1-2-3 Eyes On Me
What’s a nearsighted dinosaur called?
Ithinkhesaurus.
It may be nearsighted to look at online, interactive campaigns through the lens of just web analytics. You might need more information, since web analytics do not tell the whole story.
This week Google Analytics informed the world through its blog that they’re offering an opt-out capability – which means website visitors may fly under the radar on purpose. To quote the Google blog entry, they plan to “develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics” and release it “in the coming weeks.” Users avoidance of collection techniques isn’t new, but it seems like Google is going to make it within reach of normal people rather than those who like to dive three layers into Options dialog boxes. It’s configured on a browser, so I imagined that if an entire company did not want their employee’s web browsing tracked, they could install it on the desktop image that goes with each company-issued computer.
Here at LugIron, we think that web analytics can only get you so far in gaining insights into what customers are doing on the web. Page views, amount of time on a page, and link attribution for a conversion, these are web analytics. Social analytics or community analytics can help you realize where conversation and dialogs are happening. You should get more insights into what interactions were influenced by Twitter or Facebook interactions. How can you cull information using multiple listening tools at once unless you have a social platform that lets you do so?
While talking about measurement and analytics, you try different lenses to make sure the data is telling you what you think it is. You might need to squint a bit to get the right social, instead of web-based, insights, but we think its worthwhile.
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