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Normal is just a setting on the dryer

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

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We’re in session 3 of Digital Marketing at General Assembly, and the word “normal” has popped up in our discussions of analytics and measurement.  What is normal?

Some would say “normal is just a setting on the dryer”, but we’re not talking about “life” normal, but marketing analytics normal.  In the DGM world, “normal” is what we would define as our baseline or what we generally expect.  For example, for this blog, I can expect on a day to day basis to get a certain number of users. That’s normal. I can also expect to get a certain percentage of that traffic from the normal sources, as exhibited below in the pizza chart from Google Analytics.

Yes, I said “pizza chart” because my son said he thinks it looks more like a pizza than a pie, so he wants to call it a pizza chart. Pizza chart it is.  The chart above covers all of January, which is when I reverted back to Blogger from WordPress for this blog. So, this is my new normal, until the trend changes.
Why do we care about normal?  Here are a few reasons.
  • Normal is my baseline. It’s what you can expect if nothing else changes.
  • Knowing normal, now I can manage traffic sources by exception, meaning that, whenever I see a spike or dip in any of the above percentages, I know to check it out.
  • Anything outside of normal is either good or bad. A spike can mean a popular post or a new social medial influencer shared a post. A dip might mean a domain, DNS, or bad link shared.

Just like when you start monitoring any aspect of your health – weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. – you first establish a baseline. Then you manage by the changes to that baseline, either good or bad.
So, while normal is a setting on the dryer, it’s a very important setting in the health and growth of your web property.  Find your normal, and measure against it.

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