Everywhere I turn, there’s metrics. I’m a metric of sorts, as you are. Everyone and everything has the possibility of being a metric. So without beating around the metaphorical bush anymore, metric is a construct for a unit of measure. The use I’m referring to is the application of metrics to study habit online.
Looking at online metrics wasn’t anything I learned in my fancy school, but it’s just coming up more and more so I began digging around in my tiny online tide pool.
It’s completely fascinating!
First you have to realize the limited scope that I’m talking about. I currently look at metrics for my site and for my Flickr account. Since I started looking at it very recently, my blog has ranged from around 5 to 50+ hits in a day. The typical count is somewhere in the 10-20 hits a day range… This depends heavily on the blog topic du jour or the happenings elsewhere producing a spike in a search term that leads to my site. My Flickr stream has spiked upwards of 350 hits a day, but it typically gets something like 50-60 hits a day. Hits on Flickr can also depend on many things.
Given my limited scope of visitors, the statistics aren’t really able to be generalized widely. Why? Because the sample is too small which has made outliers more prevalent… Proof? The search term leading people to my blog the title of THIS POST because people misspell what they’re looking for. I find that to be very funny. On Flickr, my most popular image [shown] has over 4,200 views right now mostly because it was utilized by a search engine as a result when the search term is “tattoo”.
So it’s not meaningful data at all… But that doesn’t mean that digging into the stuff isn’t really interesting…
Looking at how people view your images on Flickr based on the content, your tags, or submission to groups. Sometimes I’ll take an image I love, and it’ll do nothing. Sometimes I’ll post an image I don’t really care much about and it’ll get a ton of views for who knows what reasons.
On the blog, there are three interesting things.
- The spike in activity if I mention particular brands. This happened especially when blogged about two things: my distaste for the Gatorade re-brand, and our experience at Carmax. I know that because I got hits from watchdog groups, and individuals at the corporate level for those companies.
- The second is the application of AdSense that I’ve previously blogged about.
- The third is the seemingly random visitors from odd places. I’ve got a map of unique locations of the visitors. Here’s a link to a google map [click] with markers in unique locations that have visited my site.
I can go a lot farther into the metrics, but not without spending too much time on inconsequential stuff and/or paying for the right to do so. It’s really interesting to think about the implications – but it’s equally scary and sad. You know the whole Minority Report scenario. Metrics are usually taken way to far in trying to pidgeonhole as many people as possible to increase the income of a corporation.
For better or worse, it seems to be here to stay.