MeaningfulNoise.com

Noise is everywhere… some good, some bad.
The bothersome noise can numb the senses or worse, distracts you from your primary goals.

But some noise is good: the sudden roar of the crowd when your team scores, a crash downstairs in the middle of the night, or your child’s sharp cry among a group of kids on the playground. While not all of these sounds are necessarily “good,” they do act to focus your attention to things that at least momentarily demand it.

In the context of web analytics, meaningful noise consists of business intelligence and other data points that both spur action and hold up to statistical scrutiny. Is that increase in registrations we saw on Monday because we changed the submit button to blue or because of purely random chance? Is the download rate of a white paper truly dropping or are visitors just watching more videos on the weekend and downloading more papers during the week? Does your CIO really need to know how many “hits” (cringe) his blog is getting every hour, or would the time be better spent educating him about his audience?

These are the kinds of issues we plan to cover in Meaningful Noise. We will focus our time on addressing real world questions, with practical advice and explicit instructions on how to find an answer. In our posts, you can expect us to cover:

• What is the problem?
• Why should I care?
• How was it discovered?
• What actions were taken (and how)?
• What did we learn?

We’re human. Not all of the actions we take based on the data we have at hand will be right. When this happens, we will evaluate the reasons why and encourage our readers to offer their own critical assessments.

At the end of the day, the goal of this blog is to help site owners and web analytics professionals to cut through the clatter, and focus on the meaningful “noise” that will lead to statistically sound business decisions.