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Repeated Searches as Social Bookmark Application
May 1, 2006
Trying to understand user behavior on the Web is a little like trying to track an electron using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. You can measure with reasonable certainty a user's state of mind - or his/her location on your site - but never both simultaneously.
I've become quite a fan of Google Analytics since it launched last fall, and several clients have come to us with GA already installed but not quite knowing how to maximize it. And frankly, I think truly maximizing it is a challenge for analytics veterans.
I've become particularly interested in tracking conversion data overlaid with other data, such as referring source, number of page views in the converting visit, and whether the visitor was new to the site or a returning visitor. Lately, I've been especially interested in why such a large percent of returning visitors still arrive by search engine. Typically, once I've found a site that I know I'll return to, I mark it somehow - whether through my own Firefox bookmarks, a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us, or, if it's truly the creme de la creme, its own button on my Bookmarks toolbar.
But if statistics (and my siblings) taught me anything, it's that I'm "not like the other kids." In a recent conference call, I was trying to give a client the URL of my favorite header checker tool, when Tom told the client, "just do what I do - search for [rex swain tool]." And the client immediately got it.
I've written before about being mystified by people who search for distinct URLs at a search engine. Right below that, on the growing list of things that mystify me, I've officially logged another entry: people who find sites again and again by performing the same search at the same engine.
This implies some real faith on their part - that each time they search for something, the result they remember is going to come up on top. And in an industry for which constant change is a requirement, I'm shocked at the permanence people expect from engines. Next on my list of things to find out: whether people expectation of permanence is the same for branded and unbranded queries.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at May 1, 2006 11:47 PM
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Comments
I too have been amazed at watching how some people search for information. I've seen everything from guessing URLs, the most comical in my memory is my wife who wanted to go to Dick's Sporting Goods and typed in what seemed logical: www.dicks.com.
I believe AOL is set up in such a way that the URL box in the browser is also used for entering AOL keywords and sometimes that carries forward with people doing the same in Firefox or IE....they don't know any better.
Are our current university students taking Search 101: How To Search?
Posted by: Doug at May 4, 2006 10:20 AM
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