Giorgios, Bluefin Tuna Fisherman and Digital Analytics Teacher

I have worked for over 15 years in Digital Analytics, but my background is more technical. I was a web developer, but the concept of a technical web analyst or digital analyst who can do data analysis and code remains alive and well. As part of my role, I check a dashboard every morning to check key performance indicators to see whether I need to analyse a tracking issue that might have started in the past 24 hours. To make sense of a few counter-intuitive trends, I imagine the story of Giorgios, a Greek fisherman pulling up his nets.

Giorgios specialises in catching the most expensive fish in the world: bluefin tuna. Every day, he and his crew catch some, but in weight, they see a lot more scorpionfish. Scorpionfish, as the name suggests, is venomous. No adventurous cook managed to find a way to turn it into some delicacy that was safe to eat. It is unsaleable, but the bluefin tuna makes up for it.

Giorgios has a crew and a few trawlers. Every ship has a crew, all fishing simultaneously but in separate fishing areas. His boats are of varying sizes, impacting how much fish they can catch. Over time, each ship used and experimented with different kinds of nets. These nets won't last forever, and Giorgios' boats must replace them over time. Some fish stay in the nets until the crew members pull up the nets, while the rest escape.

Some days, the nets are heavier than usual. You might expect that there are more bluefin tuna and more scorpionfish. However, the ratio of bluefin tuna to total weight fluctuates over time. The share of tuna weight may be the same or lower than usual, but Giorgios' crew members caught a lot more scorpionfish. Giorgios would also tell you that a lighter haul might surprise you with much fewer scorpionfish than expected. The weight of your net, full of fish, does not always equate with earning more money.

What lies in Giorgios' locus of control are:

• what kind of fish do they want to sell
• whether he and his crew members will go fishing today
• what kind of nets they will use
• how they will assign which boat will fish in which fishing zone

What does not are:

• weather, economy
• price of boats, diesel, maintenance, nets
• price of bluefin tuna at the fish market
• competition from other fishing families

For a stakeholder or client trying to understand Digital Analytics better, the simple story above can help. The Mediterranean Sea is a metaphor for the internet. Every fish caught in a fisherman's net represents someone visiting your website.

A bluefin tuna will earn Giorgios money, as will a visitor purchasing on your website.?Not every website sells goods and services; some?just?want people to read blog posts or sign up for newsletters, but the idea remains the same:?conversions.?The closest equivalent of the conversion rate for Giorgios is the weight of all the bluefin tuna he caught this morning vs. the net's total weight as they pulled it from the sea.

Giorgios' nets contained many scorpionfish, which he couldn't sell. His crew members threw them back into the sea.?On your website, you'll have plenty of people who?do not?convert.?They make no sale or do not do what you built your website for. Some of the fish in the net managed to sneak out and escape.?They were?probably?too small for the net.?Some people will start visiting your website and leave immediately without interacting. We call this a?bounce, and the bounce rate measures the ratio of how many bounces you saw vs the total number of visits.

Do you remember how Giorgios has several trawlers operating in different fishing zones? All that fish ends up in refrigerated trucks going to the fish market. Your website will attract traffic from various?marketing channels, such as natural search, paid search, email, direct traffic, and social media. Some fishing zones are better, so Giorgos sends his?bigger?trawlers first. As a marketer, you would want to spend more on marketing channels with a historically better conversion rate.

Natural search is traffic from free links on search engines. Search engine optimisation is about pushing links to your website as high as possible on the results pages. Paid search lets you bid on search terms so you maximise how often a link to your website will appear to your website in prime areas of the search engine pages.

Email does what it says on the tin: You send emails to support marketing campaigns, and they contain a call to action link to your website. Direct traffic will depend on your brand's popularity; if you are a household name, people will type your website address into their browser or pull it from a bookmark. Social media is about posts on popular websites that contain a link to your website.

The nets that Giorgios uses are similar to?online?marketing campaigns. Some will be more effective and last longer than others. Some may be good at catching much fish, but Giorgios might find that it's only getting more scorpionfish than bluefin tuna, so that net is not ideal for him. Marketing campaigns may have an enticing hook, but once the visitor clicks the link, they don't convert. So, conversion rate optimisation is about getting better visitors for the best price. Giorgios would love to find nets that magically attract bluefin tuna and repel scorpionfish.

However, remember that things remain outside your control. Your competition's website may have technical difficulties, and their potential customers cannot buy from them, so they buy from your website. You just got lucky. However, your competition will also have marketing campaigns that may lure away some potential clients from you. You are also operating in an economy where inflation may be high, and people have less disposable income.

In any case, you can compare your website visits with fish, your entire digital analytics data and all the data you collect. CDO and my former CDO Summer School teacher Peter Jackson said it best: data is like fish at a restaurant; use it while it's fresh, or it will spoil everything inside your fridge. As Steen Rasmussen would say, collect data sparsely and use it quickly as data loses value over time. "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

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