Perverts Make My Job Interesting

If you are a web analyst, and you have ever had to Google “zoo porn” as part of your job, you would understand why I loathe the idea of targeted advertising based on user searches. The terms I’ve searched as part of my job have gotten me on the net-nanny list of every employer I’ve had since working in this field. It’s the perverts: they really affect my data.

If Fark is to be believed, the Internet is all about porn anyway.

For the record, I don’t analyze porn sites for a living. While I admit I have done analysis for at least one adult-oriented site in the past, this is different. This is the effect of sexually-oriented search terms on websites that have little or nothing to do with sex, websites that I would happily show to my mother. But if you analyze a wide enough variety of sites, you will find that fetishes come in a surprising variety of shapes and sizes, and you’ll be surprised where they, um, pop up.

There are three ways that these “thrill-seekers” may affect your data.

1. By causing a one-time traffic spike. This is more likely to happen for a blog or a news site, when an article mentions something sexual in a fairly innocuous way. For example, this article contains plenty of keywords that may attract traffic that is not part of my target audience (and if you haven’t bounced by now, welcome to the world of web analytics!). This can happen on news or magazine sites that run features on a variety of subjects, and it can often catch the web analyst off guard. For example, consider the more-or-less legitimate — if somewhat sensational — news articles that were all the rage a couple months ago, talking about teens sending naked pictures of themselves to each other on cell phones. When you mention “teens” and “sex” and “naked pictures” in the same article, you’re bound to attract some of that kind of traffic.

This usually only becomes an issue when the traffic spike for a single article is large enough to influence aggregate numbers for the entire week or month. Any sudden spike (or dip) in traffic should always be investigated: it may have been due to a simple editorial choice instead of that awesome marketing campaign that your HiPPO designed.

2. By inflating search engine visits long-term. Perhaps “inflating” isn’t the best term, since the traffic is real, it’s human, and it’s coming from search engines. This situation happens when there are articles or images on your site that are intended for one audience but end up attracting another audience – the kind that’s not likely to become a customer – and it can wreak havoc with your conversion rates. A prime example is a site that publishes medical information intended for a professional medical audience. A thorough enough site will likely contain pictures of certain body parts or descriptions of rare medical procedures, and a glance through some of your top search terms can yield insights into the human psyche that you wish you didn’t know.

Always look past the “Top X” keyword report that is spit out of your web analytics package by default. Look for terms that seem over-represented on a site like yours. Pay careful attention to image searches, and ensure that you can separate image search keywords from text search keywords if necessary.

3. By logging visits that never really happened. This is fairly rare, and you will likely only catch it if a) your analytics are based on server logs instead of JavaScript tags, and b) your site contains one or more unprotected redirect URLs, “pages” that contain a URL as a value in the query string. The symptom is a sudden appearance in your keyword reports of sexually-oriented phrases that have absolutely nothing to do with your site. The cause is a search engine ranking hack, where a site-of-ill-repute manages to get themselves indexed by means of your redirect URLs, using your site’s good reputation to increase their rankings. You can confirm by looking at the entry pages for the offending terms to see if they are the redirect pages.

As with any traffic that is obviously unqualified, you very likely want to segment out the perverts from some of your conversion rate calculations, especially if you are doing optimization efforts on one or more areas of your site. Unqualified traffic volume can be more than enough to skew results and mask changes to real customer behavior. However, I don’t recommend you filter this traffic from your entire data set. If your linking, advertising, or SEO efforts are bringing in the wrong kind of traffic, this is something you really need to know.