Jacques Corby-Tuech - Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data

We’ve got click rates, impressions, conversion rates, open rates, ROAS, pageviews, bounces rates, ROI, CPM, CPC, impression share, average position, sessions, channels, landing pages, KPI after never ending KPI.

That’d be fine if all this shit meant something and we knew how to interpret it. But it doesn’t and we don’t.

The reality is much simpler, and therefore much more complex. Most of us don’t understand how data is collected, how these mechanisms work and most importantly where and how they don’t work.

Podcast Notes: “Measuring Design” by Clearleft - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Well, this is just wonderful! Jim has written copious notes after listening to my favourite episode of season three of the Clearleft podcast, measuring design:

I’m going to have to try really, really hard to not just copy/paste the entire transcript of this podcast. It‘s that good. Don’t miss it.

The impoverished language of business | Clearleft

A good post by Andy on “the language of business,” which is most cases turns out to be numbers, numbers, numbers.

While it seems reasonable and fair to expect a modicum of self-awareness of why you’re employed and what business value you drive in the the context of the work you do, sometimes the incessant self-flagellation required to justify and explain this to those who hired you may be a clue to a much deeper and more troubling question at the heart of the organisation you work for.

This pairs nicely with the Clearleft podcast episode on measuring design.

Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

Cloudfare’s alternative to Google Analytics is now available—for free—regardless of whether your a Cloudflare customer or not:

Being privacy-first means we don’t track individual users for the purposes of serving analytics. We don’t use any client-side state (like cookies or localStorage) for analytics purposes. Cloudflare also doesn’t track users over time via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other immutable attributes for the purposes of displaying analytics — we consider “fingerprinting” even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out.

Measuring the Hard-to-Measure – CSS Wizardry

Everything old is new again—sometimes the age-old technique of using a 1x1 pixel image to log requests is still the only way to get certain metrics.

While tracking pixels are far from a new idea, there are creative ways in which we can use them to collect data useful to developers. Once the data is gathered, we can begin to make much more informed decisions about how we work.