Over the last several years, I have done my fair share of reading about online marketing optimization. My shelf is full of books on the topic, my RSS reader overflows with blog posts from the gurus and I have an entire gmail inbox devoted to analytics users groups. After absorbing these endless streams of data, and acquiring a handful of best practices along the way, I feel somewhat confident that I have a solid foundation of useful metrics with which to handle situations as they arise.
Trying to explain optimization often leads to questions about the optimal. How many page views is good? What should we measure? What should we change? The answer of course, as is often the case, is: it depends. Everyone’s goals and demographics are different, and we all start from a different baseline. Yet, despite the disparity that exists, there is one metric that should be eliminated from organizations if optimization efforts are ever going to remotely approach optimal: blame.
Pulling numbers and calculating ratios in a spreadsheet is not difficult. The difficulties lie in the communications of these results and developing actionable plans going forward. Practitioners often lament the arduous task of explaining the impact of cookie deletion and the intricacies involved in determining the uniqueness of a visitor when consulting with stakeholders. After all, these abstract concepts involve servers and javascript, and, well, that’s complicated!
As soon as the report is delivered and recommendations are read, a pseudometric, more hideous and erroneous than any assumption made in the data collection process slips through the door and plants itself firmly in the path of progress. Blame.
Some of these numbers are red!
That campaign isn’t working
Who’s fault is that? Surely, not mine.. is it?
For all the fuss that is made about communicating meaning, blame is a more complicated issue. Bounce rate lives in a server; blame resides in the ego. Servers are technical, this is personal.
The danger that the fear of blame poses to an organization goes beyond the possibility of feelings being hurt; creativity is also stopped dead in its tracks. Fear of accountability for the negative results of trying something new is literally paralyzing. The more we blame, the more things stay the same.
Ever the optimist, I love being wrong about something. There are an infinite number of ways to get from Point A to Point B. Your chances of doing anything 100% correctly on the first try are hovering somewhere around zero. Check your ego at the door. Every scientist worth his bunsen burner has had something blow up in his/her face at one point. The good ones blow things up all the time. The sooner you discover that something isn’t working, you’re one step closer to getting it right! Celebrate every experiment that shows you something doesn’t work – because its a sign of progress.
The road to perfection is lined with failure. If you’re afraid to fail, you are destined to live with mediocrity.
Excellent post. Both topics are worth more discussion.
it’s incredibly difficult for most businesses, let alone fortune 100 enterprise businesses to admit and embrace the notion that failure is a path to enlightenment. we’ve been conditioned that anything we do can be done right (or it shouldn’t be done at all). the truth is that accidents, failures, mistakes all lead to one thing. Learning. if you repeat the same mistake twice…well that is another story. nice post.