NoFeed, No Music for the Masses

On 25th February Italy scored another record. A court judged 3 executives of Google guilty of violation of privacy, for providing a service. The case was about a video portraying an autistic teenager while he was bullied by his schoolmates.

There's a lot of disinformation about this particular case, most people think that the judgement is related to the range of time Google needed to remove the video, that was considered too high. It's definitely not the true, as most italians know.

To be completely clear, I'm italian, and I know pretty well what happens in my country even if I moved to the US. I'm also very critic, I believe that our political class is currently one of the worst Italy ever had, and this includes both who is at the government and the opposition.

The court believes that that video shouldn't have been hosted by Google at all. The explanation is apparently very simple: before publishing a video, Google should have checked if that video was violating the privacy of someone. Unfortunately this is not "bizarre" as Techcrunch said, it's perfectly normal, especially in Italy. It's probably not the case to talk anymore about the sentence itself, it's pretty obvious how stupid it is. The court cited China as an example for filtering content, it's pretty easy to see where we are going. Probably someone should tell this people that Italy is (still) a democracy.

I would like to write down a very simple timeline, let everybody think about this strange sequence of facts and eventually draw a conclusion without my commentary.

July 30, 2008:

Mediaset files a lawsuit against Google that is very similar to the Viacom one. The italian broadcasting company claims that YouTube is hosting copyrighted content, specifically the italian version of the "Big Brother" show. The lawsuit worths 500 millions of euros (780 millions of dollars). 10,000 euros every minute, for 325 hours of material. Google declares that Mediaset could use the same instruments other broadcasters are using to care about every copyright infringement (including RAI, the italian national television).

December 5, 2009:

There's a huge manifestation in Rome against the government, especially against our Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The most interesting thing is that the proponents, the so called "velvet people", started and organized everything on Facebook, without political parties of any kind - the opposition, in fact, wasn't even present. The manifestation receives very low coverage from the media, even with more than 1 million of participants.

December 12, 2009:

Silvio Berlusconi is struck in the face by a 42 years old man with mental problems, Massimo Tartaglia. The attack is filmed and soon reaches YouTube and many other social networks.

December 15, 2009:

Fabrizio Cicchitto, a parliamentary of the PDL, the Berlusconi party, talks about a "network of hate", pointing his fingers against journalists, judges, politicians and newspapers who oppose the Prime Minister, in his opinion they fomented the attack. The PDL also starts criticizing social networks starting from Facebook and the many anti-Berlusconi groups, because they help spreading the "hate". Suddenly, the many fan pages of Massimo Tartaglia disappear.

December 17, 2009:

A court in Rome judges Google guilty: for the first time a court recognizes the rights of a broadcaster over "another". You got it right, italian law considers YouTube a broadcaster and "content creator", exactly at the same level of Mediaset.

February 25, 2010:

The already cited Google affair. Google is judged guilty for the second time in 3 months.

March 1, 2010:

The so called "decreto Romani" is approved. This law states that every service that can be in competition with a TV broadcaster (basically only blogs, online news and search engines are safe) have the same obligations of a TV channel and guarantee for the content they host.

I will leave with a simple question: considering that 5 national channels over 6 are already in the hands of the government, can we still be considered a democracy ? Reporters sans frontières declassed us again, we are 49th now, between Romania and Hong Kong. Maybe this partially answers to my own question.

Nothing else to say, thanks for your time.

This is the first post I write about using Web Analytics the right way. Probably some others will follow, sharing what I'm currently doing to improve the performances of my beloved advertising startup. Full discolsure: I'm definitely not an "analytics ninja", but I'm trying hard.

Some weeks ago I started reading Web Analytics 2.0 from from Avinash Kaushik (WA2.0 from now on), and I have to say that other than being a refreshing and entertaining read, it is, to say the least, illuminating for a tech guy like me. To be honest, I've never thought at Google Analytics (GA from now on) as something else than some kind of "reporting thing", and this book is proving me how much I was wrong. And boy, I was.

The whole point of the book is to take the data you have, which is a lot, and turn it into actions. This single thing is more than enough to sell me the whole idea, to paraphrase the best part (from a Ruby perspective of course) of the Python Zen, "refuse the temptation to guess".

It also made me feel a bit guilty, I've always tried to help my Community Managers as much as I could, without ever touching what is probably the most complex point: analysis. Sorry guys, I owe you a fresh Guinness, and you know I pay my debts.

All right, let's start having fun with Google Analytics, our long standing platform of choice. There's a full chapter about choosing the right platform in the book, what kind of questions should the vendor answer, what you should care about. It's interesting, but it's 3 years we're using GA and I decided that it answers to most questions in a positive way. If I started over the evaluation I would have gone against one of the four attributes for a great metric: it wouldn't be timely, and I want to take action as soon as possible. GA also provides an API, and I guess that if the platform is not enough I can just use the API and integrate it with other platforms (which means fun).

When you open GA for the first time, you're overwhelmed by how much data it provides. It's also very reassuring, the first thing I see without even clicking on the reports, is a +15% on our .com domain, and an astounding +116% on out .it domains.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Opening the report shows other wonderful numbers: 11 pages per visit, more than 180.000 users, less than 30% of bounce rate, more than 1 million of page views. These numbers literally scream "I'm working as expected and I'm friggin' healthy ! Just sit and wait, really !!!".

Unfortunately for GA, I know my site pretty well, plus, I love talking with community managers a lot and they surely know their shit.

The first thing I start to ignore is pageviews. I know perfectly that our users are, how to say, passionate, and that our site is addictive for creatives. They love it. Take a bunch of creatives and put them on Zooppa, they will generate hundreds and hundreds of page views. Data seems to confirm that, a bit more than 100.000 visits generated more than 1 million of pageviews. With this in my mind, I can mentally blur the average time on site as well.

Bounce rate is very low, less that 30%. This one I can't ignore, and it's a great number too, very few "I came, I puked, I went to Facebook". Why ? Is my site so wonderfully clear ? Am I such a genius ? Considering that I just vacuumed all my flat and broke the vacuum in the bathroom with my bear moves and I now need to clean the mess I did with dust all over the floor, I would definitely say no. I surely need to investigate on this.

There's a small chapter in WA2.0 that really got my attention. It's about custom reports. Don't get me wrong, standard reports are fine, but as a developer I need that "divide et impera" feeling all the time, I'm kind of addicted.

The first more than obvious conversion a website can try to measure is user registration. We make no difference. It's also the simplest, given I'm no expert I prefer to start from something easy than from something complex. Setting the goal is straightforward, after form completion we display a courtesy page that invites the user to check his email for a confirmation email. It's quite some time we have this goal set and checked daily, but probably it's the first time it gets measured.

I create my first custom report using the excellent GA interface. It looks like this:

First of all I want the conversions, and I want to know which page converts the most. To accomplish this task I use the Goal1 completion rate (the registration goal) as metric, and the Page as dimension, that according to Google is "the categories that the data in your reports fall under". Other interesting metrics, as you can see, are the Unique visitors, the new visits, and of course how many bounces.

What's the point ? I want to know the pages that convert the most for this specific goal and measure it against some simple metrics like new visits and bounce rates, making my data smaller and free of what I don't need.

The custom report looks fine, but there's still something to fix: the first three pages with the highest conversion rate are the signup page, the login page, and of course the courtesy page that I used to set my goal. Fixing the problem is simple, I just need to set an advanced filter (Google, please, make those persistent, let me exclude pages from the report at my own wish, thanks in advance).

The result is absolutely interesting. Obviously, the page with the highest number of conversions is the homepage. The number of new visits is not so high, and dangerously near the number of bounces. This simple metric already tells me that there's probably a problem, the bounce percentage wasn't such a great number after all if compared to new visits. Users seem also really interested by one of our latest contests (that in fact had a wonderful reaction with thousands of ads posted), whom is our second entry, with a much higher percentage of new visits but a higher bounce rate.

I decide to investigate further, now I want a custom report about landing pages. When I create the new report, I set it to be more or less like this:

I want to know the pages with the biggest number of entrances, use the page as dimension again, and measure it using new visits and bounce rate.

Bingo.

The homepage has most entrances, but not many of them are new visits. Why the bounce rate is so low ? Because people already know what they will find, where to go, what to do: they are my existing users, nothing to convert here.

I could of course prove my point at the first report by adding entrances, I just wanted to show the whole thinking process, and I also think that having pages ordered by entrances, some kind of "landing page view", is very useful.

In conclusion, my homepage is not converting as many users as I would like (as I said, the number of users bounced is very close to the number of new users), and my contest detail page, probably the most important landing page after the homepage itself, is not performing good as well. More than this, we need to catch more new users with our marketing campaigns.

I was interested in finding more about my website, I started from a very positive view of my data and ended up having actionable data to solve some problems and especially to measure the fixes I will come up with.

Given that I'm only a beginner, I declare that I'm satisfied with my results and with how I spent my evening, I will show them to my lovely community managers and concur what to do. What is important here is that I'm absolutely sure that by looking at the data everybody will see the problem, I won't lose my time in fighting over opinions.

It also means that Web Analytics 2.0 is darn good, 2 chapters and I have my first results. Wow.

Procrastination and laziness killed my blog. I have no excuses, I didn't want to write in there, and I didn't.

I deeply hated Wordpress all the time. I hated "my" design, the way it looked and how it was implemented. This time I chose a platform I could have fun with, a hosting service I can have fun with and can use in many other ways (someone said Erlang ?) than just hosting a blog. This blog is generated by the almost awesome Jekyll, served by nginx on a FreeBSD 7.2 jailed environment.

I really have no excuses now, I have to write from time to time, I love every single part of this blog. I'm a Ruby enthusiast, a FreeBSD, hell, I can say I'm a FreeBSD fanboy, and I enjoyed configuring nginx on my new playground. I also ditched comments, this is my space, I want to write and definitely don't pretend someone to read, I simply don't care. There are also other reasons, I really disliked disqus and their inexistent support, which will probably be the subject of my second post.

It surely needs some more styling and some more stuff done, but it's a start.

Have fun.