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07.27.09 Measuring Your Site's Analytics Velocity  By Gary AngelFor many types of systems and measurements, the rate of change is more important than the actual measure. In physics, g-force is a function of acceleration not speed - no matter how fast you are traveling, you feel at rest as long as your speed doesn't change. In the world of business, stock traders often focus on "momentum" - how rapidly a stock or market price is moving up or down. And in web analytics, we often care more about whether traffic is going up more than its true absolute level. But this focus on rates of change, though something of a truism, hasn't been consistently applied in many types of online reporting. In this short series, I'm going to discuss some areas of online measurement where concepts of rates-of-change and velocity haven't been widely adapted but are, nevertheless, extremely useful. Content Evaluation / Editorial Reporting Nowhere is the concept of rate-of-change/velocity more important than when it comes to creating media metrics for editorial reporting. Raw numbers about article consumption are almost meaningless except when understood in the context of how long the article has been in circulation and what position it has been given during that time. If you're providing your editorial staff with a daily report on content page views, you are forcing them to put each article in that context: mentally doing the arithmetic of when an article was pushed, what position's it's held, and, given those two facts, how that compares to previous content performance. That's a lot to hold in your head and it makes using those reports much more difficult than it ought to be. Using concepts of velocity, you have the ability to deliver crisper, far more informative editorial reporting. 
This type of report uses an average of previous stories velocity curves (by time & position) to create a predicted interest line (in blue) for each article. It then maps the actual usage velocity (in red). This gives a simple, precise, and accurate depiction of how well a story is performing relative to proper expectations; it shows not only whether the story is more popular than average but what legs it has and how long it should probably stay in rotation. To me, this is another example of what we at Semphonic call Analytic Reporting - reports that answer questions instead of just raising them. Of course, a straightforward velocity report isn't available out of the box in pretty much any web analytics solution - you have to do some work. First, you need to create some metadata about the article in the web analytics solution. There are typically two ways of doing this. You can push basic information (like publish-date and position) as variables to be captured by the tag in real-time. Alternatively, you can push a content-id as a variable (or as part of the page name) and then transfer the metadata to the web analytics system (for example in Omniture this would be a SAINT file, in NetInsight a DataConduit). Continue reading this article. About the Author: Gary Angel is the author of the "SEMAngel blog - Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru. |
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