In the web analytics world, part of understanding how useful or effective your site pages are comes from how far visitors scroll down the page (a.k.a. the percent page viewed). This is particularly interesting for content producers like bloggers, news outlets, or any other text-based vertical. It does not matter how many people visit your blog post if most of them do not scroll far enough to see the call-to-action. How will you know if the content is not engaging enough or the juicy bits are regularly kept below the fold if you don’t understand how your site’s users regularly view the page?
Hai Tech Eric
eclectic musings
Category Archives: Industry
Peoplytics: A Plan to Implement User-Driven Analytics
In the near 10 years I’ve been in the analytics business, I’ve seen the industry grow and evolve from simple hit counters to advanced data mining techniques. In the past, where data collection and reporting has usually been very product-focused endeavor, today the more mature analytics practices have moved beyond simple site metrics. Understanding how many people visited your site might be nice to know, but the visitor doesn’t care much about how many other people came to the site. They care about a better experience and more convenience from start to finish, and not just when they visit your site. This requires something more complex and powerful than before. It requires User-Driven Analytics.
What does a Product Manager do? A Musical Metaphor
For the longest time, I’ve been passionate about working as a product manager. Once I got my first taste of it at Adobe, I couldn’t get enough. And yet, whenever I would talk to people in social circles, I had the hardest time describing my role without confusing or boring them. One of the ways I would describe my work was that of a mini-CEO, responsible not for the success of the entire company but rather just one or a few products within the company. While that metaphor helped, it was still woefully inadequate. While I held similar responsibilities for the success of my small portion of the business, I lacked the authority and budgets that CEOs have to work with.
Principles of Gaming in Industry
It is the nature of all human beings to seek learning through games, a structured paradigm that allows one to grasp new concepts and expand their horizons in a safer environment than the real world. We play house, tag, and create fingerpainting art as children. As we grow, we play sports, more complex games, and create finer works of art. Indeed, from our earliest days we rely on playing as the most effective way to learn about our world and how to live in it. Pondering this topic inevitably led to the question: Why does the playful approach to life stop when we grow up and move into a professional field?