The Weird Visitors

Why aren’t my visitors clicking on this link? Why aren’t they following these steps in my conversion funnel? Why is this landing page failing to engender the numbers of leads I expected?

We’ve all posed these questions to ourselves thousands of times. How could the process or architecture of our website fail when it’s designed so rationally? The first explanation that springs to mind is that we as site operators are out of touch—that our grand schemes don’t resonate with our visitors and as a result, our pages founder.

Being out of touch with visitors is a theme of many dissertations emanating from influential voices in our space. At the heart of this argument is the following thesis: the visitors know what they want, and matching content, flow, and functionality to their desires is the road to optimum site performance.

But what if visitors don’t know what they want; what if visitors are profoundly irrational? Take any web analytics application and look for the irregularities. Look for the weird visitor paths: visitors reloading pages over and over, visitors pursuing bizarre and circuitous routes to certain events, visitors spending inordinate amounts of time on trivial pages.

In a NY Times piece, columnist David Brooks explores the current financial crisis and the failure of the rational self-interest model of economic decisionality. He quotes Lebanese-American scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who espouses a belief in the “existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act, [requiring] an acknowledgment of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action.”

There’s a parallel here for our industry. Almost all of web analytics is predicated on the notion that the visitor is a sensible, self-knowing actor who pursues paths consistent with the dictates of reason and self-interest. But if the obverse holds true and visitors are actually psychologically inconsistent—putatively rational actors bound by the sway of biases and emotions and heavily affected by the long arm of perceptual conditioning—then we as web analytics practitioners have quite a curve-ball heading straight for us.

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