Valitics. Web Strategies, Net Results

Listening to NPR the other day, I heard a story about a person who could not feel pain. The technical term for this condition is “congenital analgesia.” Basically, it’s a rare condition where a person cannot feel (and has never felt) physical pain. At first, it sounds like the thing that superheroes are made of. In reality though, the facts are pretty grim for people who are afflicted with this condition.

Congenital Analgesia

People who have congenital analgesia are very likely to injure themselves in ways that would normally be prevented by being able to feeling pain. Common injuries include biting off the tip of the tongue, multiple broken and fractured bones, extreme blood loss due to cuts and scrapes, severe burns, etc. People who have this condition rarely live past the age of 30 because of the physical toll a life without pain actually takes on the body.

Very interestingly, those with congenital analgesia can still feel touch, sensation, and normal body-to-body contact, which means that the brain can receive some information filtered through the nervous system; however, when it comes to extreme temperature changes, or any bodily damage that signals the body to react in an emergency fashion, the body simply doesn’t respond.

A tenuous analogy to the web?

I couldn’t help but analogize this condition to a condition I think many businesses out there appear to have in regards to their web presence and online marketing activities. I’ve coined this condition – not very creatively - “web analgesia.” My girlfriend scoffed at this analogy between serious bodily injury and the Internet (because I tend to analogize pretty much everything back to what we do at Valitics), but I think there is something to this. Bear with me…

Insensitivity to pain

Being insensitive to pain stimulus means that a person does not perceive pain in the first place. Patients cannot describe the intensity or type of pain; they are simply not aware of it. On the web, lots of businesses are not aware of the “pain” (even if it’s only an opportunity that they are missing) that they are experiencing.

An example of being insensitive to pain in regards to a business’s website could be not knowing how many searches for their business/products/services are being made on a monthly basis by potential customers. Just like a person with congenital analgesia would not be aware that have a five inch gash in their leg, a business with “web analgesia” would not be aware of the big opportunities that they are missing on the web.

Indifference to pain

Being indifferent to pain means that the person can perceive the pain stimulus, but lacks an appropriate response to it: they will not flinch or withdraw when exposed to pain. For website owners, this might be an even worse non-reaction to pain than being insensitive to it.

We meet with businesses all the time who are aware of “pain stimuli” from their web activities, but they don’t have what we would call an appropriate response to it.

For instance, we told a client of ours that we thought they had an opportunity to increase their monthly web revenue substantially (in the neighborhood of $10,000 per month, or more) by decreasing their online shopping cart abandonment rate. They recognized the high cart abandonment rate (i.e. the “pain stimuli”), but months later it has still not been addressed. Their hand is still “pressed against that stove burner,” so to speak.

A cure

Alas, there is no cure for congenital analgesia. Luckily, for businesses suffering from “”web analgesia” there are lots of things they can do to protect themselves. Activities like web analytics, periodic website reporting, and closely-monitored pay-per-click and SEO campaigns will be able to quickly identify and quantify “pain stimuli” that a website is experiencing. Once that business realizes and “feels” that pain stimuli, then these businesses will be able to quickly address the pain immediately and also protect against it in the future.