April 23, 2007

When Experts Are Wrong: Don't Make the Wrong Decision

Audience measurement firm, Nielsen/NetRatings was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that measuring page views was no longer relevant.

The WSJ writes Online publishers and advertisers say page views don't capture consumer loyalty to a site or reflect the increasing popularity of online video and new technology that automatically refreshes Web sites, thereby depressing page views."

Nielsen is not the only "expert" weighing in on this, but others aren't sure that page views are the way to go either. Instead of page views Nielsen will develop a new system to measure the time spent online.

Bryan Eisenberg of Grokdot.com writes Do you ever open up a browser and get distracted by a phone call, a meeting, your kids, or an instant message? Will the time the "page" is open be counted there as well?

In December 2006, IT research firm Gartner predicted that blogging would peak in 2007.

Sometimes, research firms make predictions that are accurate are based on some "make sense" predictions. But sometimes, as in the case of blogging they're dead wrong.

Bryan Eisenberg's post about page views and how wrong Nielsen is, is just another example.

Some times analyst firms do way too much analyzing and not enough common sense thinking.

When considering what technology to implement in your business, be careful of aligning your entire business operations to the whims and predictions of a "research firm".

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