Paul Strupp at Sun Microsystems says "duh, Peterson!"
Ok, not really. But he does have a pretty good analysis of what I was trying to get at in Analytics Demystified when I tried to explain conversion rate. Which reminds me of a funny story …
Did any of you see Jared Spool at last year’s Emetrics ranting about “conversion rate is dead!” I followed him around after his (excellent) presentation asking him how he could be saying that! Didn’t he realize that everyone was just now converging on conversion rate as a meaningful metric?! Didn’t he see that by telling people to not measure their conversion rates that he was just inviting trouble?!?! I was about to become apoplectic (which at the Biltmore, in the Santa Barbara sunshine, is pretty hard to become) knowing that people really listened to this guy and I had to ask him did he know what he was doing?
Yeah, he did.
His point was basically, “Don’t tell me about conversion, tell me about REVENUE!” and he offered “Revenue per Visitor” or “Revenue per Visit” as even better predictors of success than conversion rate.
Ok, that’s hard to argue with.
Maybe instead of The Unabridged History of the Pencil my next book title will be Conversion Rate is Dead!
I mean, they say controversy sells, right?
