January 8, 2006
stats, schmats
[This cartoon is one of my all-time favorites. Which is why I repost it all the time etc.]
Back when I was new to this whole internet thing, I would check my stats at least once a day. Now I’m lucky if I check them once a week, tops. Stats don’t really tell you that much. OK, so let’s say hypothetically you got 30% more visitors in December than you got in November. Whatever. How many of this 30% offered to shower you with money, or sex, or brandy & cigars? Exactly.
My new metric of choice is how well Me and Thomas’ Savile Row business is doing on Google. This week’s been a good one. So I’m in a good mood.
Now here’s the thing. Savile Row is famous for dressing heads of state, movie stars, captains of industry, the great and the good etc. Of course, we’re delighted to have their business. But unbeknownst to many, the lion’s share of the business comes from the United States (and that is true for all of the Row, not just our little company). We’re mostly talking highly paid professionals– investment bankers, corporate lawyers, that kind of thing. Very East Coast.
Where are the next generation of East Coast $4000 suit customers finding out about Savile Row? Fashion mags? Books? Hardly. They’re finding out via Google and Yahoo and MSN.
I can see why people diss MSN or Google or Yahoo. Big company power ticks people off. But what I mostly feel towards them is gratitude. Because what all these three companies have done for me this year is make me money, not to mention for millions of other people.
To these three companies, I say, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t change a thing. Keep sending me all those droves of high-paying customers, and I’ll be loving you forever.
Are the Americans flying over to get fitted or do they just send over the sizes?
I read gapingvoid mostly through RSS. Why not consider something like feedburner to track your subscriptions? It’s require re-subscribing, but… it might make your stats more useful.
Re: stats, schmats — Makes ya wonder why bother blogging at all. Sometimes I consider chucking the whole blogging thing and just putting up a conventional website and sticking to what I do best: Recruiting.
William, the Americans fly over to London. Also, we visit American cities [NY, SF, Chicago and Atlanta] four times a year.
I know one American chap– he’s not particulalry famous, but his compnay is– who orders 10 or 20 suits from Anderson & Sheppard, every time he pops over to London.
Marketing Headhunter, I would say if blogging works for you, then do it [it certainly works for me]. If not, try something else.
Howdy Hugh,
I’m confused: In your original post, you mention that you checked your stats daily. Did you mean your weblog stats? Because at first it seemed from your post that you and I have come to the same conclusion about blogs: What’s the point of blogging if most paying clients (whether these highly paid professionals pay in money, or sex, or brandy & cigars) find you through a search engine?
But your follow up post makes it sound like your blogging is actually good for your business — as I would have imagined.
What am I missing? Do you see your blog as being an integral part of your clothing business’ marketing? Or could you do just as well with a high ranking on search engines?
Just curious,
Harry
Harry, I don’t check my stats every day. Like I said, they’re fairly meaningless.
High Google rankings is no guarantee of anything, either.
I think it’s a mistake to try to tease out a cohesive thesis out of every few sentences Hugh strings together for a post — it’s a thought, not a treatise. Yet I see his commentors keep trying to reconcile the inconsistencies, etc., which is a good thing in a way because it underscores Hugh as an authority figure in the blog-based marketing game, but ends up being a bit vapid; my suspicion is that of the dozen mantras Hugh drops in a month, if one stops making sense to him, he won’t hesitate to diss the concept within a post a few weeks hence. Statements like “X matters more than Y” in a gapingvoid post are less guidelines to live by than concepts to chew on. At least that’s what I’ve observed.
Interesting, Firas. So what inconsistencies have you spotted recently?
Well, personally, I don’t pay enough attention to the marketing posts to find inconsistencies — I’m just referring to discussions like the one above: ‘you said this, but you’re doing that, could you clarify?’ Splitting hairs over search engine rank vs the existence of a blog is not as important as a concept to take away from your current trend in posts as the idea of ‘internal disruption’, ‘make things happen indirectly’, etc., is that not true?
Very true, Firas.
I’m not sure if I agree with Harry’s “Why bother blogging when all you need are high Google rankings” idea. As if you can seperate the two.
Dear Headhunter,
Blogs CREATE Google juice. Stale brochureware sites do not.
Search Trumps Stats
In a recent post on Gaping Void, Hugh MacLeod returns some of the love Google showers on his projects. Back when I was new to this whole internet thing, I would check my stats at least once a day. Now…
Noted with thanks. While normally I would agree completely with Hugh’s notion that blogging and high rankings are inseparable, I wonder if I’m the exception. Seems like I might be.
well ‚you all need something to go underneath that super suit, so why don’t you have a look at our website, al hand made and superb,
http://www.beautifulanddamned.co.uk
This favorite card of yours, Hugh — it’s the first real Blue Meanie I’ve ever seen!
Celebrate milestones (no matter how small)
Unlike Hugh, I still check my stats fairly regularly. I enjoy it. It’s marvelous that we can own words or ideas, even if it’s just for a flicker of time. Imagine owning the two-word phrase “sift experiment“. Remarkable.
So…