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Was just browsing it and since it had so much juice, I thought HN might be interested :) By the way, people, do check out other pages in the sidebar. The link

Was just browsing it and since it had so much juice, I thought HN might be interested :) By the way, people, do check out other pages in the sidebar. The link showing expenses is especially interesting. @patio11: don't you have conversion stats on this page? I see it has free sign ups and total revenue, month-wise. But having month-wise conversion stats (across the funnel) will be interesting.

patio11 16y ago
Consolidated conversion rate is a poor metric because it doesn't help me make decisions. If it goes up, is that because of something I did on-page, or is that because of something that one of my competitors did, or is that because of market seasonality, or is it because of a change in the Google algorithms which sent a different mix of people to me? I don't know, so looking at it tells me nothing. See also: consolidated bounce rate. The only place I look at conversion rates these days is in the context of either two comparable traffic sources (like two AdWords creatives) or across an A/B test.
- paraschopra 16y ago
  Well, I think if your conversion rate is going down or up, something has changed and you must investigate what has changed. Agreed that conversion rate, by itself, doesn't yield much information but compared to past or across segments, it can yield a lot of insights.
  - patio11 16y ago
    Well, I think if your conversion rate is going down or up, something has changed and you must investigate what has changed. I disagree, strongly. 1) It is highly likely your conversion rate will bounce around without regard to what you're doing. http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/conversion-rates-for-paras.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/conversio... Just eyeballing that, can you pick the most critical time for me to have checked conversion rates in the last year? (It might -- and I stress might -- have saved me $3.5k.) 2) I think humans are exceptionally good at retrofitting explanations to data, even when the explanation and the data are unrelated. 3) Rather than continually reacting to minor changes in the conversion rate, deceiving myself as to their cause, and then implementing something that probably doesn't matter, I'd rather schedule this sort of work as part of a process: write A/B test, check conversions (with all extraneous sources of noise filtered out), implement winning alternative as appropriate, get back to work.

patio11 16y ago

Consolidated conversion rate is a poor metric because it doesn't help me make decisions. If it goes up, is that because of something I did on-page, or is that because of something that one of my competitors did, or is that because of market seasonality, or is it because of a change in the Google algorithms which sent a different mix of people to me? I don't know, so looking at it tells me nothing. See also: consolidated bounce rate. The only place I look at conversion rates these days is in the context of either two comparable traffic sources (like two AdWords creatives) or across an A/B test.

paraschopra 16y ago
Well, I think if your conversion rate is going down or up, something has changed and you must investigate what has changed. Agreed that conversion rate, by itself, doesn't yield much information but compared to past or across segments, it can yield a lot of insights.
- patio11 16y ago
  Well, I think if your conversion rate is going down or up, something has changed and you must investigate what has changed. I disagree, strongly. 1) It is highly likely your conversion rate will bounce around without regard to what you're doing. http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/conversion-rates-for-paras.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/conversio... Just eyeballing that, can you pick the most critical time for me to have checked conversion rates in the last year? (It might -- and I stress might -- have saved me $3.5k.) 2) I think humans are exceptionally good at retrofitting explanations to data, even when the explanation and the data are unrelated. 3) Rather than continually reacting to minor changes in the conversion rate, deceiving myself as to their cause, and then implementing something that probably doesn't matter, I'd rather schedule this sort of work as part of a process: write A/B test, check conversions (with all extraneous sources of noise filtered out), implement winning alternative as appropriate, get back to work.