Back to Main

Web Analytics

May 5, 2008

Web Analytics Board Elections

The Web Analytics Association (WAA) elected its 2008/2009 board of directors. Those with board positions are listed here. Last year there was an effort to enact a changeover of directors, and it looks like it happened again without much of a push. About half of the board is new, and several of the incumbents are sophomore directors. The new and fresh members in power is a good thing as it means new and fresh ideas for the WAA.

Posted by Enid Burns at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 18, 2008

Multivariate Testing for Agencies

Does your agency do multivariate testing? A few weeks ago when I sat down with Jonathan Mendez to discuss his new company Ramp Digital he said most of the companies doing multivariate testing had been acquired, and "Traditional agencies don't really have that knowledge in house to deliver that to clients."

Over lunch last week with Widemile's CEO and president Robert Bergquist, he laughed and wouldn't decline to agree with his friend Mendez's statement regarding the shortage of multivariate-capable companies. He welcomed the advantage Widemile has as it prepared to announce an agency solution at Search Engine Strategies this week.

After two and a half years with the Partner Zero product working with clients like Microsoft, The Weather Channel, Miva, Telenav, and other companies, the company is setting its sights and services on the agency. Entering beta is an on demand service that agencies will use to test all matter of creative from Web sites, landing pages, microsites, banner ads, text, images, and any other aspects of the Web you can design an A and a B or a C group for. Widemile also provides training to agencies to get account reps up to speed. The interface is accessed through a dashboard, and integrates with existing analytics services. Agency clients get a limited view based on what the agency sets up.

Bergquist isn't concerned Widemile's Partner Zero clients will turn their services over to their agencies, in fact, in many cases Widemile is helping its clients do just that. The Enterprise market is already overloaded with analytics, keyword testing, and other issues. As far as testing, he sees the move towards involving agencies with this product as the third wave in testing and optimization.

Initial agency clients include Avenue A | Razorfish, Zaaz, DDB, Red Bricks Media, TMP Direct, Closed Loop Marketing, Solutionset, Ascentium, Palazzo Interactive, ZeroDash1, Brand Digital, and Portent Interactive.

Posted by Enid Burns at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 17, 2008

Web Analytics and Hippos

Some Web sites fall flat because they're designed by hippos.

That's the name Avinash Kaushik, Google's analytics evangelist, gives to the highest paid opinion, or hippo, in the room.
In citing an example, he said he did a search for a bathroom sink and the search results turned up Delta Faucet; the link took the visitor to a Web page featuring faucets, not sinks, Kaushik said. "What the hell are they thinking, selling me faucets," he said, stressing that many other Web sites make similar oversights.

Kaushik had the audience laughing several times during a Web analytics discussion at SES NY.

Bringing up a theme raised by others today, Kaushik said clicks -- as a success metric -- shouldn't be the ultimate goal. Generating revenue and profit for the business is what counts.

Citing another metric, he called the bounce rate a good indicator of a site's shortcoming or "suckiness." Why? "It measures, from a user's perspective: I came, I puked, I left," he said.

Posted by Anna Maria Virzi at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Web Analytics and Star Trek

Companies fall into a trap when they collect Web site statistics.

They report statistics, not analyze them, said Matthew Bailey, president of SiteLogic Marketing.

Bailey, addressing an audience at SES NY, said a company must first know what its goals are, and then identify key performance indicators to track such as sales leads or downloads. "Then focus on a goal and ask how are we reaching that goal," he said. "Start asking those kinds of questions rather than how many unique visitors we have each month."

Bailey advocates the use of "segmentation" to track a company's Web site performance. What exactly does that have to do with Star Trek?

To make his point, Bailey referred to the original Star Trek television series, which was aired in the 1960s. He said the starship Enterprise started with a crew of 430 people. By year five, 59 crew members had died; 43 of whom, or 73 percent were wearing red shirts. The others were in yellow or blue shirts. "We have a little bit of knowledge, but we don't have any indicator what we can do with it," he said.

After a little more digging, Bailey said one would learn that 57.5 percent of the crew members who accompanied Captain Kirk on a mission died. If they accompanied the captain when he met an alien woman, the survival rate soared to 84 percent. Comparing the circumstances when red shirt crew died is an example of segmentation, he said, advising the audience to apply the concept to Web site analytics. For instance, a site that sells both MP3 players and digital cameras should track results for each product to gain additional insights on what works and doesn't work.

"Segmenting your visitors, where they came from, what they are looking for…trying to find the goals and motivations of your visitors and segmenting them to get a little bit of intelligence," he said.

Bailey says he's surprised by how many companies still tracking the number of "hits" they receive. "It's so '90s," he says. "We have to get beyond reporting these types of numbers…it drives me insane," he said, imploring the audience to dig deeper into the data that's collected.

Posted by Anna Maria Virzi at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 2, 2007

Drew Pops Up on Facebook

Ousted WebTrends CEO Greg Drew is laying low this week, clearly thinking of his next move, but that hasn't kept him from updating his Facebook page.

The official word on his Facebook profile is that he's taking some time off, and sources say that he'll be updating his page with more information soon. Of course, we still recommend reading ClickZ rather than Facebook for all your breaking news.

Posted by MatthewNelson at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 25, 2007

MIXX: Audience Counting Blues

Will Web measurement companies ever churn out audience data that can be easily compared? Don't count on it.

Executives from comScore, the Nielsen Co., HitWise, and Omniture at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's MIXX conference said Monday they will continue to fine tune how they collect, track, and analyze Web site visitor data and pointed out differences in their methodologies.

Some said the newest frontier involves tracking crossover media consumption, that is, measuring the extent that people consume traditional media, such as television and then cross over to the Internet.

"The Internet is part of a broader media spend, but growing," said John Mellor, Omniture's senior vice president, business strategy and corporate strategy. "We're trying to understand IP-connected devices, mobile distribution. Cable TV is increasingly digitally connected. It's as measurable as the Internet is."

How will advertisers know where to spend their money?

"Know how the Internet interplays with other media," said Manish Bhatia, Nielsen Online's president of global services and U.S. sales. Then, decide. For example, if consumers are turning to print, such as magazines and newspapers, in addition to the Internet, then they may want to cut TV spending.

To a large extent, each executive at the panel discussion, "Convergent Validity," touted his respective company's offerings.

Magid Abraham, comScore CEO, pointed out how his company uses audience panels to collect "effectiveness" metrics, not soley audience measurements. Dissing audience data collected from servers, he gave this example: If a person goes to a Web site, then deletes the cookies from that visit, she's counted as a first-time visitor when she returns to the Web site, though she's actually a return visitor.

Bhatia said Nielsen has acquired an assortment of companies that generate many Web measurement data points, thus providing opportunities to dig into the information for trends and other insights.

Bill Tancer, HitWise general manager of global research, said his firm provides online competitive intelligence. "If you do nothing but audience measurement, you're doing yourself a disservice," he said, adding that his firm collects demographic and other information that shows where Web site visitors are online, what category of sites they visit, how they are getting there, and what's driving traffic to competitors.

Omniture's Mellor said his company does not deal with audience panels. Instead, the company measures the visits and customer behavior on every single page of its customers' Web sites, he said.

One challenge, participants said, some metrics are more important to some businesses than to others. "Definition of engagement is different to everyone in this room. Retailers boil it down to ROI (return on investment), to media companies it may be a function of page views, time spent on site, or repeat visitors."

Stay tuned: discussion continues Nov. 29 at an IAB audience measurement summit.

Posted by Anna Maria Virzi at 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 21, 2007

Meteor Hits Napa! Web Analytics Set Back a Decade! Wine Saved!

Web analytics may not be for everyone in the high tech world, but those that are into it can really be passionate about it, if my experience this morning at SEMphonic's X Change Web Analytics conference in Napa, Ca., is any indicator.

For the opening keynote of the event, Eric Peterson, the CEO and principle consultant for his recently launched Web Analytics Demystified firm, knew he was preaching to a well-school bunch of analytics professionals. He pointed around the room at Matt Belkin of Omniture, Rand Schulman of Unica, Terry Cohen of Digitas, Clint Ivy of Visual Sciences and others, and proclaimed "If a meteor hit this room right now, Web analytics would be set back ten years!"

The comment elicited a laugh, but there were also nods of agreement when Peterson announced the demise of the "good ol' days" of Web 1.0 style of analytics that used cookies and page views, in favor of Web 2.0 communications.

"Now sessions start in a widget, then go to a blog, and then to a reader… how do we do the measurement?" he said. "The old measurement model is about to crack and we need to get ahead of the curve with 2.0."

Peterson touted his idea of R.A.M.P., or Resources, Analysis, Multivariate testing and Process. He said resources can be more than software, but also the people who make recommendations about what they see, while analysis is more than just issuing reports that no one reads. He also said that testing is essential for analysis of results, and that having a process is necessary in case employees leave your business and take an entire analysis system with them. He also admitted that no one has all the analytics answers when it comes to Web 2.0, but "You're going to have to cobble this together with what you have and new tools that are coming. Cause Web analytics 3.0 is the problem."

And that's mobile, Peterson said. As mobile devices can't be as easily tracked, or have cookies installed or other standard analytic tools "It's going to be a mess," he said. "But it's also going to be an opportunity. This device doesn't have cookies, but it does have a phone number, and a GPS address. It's going to be great for an advertising perspective, but we have to measure it and we're woefully unprepared."

Posted by MatthewNelson at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 14, 2007

ClickTracks and Lyris ListManager Come Closer Together

A year following the J.L. Halsey acquisition of ClickTracks, the parent company said it will tightly couple ClickTracks Web analytics data with its e-mail marketing platform Lyris ListManager. Clients will be able to track user behavior across e-mail and their Web site to gain more insight into conversions. Measured activity includes open rates and subsequent visits to the e-mail sender's Web site.

Email senders can learn to better target messages. An example given in a company statement said "An e-mail campaign drives 10,000 visitors to a landing page and only 3 percent convert. A marketer can then analyze the behavior of the 97 percent that didn't convert and target that segment with a follow-up offer."

The next generation of e-mail marketing innovation looks like it will be in more closely integrating online marketing and e-mail, breaking down the silo between the two categories, and sharing ad management and resources across the platforms. A statement from J.L. Halsey said, "This milestone moves the company one step closer to its goal of providing marketers with a platform that integrates the core technologies of e-mail marketing, Web analytics, and Web content management." Expect to see more new products and enhancements to the three core areas on J.L. Halsey's roadmap in the months to come.

Posted by Enid Burns at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

See More Posts From:

Today | This Week | This Month