I’ve come to the conclusion in the last few
weeks that some bloggers and journalists just shouldn’t be allowed
near numbers. They clearly don’t have any sort of grasp of
statistics or how to do a comparison. Their memory or
knowledge of the history of their subject is woefully
inadequate. However by thinking about how they misunderstand
statistics we can understand our own websites better.
What they do have is a headline in mind and
they try to force the numbers to fit. Here are a three of the
variations I’ve seen:
Google+ Fails to beat
Facebook – the argument here goes Facebook has 700 billion
trillion gazillion users and Google+ has only 20 million. At
no point does the article point out that Google+ launched only
weeks ago and is still in beta.
Google Fails because Facebook has more
time on site per visit or pageviews – here the mistake is
comparing Apples with Oranges. They’re not comparing Google+
with Facebook – they’re comparing Google (primarily search) with
Facebook. If the time on site for Google was the same as
Facebook I’d be concerned. The point of a search engine is to
get you to the good information quickly. The point of a
social network is to interact with your community. These are
two different tasks and the meaningful metrics are radically
different. Once we know how Google+ stacks up against
Facebook this would be a valid comparison.
Google+ is just for men - All
new social networks tend to be picked up by certain groups ahead of
other groups. Network analysis of social networks has shown
that people with an interest tend to invite people with the same
interest. They have also shown that many interests have
either lots of men or lots of women involved. One early
mailing list system found that for the first few months most of the
lists set up were created by people who were interested in
lizards. Every day new lists for lizard lovers of different
types would be added. Then some amphibian and bird themed
lists crept in. Then they reached pet lovers and at that
point lists for all kinds of interests appeared as people with pets
and other interests signed up. Social networks take time to
grow and diversify.
While reading about Google+, Google, Facebook,
Yahoo, Bing, Apple, Microsoft and all the other companies and
services beloved of pundits ask the question: Do the
Numbers Make Sense? What would good numbers for
Facebook or Google be?
Then think about your site. What would
good numbers for it be? Are there factors that skew the
numbers just like there are factors affecting the big
players? Can you alter some of those factors or do you just
have to understand them? Is a number bad or good in your
context? As otherwise all the numbers are just Lies, Damn
Lies and Statistics.
Authored by Ian
Cockayne