Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Two things in this post:

1) Quick reflection on a birthday.

2) My perspective on the benefits from blogging.

Hopefully you’ll have as much fun reading this as I did writing the post.

Act 1.

Occam’s Razor (the web analytics blog, not the principle!) is exactly two years old today. First post: Traditional Web Analytics is Dead.

I can’t believe it has been two years, at the same time I am absolutely ecstatic about the journey so far. It seems like I have lived three different lives during that time. Crazy. Cool.

At the end of the first few weeks my wonderful wife was worried that I would run out of content, and wisely counseled me to slow down my posting (twice a week). I was worried too. Now looking back I can’t believe it has been two years! [161 Posts, 283,496 Words in posts, approximately 900 images!]

Perhaps the biggest thrill is your participation, your engagement, your support and all you encouragement. This is no way that I would put in almost 24 hours a week into this were it not for that gift of your time. [3,306 Comments by you (plus 359 comments by me), 232,057 Words in comments (plus 79,657 by me), 20 Comments on avg per post!!] Thank you. I am deeply appreciative.

This being a web analytics blog what would a anniversary post be without a KPI. There are many ways to measure success of a blog , Visitors and Comments and Technorati and ROI and so much more.

If I had to pick one metric (Critical Few!) this would be it:

The reason I like Feed Subscribers is because it is “permission marketing” at its best. This is a social medium and it is a extra (perhaps slightly painful) step to sign up. By signing up you also give me permit the blog to be pushed to you, in the world of “marketing 2.0″ I can’t think of a better asset to have.

I have to admit that I am tickled pink that the blog has just under 10,000 subscribers. When I started writing my expectation that the upper limit was 500, after all how many people in this world could possibly care about something as esoteric as web analytics.

Every week the Subs go up and I look at with a child like bewilderment, I thank you for that.

[Let me hasten to add that like everything in web analytics the absolute number matters less, its the trend over time that is important.]

Act 2.

I had no idea about what benefits I would get from blogging.

It all started for me at a conference in Phoenix Andy Beal strongly suggested I start a blog, and he also provided all the initial guidance. But even after I started the blog I had no expectations of any “return on investment”. I just wanted to share my lessons and perspectives, just give something back.

Reflecting back now I have am impressed in small and big ways in which the blog has benefited me in the last two years.

Here are some ways in which your blog might benefit you (in no apparent order). . . .

Let’s dive in and look at them in a bit more detail, and have some fun.

You might end up writing a book.

Ok I admit that this might happen less than always, but I know of six other books in the last few months that were all sourced from blogs. One on cartoons, one on presentations, one about reputation and more. So while it might seem to be a stretch, I think it is not. Atleast not as much as you might imagine.

I never set out to be an author. The call from Wiley surprised me. It took a couple months before we agreed. It was painful to have a full time job and all the other stuff and write a book. But the result is fantastic.

I am very proud of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, it has sold beyond my wildest dreams (and is still on the top 1,000 books sold on Amazon almost every day, 11 months later!).

One of our earliest decisions, even before we signed a contract, was to donate all our proceeds to charity. Jennie and I wrote a chq for each our two charities for $9,000 each after four months of sale. I can’t wait for our next chq (at the end of May ‘08).

So you should blog because you might become an Author plus you could end up helping so many other people (from your knowledge, and perhaps financially). And that’s a good thing.

You’ll have friends / “groupies” around the world!

Last month there were a little over 40,000 unique visitors to this blog. Way more friends that I could ever have imagined. Ok, not all of them are friends! I kid, I kid.

People walk up to me all the time now and just start talking. They are always sweet, they say nice things about the blog and its value to them. They almost always say: “Oh I feel like I have known you for years!”. They refer to specific posts or emails I might have replied. It is amazing and it is nice to have this network develop.

You’ll also end up making some pen-pals, and some of them will spread your message. You’ll have your own small troop of evangelists!

And you can’t forget the connections you’ll end up making through this most social of environments. I know so many more people know, big and small and giant. People I would otherwise have never known, the six degrees of separation truly become six pixels of separation on the blog world.

With 50% non-US traffic from this blog I have friends now pretty much in all corners of the world. People who engage in a conversation, one to one or one to many, each week. And that’s a good thing (and quite surprising for a introvert!).

You’ll never need a resume again.

I hated updating my resume. It is such a brilliantly inefficient medium to communicate your value proposition.

[Sidebar: Oh and it would take me hours and hours to tell you horror stories about people how looked like God's gift to humanity (ok, our company) from their resume and who were absolute dud's five seconds after they opened their mouths in interviews.]

Now when situations of resumes arise, I send the url for the blog. The longer it exists the more valuable it becomes as a alternative resume.

On blogs you can’t fake it (atleast not for a very long time) and it so perfectly reflects your intelligence, your character, your values, your smarts (or lack there of) and so on and so forth. You can “fake” the piece of paper, you can’t fake a blog.

Of course the flip side is also true. If you have a great blog you might not have to go look for a job. They’ll come find you. I am sure all the bloggers in our space get atleast two job offers a week. :)

And here is perhaps the nicest benefit of having your own blog (and making sure your potential new employer has it and has sent it to the interview committee): They won’t ask you silly questions.

They have a good idea of who you actually are and smart interviewers just get to the point. And that is a good thing.

You can establish your personal brand (/microbrand).

When I started writing the blog I had bunch things I was not going to do. No self promotion. No simply responding to other blogs. No being mean. Nothing that distracts from the focus areas I had chosen. No non value added stuff. And so on and so forth.

In hindsight it ended up creating a unique “brand”, and now the blog in many ways reflects brand “Avinash”. A set of values, something different from others, something me. The brand has its own set of attributes, expectations and promises.

That in of itself is would have been impressive. What was a wonderful surprise was how much that brand can stand on its own. I am still a small blogger. But through the “power” of this blog I have a brand that can stand apart and on its own, even after it was associated with something as astonishingly huge as Google.

Here is the last brand value argument: I control it.

Through my posts, the images, the ideas presented, my comments and emails and everything else I get to set what brand “Avinash” represents. So people can still try to take a weed whacker to it, but through your platform you maintain the brand.

Having that platform is the biggest gift you’ll get from your blog. And that is a good thing.

[Bonus Link: The Brand Called You - by Tom Peters. I read this 1997 article a long time ago and it has shaped a lot of my thinking about "brand you", I highly recommend it.]

You could become an “influencer”.

A email Stephane wrote to me made me realize how fantastic blogs are at creating “influencers”. He described how at the eMetrics Insights Day he was invited to present industry insights on a panel along with Jupiter and Nielsen.

Pause and think about it for a second.

Two big established companies with budgets of millions and years in the “business”. And one, like me, “small” blogger. And he has the power and the authority as a result of his blog (and WASP ).

Now to be honest Stephane is brilliant and get’s invited to do this all the time. But even someone like me gets invited all the time to “analyst briefings” (sadly I decline most of them) and meeting with CEO’s and yes even gets sent nice gifts. :) Trimmings that in the past were reserved for the elite few.

For the longest time the loud voices belonged to the “experts” and “analysts”. Forrester and Jupiter and Gartner and others had a hold on the “influencing” market. They continue to have a voice, but it is no longer the voice.

Through your blog you have the power to be a “influence powerhouse”, provide an authentic voice of someone who actually knows, and provide a valuable service to the world.

The ability to influence others is now a lot more democratic. Next up on stage, Stephane, Nielsen, Forrester and You!

And that is a good thing.

You could end up creating a business.

Many people start a blog for this reason, to create a presence for their company or themselves. Perhaps sell some things or just flog their brilliance or get leads / clients. All perfectly legitimate and it could work for you as well.

I think the only condition is that you give something remarkable and of value to your readers.

If your blog meets those two conditions then I think you are kosher and the blog can be a great asset for your business.

For me personally the blog has not been a business. In total I have received two speaking engagements in two years sourced directly to the blog, and zero consulting engagements etc.

But that is not a surprise because I have deliberately not advertised my services, asked people to hire me and only once asked people to buy my book.

Part an attribute of what I want the blog to stand for, part the “Avinash brand” and part karma.

This is something I love doing and I am thrilled that I don’t have to do things to monetize the blog. But of course each blogger is in a different position and I know many bloggers who make a nice living off their blog. And that’s a good thing.

You can tell your spouse: “Honey, I am kind of a big deal!”

Like all couples we’ll sometimes end up having a mild tiff about something. Jennie normally wins these, mostly because she is usually right (and I like thinking that I am not wrong, just less right :)).

Sometimes when I have exhausted all my other arguments / points I’ll pause and tell her my latest feed subscriber (or UV number) and say: I have ten thousand feed subscribers. You know, I am kind of a big deal!

Yes grasping at straws, but it does feel good to put that on the table. And as you can imagine, it rarely works!

It does result in her pausing for a few seconds. Helps me think of something else to bolster my weak case. Getting that time to think as a result of your blog, its a good thing!

[The image above is dedicated to my dear friends in the C&A team, especially CHild!]

Bonus: You’ll have a “legacy”.

I am a sap. I think of stuff like this.

I write because I love writing but a nice side effect is that I have this body of work that some day my kids will read and perhaps get to know a different side of their dad. I wish it were something a lot more exciting and interesting, but nonetheless it is something I am very proud of and maybe they will be too some day.

We don’t leave anything except the impacts of our actions behind. For me these words are another way of leaving a trail. I cherish that tremendously.

Convinced about the value of having a blog (personal or business)? Ready to start and build something wonderful of your own? It takes hard work but, as you can see above, it is well worth it.

Ok now its your turn.

How long have you been reading Occam’s Razor? How did you find it? What is the one thing of value that you get from it? Do you have a particularly favorite post? Or perhaps a favorite Occam’s Razor story? If you blog, what benefit do you get from your blog?

I would love to get your stories and feedback, what better way to celebrate two years! Thanks.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Ten More Blogging Tips From A Novice Blogger
• Blogging: How-to’s, Technical Tips and Best WordPress Plugins
• Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success
• Nine Rules To Work / Live By

I write one post a week now and yet the blog is about 25 hours of work each week. Email is one big contributor. Many many of you write in with specific questions and it takes a lot of time to answering every single one with specific advise.

[Some are really tough, this is the complete email: "What are two best multi channel metrics you recommend, I have a big presentation tomorrow". (!!!)]

In this post I want to share two recent “dear avinash” emails. I get these two issues very frequently, so obviously they are big concerns for all of you. Hopefully you’ll find my answers to be of value.

# 1: Web Analytics Career Advice (Agencies):

I work for an agency, our clients use many different analytics packages, they grant me access and I have to look at this data to try and show them how our work is benefiting them.

I am fairly confident using Google Analytics, but with the rest, I have almost no experience, and I worry that I will mis-use the data. Also, with all of the clients, I have not been involved from the beginning, when they set it all up, etc. which I worry means I am missing out on something critical.

I try to contact the specialists within the client companies, to try and confirm that the data I am using is ok, but there isn’t always a person that knows the package well, or, as you can imagine, they don’t always have the time I might like to help me out (as they are the client!).

So anyway, I was wondering if you have any advice for people like me, who don’t have close involvement with the web analytics packages they are working with, and don’t have time to become experts in multiple packages.

Believe it or not this is a very common situation. And it sounds like such a tough situation to be in. My reply:

Here is the good news, with each passing day there seem to be fewer tools on the top tier which means that you don’t have to learn too many tools! :)

There are two parts to your question that I wanted to address separately.

The kinds of metrics that you will analyze and look at and try to decipher will typically stay the same, or similarly close (unless you switch from dramatically different businesses). For example on any new site I actually almost always start with the things I have outlined in this post:

The Beginners Guide To Web Analytics.

The post outlines the initial diagnostic type analysis I might do, the low hanging fruit that you can impress the client with right away and for each recommendation the post contains “stretch goals”.

My recommendation is to try and get really good at that, understanding the base / advanced set of metrics and how you can use them because this will stay the same across your clients (though in some scenarios you’ll come with slightly different metrics, like the ecommerce will have slightly different emphasis than non ecommerce).

As your career matures I am positive that you’ll have your own arsenal of frameworks that will make the initial set of work straight forward. After that initial work what you do for each client will be unique because of their business, their politics, and the tribal knowledge you’ll gather.

The second part of your conundrum is awareness of the tools. In this case sadly it is usually optimal to get some sort of training.

Most web analytics vendors are eager to give this to you, and in your case I am sure your clients will let you play with them. Your goal would be to get to know them a little bit but mostly to figure out how to get to the data that you need to across different tools. So for example where to find Top Landing Pages report in Omniture and CoreMetrics and WebTrends and ClickTracks so you can look at Bounce Rate for each page.

Again over time you’ll get smart about the tools as well, worry not if you are not a expert on day one (focus on the first part above, web analytics frameworks).

One last thing, I think you have touched on this but one of the most important things to know is if the tool is installed right, for someone from the outside this can be killer because you might be using garbage data.

Some tools will give you a diagnostic utility, others don’t have anything (for those cases we wait for Stéphane to build us something!) but for GA you can use this site:

http://sitescanga.com/

It is a 100% free tool that will scan your site and tell you if the tool is implemented completely and correctly. Once you fix the errors you’ll have confidence in the data you are analyzing.

# 2: Robots Are Out To Get Me: :)

I’m the “do everything web guy” for a small non-profit. Translation: over worked and under funded.

I’m asking if you can point me in the right direction for finding something out. My site gets 150,000+ visits a month. But the problem is that the bounce rate hovers around 70% and the % new visits is around 80%.

When I look at loyalty (got that from one of your blog postings), almost 80% visit only once (loyalty), almost 90% visited today (recency), about 70% visit for 0-10 seconds (length of visit), and almost 70% visit only one page (depth of visit).

I have a sneaking suspicion that much of this activity is due to “non humans.” I just find it hard to believe that such a large amount of my traffic spent less than 10 seconds. But at the same time, GA uses javascript tagging, and I thought that robots didn’t bother to execute these (thus, being invisible to GA). If you could point me to resources/reports that I should look at to get to the bottom of this, I’d be indebted.

There is one small issue I wanted to clarify first, Recency 90% visited 0 days ago would include everyone on your site who is new (because technically they visited the site for the first time, hence “0 days ago”). This is a little confusing and hopefully the team will fix it at some point. To summarize, 0 days ago is everyone on your site who is new (never visited) and those who visit every day (you!). Confusing, yes.

You are right that most robots don’t execute javascript so the behavior you describe (high bounce) would not usually be associated with them (and they won’t bounce either unless the landing page has no links on it that go into your site).

There are a couple robots out there who execute javascript, but it is rare that they go after random sites, especially small ones. If you really want to double check then, for Google Analytics, go to Visitors the Browser Capabilities and look under Browsers and OS and Network Properties and if you see something really funny there (like a bit bulk of traffic from a “funny” source) then that could be a clue.

But let me stress that the odds are low (not zero) that robots are causing this.

My advice to you is to go under Traffic Sources, look at where your top three buckets are. Is it mostly search engines? Is it mostly Referring Sites? What’s going on? Then dive deeper.

For example if it is Search Engines then which engines are sending traffic, what keywords and I would drill down to the keywords reports and look at the top 50 keywords and bounce rate for each, along with traffic.

Are the high bounce rate keywords relevant to you? That would mean something’s wrong with your site in terms of delivering relevant content.

If those keywords are not relevant to you then you got indexed for sub optimal ones and you can see what pages and go address them (get “de-seo’ed” :) or ignore that traffic).

I would also go look at the top landing pages to the site (Content -> Top Landing Pages) and look at the top 25 landing pages to the site and their bounce rate. Pick the ones with high bounce rate and drill down on them and look at Entrance Source (what sites send traffic to this page and they have high bounce - unqualified traffic?) and Entrance Keywords (see above!).

My thought is that by this point you will start to unravel the mystery of what is going on. Especially if it is search the culprit is relevant content (or lack there of) on landing pages. Bye bye robots, hello copy writing! :)

One final recommendation for sites with high bounce, implement a free onexit survey solution like 4Q. Then your customers will tell you why they are bouncing.

E O M.

All joking aside you’ll agree that the life of a Analyst is tough.

What did you think of these two “dear avinash” examples? Helpful?

What would you advice Stressed Agency Analyst and Worried About Robot Analyst? Would you advice something different?

If you have faced these situations then how do you deal with them? Please share your own stories and feedback with me and these two wonderful people. Thank you.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Web Analytics: A Puzzle or A Mystery?
• Standard Metrics Revisited: #3: Bounce Rate
• Excellent Analytics Tip #7: The Adorable Site Abandonment Rate Metric
• I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success?
• Top Ten: Signs You Are A Great Analyst
• Web Analytics Career Advice: Statistics, Business, IT & Mushrooms

Know the difference between a Reporting Squirrel and a Analysis Ninja?

One is in the business of providing data.

One is in the business of providing, to use a old fashioned word, information.

This one of the core reasons why most dashboards are “crappy”, i.e. they are data pukes that provide little in terms of context and even less in terms of actionable value.

Here are some examples of sub optimal dashboards, sub optimal in my mind from a actionable perspective. . . .

Perhaps the most common type is above. Lots of data, even drill downs included, but you can’t look at it and go: “Wow we need to do . . . “. No sirrie bob you can’t.

I wanted to point the above out purely because of a common feature of 80% of Web Analytics Dashboards, in excel with a billion tabs to look through. This is not a dashboard, it is the result of a massive sum of money paid to a Consultant who is trying to impress you with his / her excel skills - without actually telling you anything.

You are walking down the street. You look at someone from behind and you think “hmmm she’s / he’s pretty”. So you speed up and overtake them and in the process you sneak a glance at them (yes you are married but looking is still ok :), and you are hugely disappointed. Not pretty. That’s the dashboard above. Very sexy and Web 2.0′fied and a ton of data there, but a lot less actionable than you might have hoped.

Why is this so? All the above efforts are well intentioned, took lots of honest work and probably took months to put together. So why?

Here are some hidden (corrosive) reasons why most dashboards tend to stink when it comes to helping the Executive make any decisions:

1. They leave the interpretation to the Executive (/ customer / requestor / other Squirrels). This is a fatal flaw because most dashboards are highly aggregated views of any KPI and are missing all the nuance and analysis (that only you as Ms. Ninja have, and you don’t go with dashboard).
2. Most Executives actually want insights / action recommendations but they don’t trust the Squirrels / Ninjas / VP’s / Data Providers. So they ask for numbers. We dutifully cram as many of them on to a A4 size paper in 3 size font and send it along with a magnifying glass.
3. Most Squirrels / Ninjas live in a silo. Going out to collect enough tribal knowledge to actually know what is going on to then make recommendations from the data is not something that we do, nor are we encouraged by our Executives or our organization structures. This incentivizes data pukeing.
4. Often dashboard creators tend to be “outsiders” (Consultants, Experts etc) and they often don’t have deep practitioner experience that would allow them to understand the human / “below the surface” issues like the above three. That leads non-Practitioners to make the common mistakes like creating the above three dashboards.

If you want your Executives / Customers to take action, you have to give them information and not data. It takes effort to get there, it will take all your charms (though no violation of any HR intimacy policies), and it will take some time.

Step one as always is to become aware of the above three problems.

Step two is to get a possible solution from the Occam’s Razor blog. :)

My attempt at solving this problem was to try and attack it from a human psychology perspective: How can I create a “dashboard” that will incent the right behavior from the Squirrels / Ninjas while giving Executives the information they need to make decisions (rather than engaging in a bitchfest which is the typical outcome).

Recommendation #1 was to move to a Critical Few philosophy for Executive reporting: Only report the three or five (at most!) metrics that define success for the whole business. Kill all the ancillary metrics that were nice to know (and my kill I mean let lower levels worry about it).

Recommendation #2 was my humble, admittedly ugly, attempt at a “Action Dashboard”:

4Q. (Sorry Jonathan! :)

Each quadrant representing a solution to a human problem that lead to crappy dashboards.
(Apologies for having to redact some of the data above, to protect the innocent.)

Let me walk you through it.

First very up top a clear identification of what the Critical Few metric was, who was responsible for that metric from a business perspective (translate into “head on the line”) and who was responsible for the analysis.

Also note the little red dot. That here indicated trouble. It can have two other colors, yellow for don’t fire anyone yet but get ready and green for send someone a big hug and a box of chocolates. Next. . . .

The first quadrant (the graphic) shows the trend for the metric. Ideally segmented (as is the case here, cart abandonment is illustrated for four key customer segments).

This quadrant is to satiate Executive curiosity that you know what you are doing, it will be glossed over (and that’s good!).

The second quadrant (Key Trends & Insights) is to add value by interpreting the trends and adding context. It says there that some things are up or down (in english :), and it also warns which data might be bad etc. You are starting to do your job here.

This quadrant is the one that Executives will read a lot initially, over time they will gain confidence in you, they will love that you share context (hello Ninja!), over time they will gloss over it (a good thing).

The third quadrant, clockwise, (Actions / Steps To Take) is force the shy Web Analyst to get out and talk to Marketers, Website Owners, VP’s, Whomever it takes to get all the tribal knowledge, identify root cause for the trends in the metric and recommend solid action to take. The Analyst will rarely be able to do this by themselves. It will require human contact with others, it will require conversations, it will mean identifying solutions collaboratively. It is a fantastic opportunity to become smart about the business.

This quadrant is key to driving action. No longer do you leave things to interpretation or let’s blame people etc. You are recommending what actually needs to get done. Your Executives will kiss you and over time this is the only quadrant they’ll read. It will also mean that monthly meetings will move from bitch fests to deciding who does what. Amen!

The fourth quadrant, (Impact on Company/Customer) exists in case it is not clear to the Executives why they need to take action (listen to poor old you the lowly Analyst). I feel it is the key thing missing from any dashboard, they are normally missing the kick in the rear end and this quadrant delivers it. It is the answer to this question: “As a result of this trend (up or down) what was the impact on the company and its customers”. It also forces you, Marketer / Analyst, to do hard work to estimate the impact and put it on paper.

This is the killer quadrant, if nothing else drives action this will, knowing exactly how much money was lost, how many customers were pissed, how much opportunity was wasted. Now when they ignore you they do that at their own peril and with their butt on the line. Trust me action you recommend will be taken.

See how simple it is?

You fix the human problems, you address the flaws in the system today and you actually become much smarter about the whole business (thanks to q3 and q4).

Win - win - win.

Over time you’ll gain a lot more trust from your Executives and all the crappy dashboards can die and be replaced with one that looks like this one. . . .

Now you are asking your Executives to simply layer their own judgment on the recommendations and help the company take action. Who needs to see the numbers? They pay you and I to deliver actionable insights.

I stress that it won’t happen overnight, but shoot for that nirvana state.

May the force be with you.

Ok now your turn. Care to share your own learnings and battle scars? Your success stories? Perhaps critique my “Action Dashboard” (sorry could not think of a better name, do you have suggestions?). Your perspectives are most welcome and would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Five Rules for High Impact Web Analytics Dashboards
• Web Analysis: In-house or Out-sourced or Something Else?
• How Should Web Analysts Spend Their Day?
• Seven Steps to Creating a Data Driven Decision Making Culture.
• Six Data Visualizations That Rock!