Olympic Medals Per Million & Web Analytics
September 2, 2008 3:41 PM | Written by Yan Shikhvarger
One of my favorite websites, WorldChanging.org recently questioned the nature of the omnipresent Olympic "medal count." The argument is definitely valid. It makes sense for larger and populous countries to be at the top since they have a larger pool of athletes. How can smaller countries compete? If introducing more equitable metrics into this picture such as "Olympic medals per million people" an interesting picture emerged. In this case, the new top-3 are Bahamas, Jamaica, and Iceland. So Bahamas for example got 6.5 medals for every million citizens while the U.S. got 1 medal for every 3 million citizens.
Anyway, this got me thinking about web analytics and traffic expectations. Everyone wants to know what success looks like. This is kind of reminiscent of "how many medals should we expect" or "how many medals per million people to expect." In that case the questions would be how competitive are our athletes and programs? What has the recent performance been like? In the case of a web program the questions would be: what is the target user universe? How compelling is the content/web offering? What is the launch plan? Marketing plan? Viral features? There are a lot of factors here and many of them are difficult to predict.
One key factor here is trying to research and assess performance of similar web properties or web initiatives. The good news is this type of research has gotten a lot easier to conduct with recent Google products: Google AdPlanner and the trending feature (Visitors > Benchmarking) of Google Web Analytics. Both have very robust data sets (Google's data mining of web activity probably plays a large role here). These tools have made competitive research much easier and it is a key factor of figuring out success benchmarks. If there were only similar tools to predict Olympic medal success by country which take demographics into account...
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