads.
”Click on Alabama”, he says. At this point, I’m thinking that maybe we’ll find some brand infringement related stuff on the page, or something else bad going on over in Alabama. The web site’s page on Alabama loads.
”What? Is the link gone?! Try again!” I understand the page is missing an advertisement my colleague is looking for, as his index finger is pointing vaguely at the right hand side of the page. I refresh the page, thinking a new ad should be provided by Google . Sure enough, a new ad pops up.
”Yes, there it is! Click that link”, my colleague says with a distinct note of satisfaction in his tone of voice, and points at the ad. Of course I click the ad and the ad campaign landing page on www.smartdraw.com loads. (Side note: good job from SmartDraw web site manager, to have a campaign specific landing page there.)
”Do you know if we have any software like this available to employees in the group?”, he asks.
I say I’ve not heard of anything like it and I kindly suggest that he checks with the IT department, rather than the brand management department. He thanks me for my help and leaves my room to walk down to the IT support team.
A few minutes later as I’m back to writing my e-mail or whatever I was up to, it suddenly strikes me what procedure we went through to answer a fairly simple question.
Now, I surely don’t expect everyone to understand how the internet works, or to learn all features of the software they’ve got installed on their computers. But it boggles me that my colleague didn’t just copy and send me the link with his question, via the company internal messenger (or e-mail), or at least mentally noted the SmartDraw domain name before he came to ask me.
But, does it matter? Yes, I say it does! If you’re working with SEO, online marketing and web analytics, you probably see a lot of issues: For instance, if my colleague goes to the IT department and walks them through the same procedure as he did with me, we now have three click paths from three different users looking more or less exactly the same. But if you were to follow up on converting this to an actual lead, it’s still only one lead, regardless of what your statistics say. And it cost SmartDraw three clicks on the ad, so it is a more expensive lead than what your statistics say.
Conclusion: There are always quality issues in your web analytics, again highlighting the need to look for trends rather than the exact numbers in your key performance indicators.
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