Link archive: December 4th, 2021

Jacques Corby-Tuech - Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data

We’ve got click rates, impressions, conversion rates, open rates, ROAS, pageviews, bounces rates, ROI, CPM, CPC, impression share, average position, sessions, channels, landing pages, KPI after never ending KPI.

That’d be fine if all this shit meant something and we knew how to interpret it. But it doesn’t and we don’t.

The reality is much simpler, and therefore much more complex. Most of us don’t understand how data is collected, how these mechanisms work and most importantly where and how they don’t work.

Making Colophon Cards – Baldur Bjarnason

I think Baldur is onto something here with his categorisation of software. There’s the software based on innovation, something truly novel:

Innovation’s the word. Pushing the boundaries. You know the phrases. Usually spouted by that dude at the party.

Then there’s the software based on itertion, making a better version of a proven tool:

We are now in a place where we have entire genres of software that have decades of history, are backed by stacks of new and old research, have dozens of successful, well-made exemplar apps, and a broad enough conceptual space to allow for new variations on the theme.

In short, we have genre software and we have avant-garde software, and I’ve always been more interested in genre fiction than literary fiction.

Ain’t No Party Like a Third Party - CSS-Tricks

Chris is doing another end-of-year roundup. This time the prompt is “What is one thing people can do to make their website bettter?”

This is my response.

I’d like to tell you something not to do to make your website better. Don’t add any third-party scripts to your site.