Gary Angel's latest article in Adotas appeals to my sense of subtlety - it's often subtle, intangible elements that are the most influential, and yet, the least understood (which is why they're subtle in the first place):
"…This drive to explain everything with one simple rule is everywhere. If you listen to reports on the stock market, you’ll hear the same impulse to simplistic explanation (and with a much higher nonsense factor) – the market was “spooked” by some piece of news or was “reacting to comments” by someone. Maybe. Maybe not. There’s always something to explain a movement, but in a market movements will inevitably occur and some outside fact can always be found to match. Variation happens."
Now, it gets interesting - he goes after pageviews and uniques and says they're both flawed (we know) but for other reasons - they tend to reward the wrong things.
"….Qualified traffic is nearly always much more expensive than unqualified traffic. So if you are optimizing for traffic then you are always going to end up buying more and more unqualified traffic since it will give you more traffic for the buck. In PPC terms, this means you’ll end up buying words like “free stock quotes” instead of words like “portfolio management advice.”
When sites are optimized this way, it’s not unusual to see truly horrible campaign results – with the vast majority of traffic looking at only a single page on the site and spending less than 15-20 seconds (measured time) on the site. That isn’t an impression, it’s a blink."
I've seen way too many sites like that - "misoptimizations" he calls it and suggests that a better way to evaluate a visit is:
"… we are going to score each visitor based on how often he/she returns to the site and has a qualified visit plus how many relevant pages and relevant page time they consume in those visits."
That would be interesting, indeed - and take a bit of characterization to set up - but I think it wold be worth "measuring the intangibles".
It looks like Gary is adding to Eric Peterson's Engagement Methodology with his own way of scoring a visit. I will have to read his article a couple of times because there's a lot in it.
