Читать книгу Search Analytics for Your Site - Louis Rosenfeld - Страница 29

So you’re wondering: if SSA is so valuable, why don’t you hear more about it? And why haven’t you been taking advantage of it?

There are a few predictable and mostly mundane reasons, such as the following:

 Lack of awareness: The idea has been around for years, but so was the Web before it took off. There’s simply a lack of critical mass behind SSA getting more attention; hence this book.

 Technical hurdles: Your IT people might be too busy to write the scripts to parse your log files or even provide you with access to large and unwieldy data files. This is becoming less of an issue as organizations move toward using analytics applications to access the data; still, you might need a developer’s help in writing ad hoc queries.

 Political hurdles: Your IT people might be too busy (or instructed not) to answer your phone calls. Or they might feel that anything related to search is their and only their responsibility (because many equate search with a search engine). There’s no simple solution here. Often, your best and only approach will be patience and persistence—just keep trying.

 Legal hurdles: Lawyers often freak out any time someone wants access to user data—even if it’s for internal use—and issue blanket denials to requests for access. If you can get the attention of your legal department’s representative for even 30 seconds, explain to that person that you’re interested in analyzing the collective behavior of your site’s users, rather than digging into the habits of individuals.

 Lack of data: Many sites—your personal blog, for example—likely don’t generate enough search activity to merit studying. In fact, they probably aren’t creating any sort of behavioral stream worth analyzing at all. That said, it’s still won’t hurt to poke into even a small data set, given that...

 Lack of tools: ...the price of analytics tools is coming down. Way down. Like, free, thanks to Google Analytics (though you won’t be able to use a hosted service for your intranet). It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty useful, especially given the price. And if you’re working with simple data, Excel will do in a pinch.

But these barriers to taking advantage of SSA don’t explain why it’s still something of an unknown in most circles. So why has SSA fallen through the cracks?