After a beer and some calamari with a new marketing friend from Motorola, a conversation about the overuse of numbers in making marketing decisions came up. The premise was numbers made us feel safe and secure about our decisions, thus leading to good marketing work. And, this good marketing work based on analytics proved the age old “Good is the biggest obstacle to Great” theory. Instead of focusing on the reliance of analytic data to prove ourselves as marketers, I’d rather talk about the BIGGEST misconception in the online/website marketing world today: Analytics vs. Usability.

First and foremost, we need to define the two. Web analytics is the practice of measuring “what” is happening on your website through software solutions (usually tagging or log file). In the most basic form its visitors, uniques, length of stay, page views and more advanced analytics would be conversion funnels or other “key performance indicators.” Website usability is the cognitive science of understanding “why” people do what they do on your website. Common forms of usability are lab testing, remote online testing and heuristics. After 15 years of commercial use of the web, there are reams of data about best practices when it comes to how best to serve your user and so simple audits against said best practices are also a common entry-level usability engagement. (more…)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites