I’ll tell you which company did the ESPN redesign in one minute, but bear with me for the time being… just scroll to the bottom if you can’t stand to wait.
One of the beauties of using Google Analytics is seeing what keywords people type into a search engine in order to find their way on to your site. I’m not talking about the practical use of such information (e.g.monitoring keywords to improve your SEO), I’m talking about the sheer amusement that comes from some of the keywords/phrases.
Here are my favorite keywords by which a visitor found his/her way to The Daily Anchor, in no particular order:
- “where is the ‘daily anchor’ newspaper published”
- Why is this funny? Because The Daily Anchor is a blog, not a newspaper. Frankly, when I saw this keyword combo I was downright flattered that someone thought highly enough of the site to consider it might be an established paper. Then again, given the decline of print publishing, maybe that was an insult. Then again, they probably searched for those words without having ever visited the site, and I’ll readily admit our name sounds like a newspaper. I’m rambling.
- “is the excuse ‘temporary contract’ a good one to use for being fired”
- I really have no idea how this string of words led a visitor to my site, but that isn’t important. What IS important is that I’m totally calling someone out for putting “temporary contract” on their resume, for a position from which they were fired. Hey you! I know your secret! (note: Google Analytics doesn’t provide any personally identifiable info – even IP addresses – so I really don’t know who you are, that’s just my witty editorial voice… but if you’re reading this, then HA!)
- “should i cold call wyeth now?”
- Hahahaha! It’s perfectly reasonably to research Wyeth or to research “cold calling,” but did this person actually expect an answer to their question? Were they hoping that the #1 result would be a headline that said “YES! Cold call Wyeth RIGHT NOW!” I mean, really? You’re asking Google if you should cold-call a specific company? It’s a search engine, not an advice column.
- “guy in sunglasses behind obama”
- I’m scratching my head as to how these keywords even led someone to The Daily Anchor. We’re a month old. I’ve published 4 posts on Obama and 1 post on RayBan Wayfarers (“guy catches sunglasses with face”, but never did I mention “Obama” and “sunglasses” in the same post. But nevermind that… someone actually Googled “guy in sunglasses behind Obama!” This is just as bad as the last one… did s/he REALLY think they’d find an article with the line “in case you were wondering, the guy in sunglasses behind Obama was…” Sigh. Anyway, I’ll put $20 down on “the guy in sunglasses behind obama” being a Secret Service Agent.
All in all, the first 2 are funny just because they’re funny, but the second 2 remind me that most everybody outside of the mediasphere or technobubble really has no idea how the Google algorithm works, but that’s for another post.
Back to the point
So anyway, back to ESPN… one keyword string that keeps popping up on my Google Analytics is “which company did the ESPN site redesign?” I’ve been getting 3-5 hits a day from people looking for the answer; not much, but enough to notice (I’m a little obsessed with my analytics, can you tell?) At first I didn’t think anything of it, but then I became curious, and then my curiosity triggered a realization that I had a friend who used to work at ESPN and I figured I could leverage that relationship to provide an answer to some curious visitors (thanks CB!) So I shot her a message and asked her to contact some ex co-workers to get the answer, and the just got back to me today.
So, without further ado, the answer to the oft-asked question, “which company did the ESPN site redesign?”
The answer is… ESPN! It was an in-house job, people. Or at least most of it was done in-house, according to CB. She said there were a few outside firms that had a small hand in it, and she’s working to find out who exactly, but the bottom line is that ESPN did their own redesign. Nice work, fellas. As soon as CB gives me the 411 on who the outside firms were I’ll post that right here: __________ and __________
P.S. I’ll admit that this is my most kaleidoscopic post to date, but considering the whole premise of the post was to tell you that the ESPN site redesign was done by ESPN, come on, I had to do something creative with this post. That, and I’ve been wanting to work those keywords into a post for the past couple of weeks and finally found a way to do so.
