Читать книгу Search Analytics for Your Site - Louis Rosenfeld - Страница 30
Who Is Responsible for SSA?
ОглавлениеFrankly, in smaller, less advanced organizations, SSA receives little or no attention. It’s just one of a few dozen non-urgent aspects of maintaining a Web presence—like meeting accessibility standards or keeping content fresh—that often gets pushed aside as assorted fires get put out. And when it does get done in these settings, it’s by a webmaster who already wears nine other hats.
In more advanced settings, where there are entire business units devoted to web analytics and user research, SSA still falls through the cracks. That’s because when SSA comes up, it seems just different enough from each unit’s existing daily responsibilities to assume that it’s someone else’s job. Why is that? It comes down to what people are comfortable with, and usually we’re comfortable with the familiar.
For example, web analytics people tend to prefer analyzing “cleaner” types of data—like conversion data—that have a more clear impact on the bottom line. (Monitor the Web Analytics Forum Yahoo Group for a week or two, and you’ll see what we mean.)[6] The successful conversion of a search is far more difficult to determine, much less measure, as language (and therefore searching) is so ambiguous. So, in a sense, the semantic richness of search query data is a double-edged sword—while the data might be quite interesting, it can be relatively difficult to analyze.
User experience people, on the other hand, tend to be less comfortable with numbers in general and data analysis in particular. They more typically rely upon qualitative analyses, where there are fewer expectations of conclusive, measureable outcomes and more is open to interpretation. And they may assume that analyzing data requires sophisticated expertise in statistical analysis. So, for UX people, SSA is usually on someone else’s table.
Let’s face it, in most situations today, SSA is no one’s job, but it should belong to someone (hence this book). Whatever your perspective—whether you’re a web analytics expert, a UX researcher, or a wearer of nine hats—you’ll want to have a clear picture of those top most common queries and how well your site is performing. And you’ll want to have that clear picture this month, next month, next season, and next year. Seeing SSA as part of your ongoing work (for example, 5% of your normal week) rather than as a one-off project (for example, a 12-hour assignment) will enable you to continually improve your site and make sure that it keeps up with the changes in its environment. The world around it changes, and like a living organism, your site must change as well in order to survive and thrive. And don’t lose sleep over when during the process—research, design, development, or maintenance—you tackle SSA. You’ll glean something small—good things at each point, none of which will likely take you off on a radical tangent.
Finally, if you’re one of those wearers of many hats, don’t fret: as mentioned earlier, SSA scales wonderfully. Even if you spend 15 minutes per month looking over the simplest reports—the most frequent queries list and the null results query list—you’ll get something useful out of your analysis. This month’s 15 minutes of tuning can gently grow to 30 minutes next month, and so on. The work is the same—it will fill whatever time you can make or justify for it.
