My Website’s Signal to Noise Ratio

In  audio, there is the concept of the “signal to noise” ratio.  This is the ratio of a signal (what you want – such as the music) to the noise (what you don’t want – such as the background noise).  Higher ratios are better.

Over the past few months, we have been doing some interesting analysis and experiments on our website. 

Our core finding?  We had a low signal to noise ratio.  Although we have lots of “content” (signal), visitors have a difficult time finding the gems.

Here’s what we did. 

We installed Google Analytics.  We quickly discovered that we had an 82% abandonment rate.  That is, of the 20,000+ visitors each month, only 18% stayed for any length of time.  We hypothesized that there could be two main reasons for this: 1) we had the wrong visitors (so they left), or 2) our visitors were confused and did not know what to do.  Assuming the latter to be true, my web guru (Ariel Coro) tried some experiments.  When he removed half of the options on the home page (fewer menu items, less content, and reduced clickable images) we reduced the abandonment rate to 58% in a matter of days.  42% of the people now interact with the site.  This mean I have tripled the number of active participants…by giving them fewer options.

We also looked at blog statistics.  There we noticed that quantity beat out quality.  My blog strategy has been to write almost daily.  As a result, people had difficulty finding the best blog entries because they were lost in a sea of “filler.” Our solution?  We will replace our blog with monthly “briefs.”  These briefs will be longer, meatier, value-oriented pdf files with high quality content. 

We will be launching a new website within the next few weeks.  The improved site will be simpler and streamlined with fewer options and more content.  We will provide a larger article repository.  We will enable interactivity.  We will give you more of what you want…and less of what you don’t.  Our goal: a high signal to noise ratio. 

Simplicity is the best innovation.

Stay tuned for the launch.

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Quoted in Forbes

I was quoted in today’s online edition of Forbes.

Read the article, How to Unlock Your Company’s Creativity

Also be sure to click on “In Pictures: Six Tips For Fostering Innovation At Your Company”

I am quoted in Tip #4 and Tip #6

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Instant Replay Computer Crashes

When my computer is not working, life is miserable.  Unfortunately, over the past few months, my computer has crashed nearly every day.  To make matters worse, the expert technicians could not recreate my problems, so they could not fix the underlying issue.

What if your computer had a TiVo-like device that recorded all of your activities and allowed you to replay them later? 

According to an interesting New York Times article, a new product called ReplayDirector does exactly that.  It allows you to replay the events leading to a computer crash, enabling technicians to recreate the problem.  The idea was devised when the inventor Jonathan Lindo asked the question, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just TiVo this and replay it?”

Once again, this is a great example of analogy-driven innovation - taking an idea from one industry and applying it to another.

It’s a good article, so be sure to read it.

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