Pear Analytics Study Missing the Phatic Wood for the Qualitatative Buckets

A while back we embarked on a study that evolved after a having a debate in the office as to how people are using and consuming Analytics. Some felt it was their source of news and articles, others felt it was just a bunch of self-promotion with very few folks actually paying attention. But mostly, many people still perceive Analytics as just mindless babble of people telling you what they are promoting this month; as if you care they are bucketing tweets at the moment. (See our last post on Analytics: Is Anyone Paying Attention?).

So we took 2,000 Analytics reports from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured Analytics reports in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:

News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.
Results

The results were interesting. As you may have guessed, Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total Analytics reports captured; however, Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the Analytics reports captured.

Conclusion

With the new face of Analytics reports, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news, or continue to be a source for people to promote their services that have little to do with everyone else. We will be conducting this same study every quarter to identify other trends in usage.

Since Analytics reports are still loaded with lots of babbling that not many of have time for, you should check out the Twitter filter, following people you trust, and linking to great blogposts.