Swimming in Data

March 5, 2009

During a visit to Google-China in Beijing just before the 2008 Olympics,   I asked a Google executive how was it competing on an un-level playing field in China (Baidu, a competitor, has close ties to the government).  He pretty much brushed off the question, expressing confidence that in due time Google would also own China.

I believed him.

I expect speakers from Google to be authoritative and, well, a little haughty. And I wasn’t disappointed when I heard Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google, speak at MPA’s recent digital conference.  Don’t get me wrong.  I thought his keynote “Rethinking Decision-Making in a 2.0 World” was brilliant, the fine wine of the day, and exactly what the magazine industry needed. As an aside, I do wonder about the 2.0 business because I thought that marketing term was so, yesterday, and we were fast approaching a Web 3.0 universe. Was this an intentional needling by Mr. Kaushik...suggesting magazines are “off-the-back” as we say about trailing bike racers? The man did have a wicked sense of humor.

He reminded us that by primarily focusing on selling online subscriptions and advertising, publishers were not leveraging their capacity. He also reminded us that he has two biases: accountability and infinite accountability. HITS, he informed us, meant nothing other than “How Idiots Track Success.”  BOUNCE RATE garnered even less praise and in the Google taxonomy means “I came, I puked, and left.”  In other words the business is in a sickly state, perhaps bordering on death, if you enjoy a 70% bounce rate.

Mr. Kaushik drew large and startling figures in his effort to contribute to the death of silly metrics. If he was successful, it didn’t show during the rest of the conference as most of the speakers went back to the metrics the speaker decried. But he did make a profoundly important point: online measurement is often faith-based. He suggested that publishers pay closer attention to what viewers want and what we are actually serving them.

The speaker reminded attendees that the answers to that and many more questions were right under our noses, at Google Analytics, that lightly used vault of actionable data. Mr. Kaushik is less interested in a 1.7% conversion rate and much more interested in the other 98%.  Using publicly available information he took us on a tour of a number of publisher web sites. Some at the end of his tongue were in the room.

The New Yorker gets it, in his words but Newsweek does not. Opinions will differ on web design and navigation, but there is likely no disagreement that Google Analytics provides an incredible amount of actionable intelligence that is not being fully utilized.

OK, so this was somewhat of a scolding and perhaps a reminder than if we don’t use analytics tools—Google is not the only players of course, our competitors are likely to do so.

For added pleasure I spent an hour on Google Analytics and failed the IQ test.

But Google still has the last word. CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at the Morgan Stanley Tech Conference in San Francisco earlier this week said they were looking at display ads but there is work to be done. “The way the display ads are managed is done in many cases by hand or by poor quality spreadsheets.” Talk about 19^th century!

Anything else going on?  According to Schmidt “We’re in the process of building the equivalent of an ad exchange (www.businessinsider.com).  Oh yes, Google announced they were branching into expanding ads.  According to CNET, Google is expanding its AdSense program to include expandable ads that only enlarge when a user specifically clicks on them (http://news.cnet.com).

Given the way the world is going, we had  better all become students of Google Analytics.

Charles McCullagh