Learn Web Site Analytics From Capt. Kirk And The Enterprise
What can <a href="http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TOS/character/1112496.html">Capt. Kirk</a> and the original <em>Star Trek </em> TV series teach us about <a href="http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml?term=Web+analytics">Web analytics</a>? Quite a bit, actually.
What can Capt. Kirk and the original Star Trek TV series teach us about Web analytics? Quite a bit, actually.Matt Bailey at The Inside Track uses Capt. Kirk and the deaths of the unnamed ensigns to demonstrate how to analyze Web sites. Here is the setup:
The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (startrek.com) in its five-year mission. (Now, I know that the show was only on the air for 3 years, but bear with me. 80 episodes were produced, which gives us the data to build from.) 59 crewmembers were killed during the mission, which comes out to 13.7% of the crew. So, that will be our overall conversion rate, 13.7%.
Then he segments the deaths of the crew members:
However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:
Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%) Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %) Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4 Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%) So, the basic segmentation of factors allows us to confirm that red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.
And it gets better. Here are the data trends:
Probability of a red-shirt casualty= 53% 14% of fights ended in a fatality (with a 72% chance the fatality wore a red shirt) Probability of a red-shirt "incident" when Kirk has a "conquest" = 12%
The red-shirt survival rate is slightly higher when Kirk meets women than when a fight breaks out. This trend necessitates the question: How often did Captain Kirk "meet" women? In 30% of the missions.
As the data shows, Captain Kirk "making contact" with alien women has an impact on the crew's survival. The red-shirt death rate is higher when a fight breaks out than when Kirk meets a woman and a fight breaks out. Yet the analysis shows that meeting Kirk meeting women only happens in 30% of the missions.
I will never be able to look at a site traffic report -- or an episode of classic Star Trek -- the same way again.
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