Don’t forget your toothbrush: apparently, this gets lots of “hits”
Writing this as I escape London for a couple of days holiday and head off to climb Mount Snowdon in Wales, it brings to mind some intriguing comments made regarding holiday advice on The Foreign Office website.
A couple of weeks back, The Times highlighted a section on the The Foreign Office website entitled “The Wags’s Guide to travel”, a list of handy travel hints ostensibly for young women written by the girlfriend of a Premier League footballer. ( “Wag” being the name coined by the tabloid press as a collective term for wives and girlfriends of high profile male sportsmen and has come to be associated with ostentatiously flashy patterns of consumption)
Whilst it goes way beyond the remit of this blog to dive into the controversy surrounding use of taxpayers’ money on what some have argued to be a populist attention grabbing ruse , (: I’ll leave that to the likes of Guido Fawkes et al ) or even to speculate what Holly Buchanen and others might make of this kind of ‘personalisation’, what is particularly interesting are the comments made by an unnamed FCO spokesman in terms of measuring the success of the campaign:
According to the Times article
“The FCO said that the guide was tongue-in-cheek with a serious message. A spokesman said: “These pages are the most-used part of the website, getting hundreds of hits.” ”
On one hand, it is really encouraging to see that proactive efforts are being made to track and measure and to see how doing this can go some way towards providing quantitative evidence to demonstrate a point/back-up an argument (*or in this case, a rebuttal of charges of ‘dumbing down’)
However, on the other hand though, I can help but find it slightly frustrating that whilst resources have clearly been spent out on paid-for web analytics tracking software, someone somewhere still doesn’t know enough or understand enough about the basic concepts involved..ie, realise that ‘hits’ is not really the most reliable term to use at all.
Ok; this might all just be a case of semantics, things getting lost in translation or just plain mis-reporting, but in some small sense I can’t help but this goes to restate the 10/90 rule for magnificent web analytics success.
Or as 80s Brit band Bananarama put it so succinctly: “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it” - ie, having a paid for solution in place is great, but if you don’t ‘get’ the terminology used……then is it worth it?
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