Why do marketing people get so obsessed about time someone spends on a page (with the assumption that longer=better because 'engagement')? Good IA should mean users find what they want quickly; good UX means quick ordering. Good copywriting means quick comprehension, doesn't it?
@brucelawson@craiggrannell Literally been explaining this to clients since the mid-/late ’90s. I’ve long-since stripped all traces of Google Analytics out of my own sites, and only install it on clients sites when they explicitly request it. Few ever do.
@brucelawson taught this idea which I call the “visit fallacy” as in more time and engagement in a visit = more success for years in my web analytics course. Use an example about successful visits to the course page to find the homework assignment using time on site and page views and compare to one with the answer on the home page and one buried somewhere. The students really relate to this one! I point out fallacy is untrue if paid by more time or click though…there’s the rub. 😖
@brucelawson Ah i remember writing an email at my old company explaining exactly this. That's a bad measure in many cases. Literally the opposite of good.
@bkardell if you can repurpose that email as a blogpost, I'd read it. (I too wrote a similar email in about 2007 but I can only remember the swear words)
@brucelawson I don't have access to emails from my previous employer, but it seemed like pretty obvious stuff to me. We had just done a major/expensive reorganization of a complex site at an online university and they sent an email with all of these stats about how people were on there twice as long. No kidding - you moved everything? They're all probably lost? Is that really a definitive win? Why?
@brucelawson So really it was just: why does everyone assume this is a universally good metric? Why does no one seem to ask "why?" or even "who wins if they do?"
@bkardell That's v similar to the one I sent, in similar circumstances. I recall it made me incredibly popular with that department and management; I trust it had the same effect for you.
@brucelawson@bkardell randomly reminded of my old uni webmaster job, where - after a much needed redesign - our head of marketing asked for stats to show we now get more "hits". i sadly had to show him that we now got about half of the numbers of raw total page views across the entire site, because i had streamlined it to surface important stuff much quicker and flattened the overly convoluted site structure/hierarchy... good times
@brucelawson christ, that meeting when somebody in the marketing team said "we need to buy an island in second life", and i just asked "why?" and nobody had a cogent answer...
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