Metrics is hard ….

For those of you that care about the background, two views exist on web metrics – 1. its hard, 2. its not hard but it is complicated.

Its an entertaining war of words between Avanish Kaushak and Eric T. Peterson, and is helping to sell books for the latter!

I personally don’t worry too much about this, but in my experience reporting on the basics is pretty easy, especially with an application like Google Analytics – of course where it gets complicated is when things don’t quite match, or numbers lie … or of course someone asks you:
“if I add up all the daily visitors its different to visitors for the same period” – whilst it may seem pretty obvious to you, its not that easy to explain.

Why is it that 90% of the recorded clicks aren’t landing onto the site (they were, but they weren’t being recorded as PPC – why not ? cause they were hitting a redirect…)

There are hundreds of questions that can be hard to diagnose – especially as the online worlds evolving, Ajax, Flash and more … Browsers are hitting the market that aren’t even recording … so yes, web analytics is increasingly complex.

“…find me some actionable analytics….”

“….is this number good or bad…”

Some questions are easier to answer than others…

My two pence (english, they are worth more than cents)