digitalian

Search marketing is a wonderful tool, and any marketer worth his or her salt loves the data and evaluative tools it delivers. The old adage, ‘If you can’t measure it you can’t use it,’ comes to mind.  But I’m getting increasingly uneasy about the the amount of weight given to this one dimension. Client review meetings devote an inordinate amount of time to going over the stats, slicing and dicing the data. Nothing wrong with that, but I would like to start re-dressing the balance a little. Putting the user more centre stage rather than the numbers.

It’s easy to count the user sessions, track the visitors and measure the conversions, but often, when we look to improve the performance, the focus is upon the numbers, the keywords, the content and the clicks. Performance may be greatly enhanced by going back to the user and the user’s experience.

It’s easy to see why the focus tends to be upon the numbers – quantitative data is easier to collect and easier to analyse. Qualitative data is harder to amass and analysis takes more skill and experience than just wielding a calculator. Social psychologists use a number of approaches to qualitative data including ethnographic studies. One of the most interesting is perhaps grounded theory which, simply put,  means approaching the data with a completely open mind and no preconceived questions to ask – the theory being emergent from the data itself.

Unfortunately, when all the quantitative analysis of web stats has been done, qualitative decisions are often made on the basis of hunches and anecdotal evidence, with no real input from the user.

Perhaps getting back to the user and spending more time on the experience might deliver even better results that can then be evidenced by the stats. I feel sure that some of the predictable and unimaginative sites we see today are the product of too much data focus. They look as though they were built by statisticians – not humans.

Ask any web developer and probably the biggest issues he or she has to deal with is content. All the planning stages are carried out with only broad notions of content. There is a view that it can be simply added at some point down the line. This means approaches may be developed with predictable structures and unimaginative navigation.

Structure and navigation should be emergent from the content. Try taking the content as a starting point, with no preconceptions and building the sitemaps and wireframes out of the content – rather than the other way around.

How many times are we handed a big fat strategy document, calculated to induce a hernia before you get back to the car?  And why? Because 99% of it is not strategy. A large proportion is almost certainly research and background – how we got where we are now. Another large chunk will probably be tactics – how we are going to get where we want to be.  Sandwiched between this will hopefully be a thin strategy.

If your strategy is more than one page of A4 you are probably missing the point. When I sit down with a client to plan a digital strategy, there are only four key questions:

• Who are we talking to?
• What do we want to say to them?
• What do we want them to do?
• What impression do we want to leave?

The answers to those questions are the strategy.  Sure,  we need the research to answer those questions, and we will need a tactical plan to put the strategy into operation. All this requires a lot of work, but it is the distillation and clarity that is important – filtering everything down to one single piece of paper. If the  strategy is not clear and simple, how will you be sure you have got there?