The downside of Online’s powerful measurement tools.
The web is a statistician’s dream. If you have an internet site and install some very basic, very easy to use and very free analytics code on it, you can monitor all sorts of stuff. You can see which pages on your site are most visited, which ones users spend the most time on, and which ones cause users to click away from your site. Ideally, you can use this data to make ‘improvements’ to your website, that is, in the case of content heavy sites, you can provide more of the content that attracts the kind of users you want, and less of that which turns people away or doesn’t get clicked through to as often.
This seems great right? But the problem is you can’t always take this data at face value, there are lots of factors which might contribute to certain pages being viewed more often than others. Take for example newspaper websites. On a news site, much like in an actual newspaper, the stories that are featured on the front page will have a much higher readership figure than those buried further into the site, or further into the paper. So instantly, on a newspaper website, editorial direction will influence the measurable statistics from an analytics tool. That’s a pretty straightforward, obvious sort of correlation which I trust online publishers already understand, but there is a far more understated manipulation going on which I only recently thought of as I more closely analysed my own personal news consumption.
I get the print version of our local metropolitan newspaper delivered to my home. I don’t have a great deal of time to read the whole thing cover to cover each morning, so I peruse all of the headlines and read the articles which are most important to me, or that I find most interesting.
By the time I get to work and am catching up on the rest of the day’s news during my breaks, I am invariably online. But the thing is, I have already read the stories which I find to be the most pertinent. I’m not really interested in reading the same news item twice in one day, so I click on articles that are less interesting to me, but are still relevant to my life. These tend to be softer news pieces and (yes I confess) entertainment news stories.
I seriously wonder whether this pattern of news consumption gets taken into account by publishers. What I worry about, is whether or not my click journeys online are taken as some sort of sign that I prefer to read one type of news story over another. My message to publishers is to be very cautious of analytics data and those who claim that it’s results and statistics are unequivocal proof of demand for a certain type of news.
Because in my case they certainly ‘aint.
