Web Stats Are Broken

Matt Marshall at Siliconbeat wrote that web analytics are broken and are back to square one, talking about third party web traffic measurement.

The only reason the system isn’t breaking down, and advertisers aren’t pulling out, is because they have no choice but to play. They are taking informed guesses, based on the shoddy statistics available. And Google et al. are using every strategy they can find to deal with this problem.

Webanalyticsbook added some graphs and a good summary of the main companies that guess traffic.

Alexa: Alexa data is collected via the Alexa browser toolbar, which is obviously more often installed on tech interested users, than on average Joe’s computer. This means that more tech relevant users on your site increase the chance that your Alexa rank increases. Also software programmes like Alexabooster can easily “boost” your rank . Alexa only gives you an idea or a trend, but will never be accurate.

Comscore: Comscore is based on 2 million participants, which allows them to capture a broad view of surfing and buying behavior. Problem here is pretty much the same. Accuracy won’t be 100% for tech related websites.

Hitwise: Hitwise collects logfile data directly from the ISP networks (network-centric) and does not have a user-centric or site centric approach. They also combine this rich ISP data with a worldwide opt-in panel to overlay demographic, lifestyle and transactional behavior across the thousands of websites that are reported on every day.

August Google Rank – Afterthoughts »« Feeds Via IM

The 10/20/30 PowerPoint Rule

While catching up on my Guy Kawasaki posts, I wanted to reference some all important advice for presentations, The 10/20/30 PowerPoint Rule.

I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

This is specific to his work in venture capital, but it’s good advice for all of us that need to create and sit through presentations.

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Consumer Web Behavior

A study using eye-tracking equipment by Nielsen Norman Group of 230 consumers, sheds some interesting light on how people tend to use the internet. (Yahoo News article)

• Individuals read Web pages in an “F” pattern. They’re more inclined to read longer sentences at the top of a page and less and less as they scroll down. That makes the first two words of a sentence very important.
• Surfers connect well with images of people looking directly at them. It helps if the person in the photo is attractive, but not too good looking.
• Images in the middle of a page can present an obstacle course.
• People respond to pictures that provide useful information, not just decoration.
• Consumers will peek at ads in search engines as a “secondary thing,” Nielsen says, since they usually have specific product targets in mind.

Jakob Nielsen (a principal at the firm), also has an article on growing a business website.

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MyStickies Goes Live

Sticky notes for the web! MyStickies let’s you put sticky notes on a web page and loads them back up when you come back to the page.

You can also tag your notes, change note colors, and manage all your notes from the free on-line account at mystickies.com.

Future features include sharing notes with friends and creating public notes.

read more | digg story

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Buzzwords

For those in need of another game for your buzzword/jargon junkie needs (you know who you are FL), there is Buzzword Bingo.

The first documented buzzword bingo occurred when the then Vice President of the United States Al Gore, known for his liberal use of buzzwords hyping technology, spoke at MIT’s 1996 graduation. The graduation class had distributed bingo cards containing buzzwords to the audience.

Thankfully, this game has been updated for Web 2.0 Bingo, so we no longer have to depend on the dot com bubble Bingo version. 

And I have to admit, Ruby on Rails is a new buzzword for me… I must be slackin. 

Here are some other gems (or check out BuzzWhack): 

1.      Robust 2.      Powerful 3.      Flexible 4.      Integrated 5.      Seamless 6.      Extensible 7.      Scalable

8.      Interoperable 9.      Easy-to-use 10.  Intuitive 11.  User-friendly 12.  Comprehensive 13.  Best-of-breed 14.  World-class

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Do’s and Dont’s of SEO

SEO will make or break a site, and as Google gains control, this only becomes more important. The trick is to watch out for unethical SEO “experts”. Article by Mark Lloyd on Purchased SEO.

What is SEO?
SEO or ‘Search Engine Optimization’ literally refers to a set of techniques used to improve the ranking of a website in search engine listings. The importance of being high up in a search engine listing is common knowledge, the number of visitors a site receives can literally dictate weather or not a site will succeed or fail.

Google-Mart »« Best Sushi in Hoboken

Click Here

I see this a lot in the marketing that comes out at my company as well as elsewhere… people love to have “click here” as a link. People tend to scan web pages and you have to assume they will only read the links only and not focus on the text on the page, so someone reading just “click here” gives no information or action. At this stage of the Internet also, I think people know how to take action to visit a link, there is no education value. It’s just tragic and lazy marketing.

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Blog Usability

Jakob Nielsen brings his usability guidelines to the Blogsphere and talks about the Top 10 Blog mistakes.

And this gives me a few todo’s like a bio, photo, and a regular schedule on a limited topic range. Highlights will require more richness to the site. But I at least think and try and avoid the other mistakes like vague titles, non-descriptive links and focused tagging.

Slow paper death »« Meditation to generate compassion and positive thoughts