OK, there's people that will buy pet food and those that won't. There are people who are interested in buying an architectural house plans and those that are not. There are lots of people who want to view and download online videos, but then again, there are probably more people that don't, or wont; the list goes on, I'm just giving examples from sites that I deal with.
Seth Godin has this all figured out - or at least, it sound like he does:
"….The folks that want (need!) an iPhone, and those that couldn't care less. And of course it's not just Apple and it's not just phones. It's every single industry in the world.
You're not likely to convert one group into the other. What you can do is decide which group you'd like to market to. You can't do both at the same time, not particularly well, anyway. "
I'm thinking there may be a way to make this observation work for better tracking in Web Analytics - would depend on how successfully visitors are segmented based on what group they're part of. Right now, I can think of a couple of ways to segment visitors - but all these things are based on extensions of my physical self:
- Location (a page or part of a site)
- Time Spent (on a page, on a site)
- Sequential (series of actions that constitutes interest, including Cookies - Return visitors)
- Directional (where they go).
To me, many of the things we track in Web Analytics are tied to way we view things as human beings. For example, we often want to "track" visitor activity just tracking the movements of someone your following, or a rabbit your hunting. We can also track the location and time spent on a page as if it were time spent in a room, and evaluate people based on what neighborhood they or what site they go on.
I wonder if it's possible to measure things more subtly, that are not so tied to physical concepts of time and space. I'm not sure I know how to do that - but I can conceive of need for it. Still developing this idea.
