Reason #Hazy: It’s my birthday

Hey Facebook,

It’s December 17th today. If you weren’t keeping count, that makes me 30.  I’ve completed the 20s period of my life, which means it’s time for me to look back on what I’ve done over the past 10 years and determine if this decade was used to any kind of worthwhile effect.  To do this, I’m going to try to distill a 10 year span of life into a single paragraph or two or three. If I were then to compare that 10 years to a random person (for example, FDR), I’d have a reasonable idea where I stood in the world of having gotten things done.

When I was 20 I left the boundary of the United States for the first time on a night trip to Mexico (it was scary). When I was 21, I became really good friends with a Bosnian, traveled to Germany for two months, and drank alcohol for the first time (also went to Mexico again). When I was 22, I graduated college, moved to a new state for the first time, and started psychology graduate school. When I was 23, I went to NYC and watched the ball drop on New Years Eve, finished the grueling work of coding for my thesis, took a trip to Canada for the first and only time, started writing a novel, and sold vacuums for a while (also, I watched Friends all the way through).  When I was 24, I successfully defended my thesis, earned a Masters degree of Science, dealt with the self-doubt of watching an advisor leave for greener pastures, visited Los Angeles, and moved back to Wichita for the first time in 6 or 7 years.

When I was 25, I started law school at KU, moved to Kansas City, and finished my novel (never published it, though). When I was 26, I was a clerk for the Shawnee County district court, was rejected by more companies than I’ve ever been rejected by in my entire life, and watched two of my best friends from Montana get married in Ohio. When I was 27 I got my first (and last) paid job in the field of law, working as a clerk for Parker and Hay law firm, and I got lasik eye surgery.  When I was 28, I graduated from law school and realized, to my great surprise, that I hated the conflict, the stress, the pressure, and the generally aggressive nature of the legal profession; I was nominated and accepted into the gloried Team XBMC Media Center group; and I also was unemployed for the longest period of my life and suddenly got a career in social media and internet development.

When I was 29, I learned (under the mentor-ship of yet another great friend from Montana) how to code a website, and I learned through example, trial and error, and dumb luck how to design those same websites. I started a company called The Felix Fix that earns a de minimus income at best. I’ve come up with or helped to come up with the ideas for various companies and games that have not YET come into fruition. And, of course, I started the blog “Hey Facebook, why not give Nathan Betzen a Job?”  I also bought my first car using my own money.

And now, today, I turn 30.  As I look back, I can honestly say, I would never have guessed this path would be mine back at the tender age of 20.  Has it been an amazing 10 years? No. Have I met all my goals or expectations? Once again, no.

But it hasn’t been terrible either.  I think, if I were to write a book on these years, that book would be entitled Holding Pattern.  I haven’t gotten married. I haven’t had kids. I haven’t really done much to distinguish myself in the realms of accomplishment, save writing a little-seen thesis (that I’m still convinced is important), writing an unpublished book (that I’ve never really gotten around to fixing), and spending a year accomplishing only 50% of what I think needs to be accomplished at my job (leaving the MOST IMPORTANT thing totally unaccomplished… namely, convincing salesmen that THEY are the ones who need to establish personal relationships with our facebook fans). But I also haven’t taken any kind of major steps backwards. I’m not an alcoholic. I haven’t lost an arm for any major reason. Also, even though I’m still medically obese, I can run 5ks again, so that’s cool.

Still, if these past 10 years have been the book Holding Action, I’ll be very disappointed if these next 10 years aren’t entitled The Steady and Climactic Rise.

I don’t really know what that entails yet. I am totally certain it means that if I am still employed in the exact same job I’m employed in now, I’ll be pretty disappointed.  If it means I’m not employed with Facebook or Google or a similar mover and shaker in the world, I won’t be crushed.  There are a thousand and one ways to place one’s stamp upon the world. If the major companies of Facebook and Google are too narrow minded and stupid to see how I could benefit them, then I feel sorry for them, but I’m not planning on feeling sorry for myself.

What I am planning on doing is continuing in my path towards being proactive. If I want a job and I get automatically  rejected, I’m not just going to lay down and die. I’m going to create an entire (and ridiculous) blog to try to get back what should have been mine.  If I have a vision for a story that needs telling, I’m not going to just talk about how neat it would be if I could get paid to tell the story. I’m going to TELL the freaking thing, come hell or high water.

I’m done – in fact, I’ve been done for a while now – with sitting on the sideline and hoping somebody puts me in the game.  Through the miracle of communication, the internet, and a flatter world, I am now my own dungeon master.

And my game has begun. The die is cast. Time to see whether it rolls a 20.

Google Analytics – Benchmarking is Awesome and so am I

In the world of highly competitive lead acquisition, a car seller has to do a lot of things he’s not proud of to get ahead.  For example, once I leapt into the back seat of a GMC Yukon while pretending to shoot at imaginary aliens.

Actually, that was pretty awesome.  I’ll try to come up with a better example.  In the mean time…

In addition to all the not proud moments, a useful feature that every webmaster (or whatever you want to call yourself) should take advantage of is Google Analytics.  Do you want to know if your vomit listing page contains TOO many pictures of vomit and makes people leave the site?  There’s a stat for that.  Do you want to know if your landing site is more ugly than the mind of even the filthiest British actor and, as such, makes people leave in droves?  There’s a stat for that.

But perhaps one of the most useful features of Google Analytics isn’t a stat at all.  Instead, it is a broad collection and comparison of statistics. It’s the 4th dimension of stats!  Oooh!

Above all, in this dog eat mastadon world of internet sales, it is crucial to know how your site performs against sites that are like yours.  While as a web guy for a car dealership, I can’t directly compare the performance of my site against the performance of the sites of my competitors (without their help and permission[which I'm unlikely to receive {because they are jerks}]), I can compare my site with sites that receive approximately equal numbers of visitors per day.  This comparison, under Google Analytics, is called “Benchmarking.”

This is a simple chart that compares how LubbersCars has performed against sites that receive similar numbers of visitors on any given day.  And it is a chart that has given me a great deal of peace of mind since I discovered it.

As you should be able to see, Lubbers receives very roughly twice the number of visits from users as similar sites do.  During those visits, each visitor goes through roughly twice the number of pages as similar sites.  Naturally this results in a visit that is roughly double the average length of time.

Thus, when you more than double the number of visits, and more than double that number with pages viewed, you have a site that results in approximately five times as many page views as an average comparable site.  Also, if you don’t trust my math, you can go punch yourself straight in the face.

The crazy thing about these numbers is that they occured AFTER the downturn I complained about last week.  LubbersCars is getting approximately five times as many hits as websites with similar numbers of users, and it is doing so during a down time.

It’s important to hold yourself up to higher standards, but it’s also nice to get a good shot of perspective on occasion!  How much better than other websites is my website? 5 TIMES BETTER!

Two other items of note.  First, that chart seems to suggest that most sites of our size experience a 50% bounce rate.  If you remember, bounce rate means the percentage of people who see your front page and then leave.  How terrible is that?!  Our current bounce rate is about 23%, but even before I started working at Lubbers the bounce rate was never much more than 30% (that number is based marginally on guess work).  I mean, a 50% bounce rate means that half the people who take one look at your site immediately leave! How horrifying and/or boring do you have to be, as a midsize website, for people to bounce out like that?  Do these sites intentionally stock their pages full of slowly spinning guitars and blue on blue colors?

Second, the updated Used Car listing page looks to have been the likely cause of the decrease. Since experimentally switching back to the old listing method, our pages views have returned to close to their old level.  Meanwhile, the exit rate of the old listing page has held steady at about 13% to 14% in its more prominent capacity, while the new listing page, even when less trafficked, remains 21% to 23%.

I really don’t understand why that newer listing page is being reacted to so negatively by users, but I’m certainly not one to argue with them. If they don’t like the page, they don’t have to use it.  Perhaps it’s another example of how adding just one more click to a page can drastically alter how people respond to the page.  I may start calling it the “click, click, pause, wtf! Are you kidding me?! I’ve already clicked too many times! I’m getting the hell out of here” effect.

Something similar was going on in the early months of my hire, when Lubbers was using a website landpage that required you to click a link, and then click ANOTHER link, before you could get to the car listings.  Upon eliminating that initial click, page views and leads immediately doubled.

Of course, they doubled from not very much to only slightly more, but it was the first step in a journey that’s lasted nearly a year now.

So, facebook folk, here’s reason number #237 to hire me. I don’t really know how people think or work, but I’m not terrible at making guesses about it. (Hint: my guesses always presume that people hate doing more work.)