Web Analytics – An hour a day

If you are in the internet industry you sure know Avinash, one of the most dedicated web analytics professionals. His passion for web analytics allowed him becoming one of the top referents of the industry. His blog Occam Razors is visited by the most important industry professionals making it the most visited web analytics web site.

An hour a day

Now, Avinash is presenting his book “Web Analytics, an hour a day”, where he goes beyond web analytics concepts and definitions to provide a step-by-step guide to implementing a successful web analytics strategy. His revolutionary approach to web analytics challenges prevalent thinking about the field and guides readers to a solution that will provide truly informed and actionable insights.

In Part I, Avinash explains why traditional web analytics is dead and introduces the Trinity mindset and strategic approach for web analytics. He then details the data collection options at your disposal for robust analytics and the pros and cons of each methodology (such as clickstream, outcomes, research, and competitive data). He concludes Part I with a deep dive into qualitative data and its critical role in any web analytics program.

In Part II, Avinash provides insights that will challenge your knowledge of what it takes to create a successful web analytics program. He covers customer centricity, optimal organizational structure, how to identify great analysts, and his (now famous) 10/90 rule of web analytics. From his experience, he outlines radical strategies for how you should select the right tool for your company (while saving money and peace of mind) and identify truly valuable metrics with his three layers of So What? test. He concludes Part II by providing a fresh perspective on some of the most common web analytics reports that you’ll never look at in the same way again.

In Part III, Avinash guides readers to a successful web analytics strategy and implementation month by month, day by day, and hour by hour. A customized quick-start guide for different businesses (including blogs) is followed by increasingly advanced and crucial analytics topics, such as search analytics (SEO, SEM/PPC and internal site search) and multi-channel marketing analytics. That’s followed by the revelation of the key ingredients of a great experimentation and testing platform, performing competitive intelligence analysis, and Web 2.0 analytics.

Avinash then discusses the three secrets behind making web analytics actionable and, in his clever, engaging, and thought-provoking style, debunks leading myths about path analysis, conversion analysis, and real-time data, for example.

Finally, Avinash highlights seven specific steps you can take to create a data-driven decision-making culture in your company and then discusses such advanced analytics concepts as statistical significance, SEM and PPC analysis, the power of segmentation, complex yet insightful pan-session metrics, and conversion rate best practices.

Sprinkled throughout the book are real-world examples drawn from Avinash’s experiences as an analytics professional at Intuit, DirecTV, Silicon Graphics Inc., and DHL.

The book includes an innovative CD that includes more than five hours of insightful audio podcasts, a 45-minute video, PowerPoint presentations, and other useful web analytics resources.

Congratulations Avinash!!!

More information here

Pageviews, Visits and Visitors. Is that enough?

Pageviews, visits and visitors, are apparently the most important metrics for measuring our website performance. Then as much pageviews, visits and visitors we could have as better our site performance is.

Unfortunately this view is not only weak but incorrect.
Those three metrics allow us measuring different kind of things. So if we have a publisher website our main metric is pageview (this is the way it works but is has lot of issues I’ll mention in a future post).

If we are measuring a chat, unique visitor is out metric, because what we do want is people stay in the chat longer and not to come in and come out.

So not all the indicators are KPI’s (key performance indicators), and you make the difference by defining and giving them the correct meaning.

Nielsen Shuts Window on Pageview Rankings

Yahoo reports that Nielsen/NetRatings will be scrapping the pageview-based rankings system that’s long comprised the industry’s webpage yardstick, in favor of tracking the length of time visitors spend at sites.

The move comes as new technologies, such as online video and AJAX, chip at the relevance of pageviews. AJAX in particular is tricky, as it automatically populates sites with new information without a user having to refresh the screen or pull up new pages. This technology renders the pageview yardstick virtually worthless. ComScore Media Metrix, a Nielsen rival, recently developed a new metric to weather changes in site value led by AJAX. “Site visits” count the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of a half hour or more. “Based on everything that’s going on with the influx of Ajax and streaming, we feel total minutes is the best gauge for site traffic,” said director Scott Ross of Nielsen’s product marketing. He added that Nielsen is “changing [its] stance” on how data should be used. Nielsen already measures the average time a user spends at a given website, as well as the average number of sessions per visitor. It will begin reporting these units to help paint broader pictures of site use for investors, advertisers and analysts. In terms of time spent, Time Warner’s AOL will see a more positive ranking, because its instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL logged 25 billion minutes in May, a score ahead of 20 billion counted for Yahoo, making it number one. Via pageview count, AOL ranked sixth. Yahoo leaps ahead of MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media sites for both pageviews and time spent, logging over twice the time spent at Fox. It was ahead by less than 10 percent in pageviews. And while MySpace forces users to pull up new pages every time they have to update data, Yahoo utilizes AJAX to draw new data without the user having to leave a given page. Google will see a drop to fifth in time spent, simply because its search engine is intended to guide users elsewhere as quickly as possible. It ranked third in pageviews. Nielsen/NetRatings will continue to provide pageview data but will cease to formally rank them. Ross explained that time spent on a site is a better gauge for the level of engagement users experience with a site. The company is expected to announce the measuring shift on Tuesday (MarketingVOX).

My kingdom for a pageview

If there is something that revolutioned the internet it is SEM, mainly with google. This company understood that value of relevant content and give the chance to people who generate it to earn some money.

The result is really good, they have a really simple service, that almost anyone with a minimum internet knowledge could handle. Both, adwords and adsence give the users a lot of technical and marketing support (even with very simple e-learning modules).

visitor

The fact is that today citizens became publishers, and the the TV raiting war is being emulated but in a different scenario. The objective? Traffic.

Regular citizens start talking about, pagerank, alexa, inbound links, and other different things formerly used only by internet professionals.

Actually the web analytics tools are becaming more and more user friendly. One of the best examples is the new version of google analytics, focused on simplicity instead of flexibility. This is not good or bad, just a fact. Is really hard to get the best of both worlds, and google like most of other providers has taken a desition.

Finally, how high could be the price people pay for traffic? And what’s behind that traffic? But nevermind, anyone cares about it?

Some important points about Web Analytics Tools

p>In more than 10 years of experience I had the chance of trying almost all the well known web analytics tools, and I found some points that in my opinion Web Analytics tools developers must consider for their products.

WebAnalytics

1- Flexibility: Web Analytics tools are becoming more and more simple but at the same time less flexible. The possibility of manipulate the information inside the tool is a must, and in a lot of cases is not even available an API.
2- Cost: Prices are in general ridiculous. When Google Analytics was launched I thought that prices should decrease but they don’t. So in one hand you have Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrix and others with unaffordable prices and on the other hand Google analytics for free.
3- Heterogeneous information: every web analytics tool has different technologies and the ones with similar technologies have a different way of processing it, so comparisons became very difficult.
4- Heterogeneous technology: There are two main technologies, “log file analyzers” and “page tagging”, but also hybrid and packet sniffers among others. All seems to be technological correct, but at the same time track and process the information in a completely different way.

Web analytics and the Online Based Applications

In web analytics we track, tabulate and analyze data from all what is displayed (and not) into an internet browser.

Today the most normal things we display in a web browser are websites, blogs, and so on. But the desktop applications are installed in every computer so today we have part of the information of what every person do with a computer.

Google SS

The trend in a short term future is the all the desktop applications are going to be online (thanks God), no more installing hundreds programs after formating or changing your PC.

But the thing is, does it became a web analytics task to analyze not only the websites but the applications? I mean at least the companies that provides those applications will need to understand how and when people use them. So my point is, if we are going to be more and more browser based its important to define the limit among private and public information.

Juan Damia – Web Analytics

Successful Online Business – Third and Fourth Part

Brainstorming process (identify tactics): Once you understand what’s your “weakest link”, you should launch a brainstorming session (or several) in order to find the project or projects (tactic) that will best help you fix your “weakest link”. If you have a lack of information about your client behavior and attitudes then a great idea is creating a social network where they could relate each other and as a result you will get a bunch of information that will help you understand what are they doing and why.

4- Project design (tactics): Now you have the idea (The difference between idea and project is that IDEA is the “what to do” and the project is the “what to do, how, when, etc”), so you need to design your project starting by defining your project scope as much detailed as possible, otherwise you will face lot of problems in the future. I recommend 70% planning 30% execution, and if you think I’m exaggerating just remember how much time have you spent in last projects just fixing problems because of a weak planning. Remember that a “millimeter of deviation in the basement of a building could make your building falls down when finishing the construction”. “If you are failing to plan is because you are planning to fail”.

Optimization: The Glue Between Marketing and IT

We all know this: interactive is becoming an ever larger part of the marketing supply chain.

The days of focusing on how a brand is delivered on TV are diminishing daily. Large scale CRM systems are still widely used to retain and grow the customer base and the internet is a critical channel for acquisition. Moreover, measurement, ROI, and accountability are forefront on people’s minds. What these things lead to is an increasing reliance on technology to deploy marketing programs, measure results, and optimize performance. An existing challenge that few are talking about is a people issue: the dynamics and working relationship between Marketing and IT.

lead

Marketing and IT are perceived to be very different organizations that can never truly develop a high-performance team dynamic because of differing remits, people skills, challenges, personalities, and goals. After all, how can a marketing organization that focuses on creative concepts, value propositions, and Continue reading →

Google updated their Webmaster Guidelines

Last 5th of June 2007 Google updated their Webmaster Guidelines, including the addition of hyperlinks to more detailed pages on specific quality guidelines.

logo_google

If you’ve never read through the Webmaster Guidelines it’s a good exercise and something I need to do again so I can be up to date with the latest changes.

If you need more help in understanding the guidelines have a look at Patrick Sexton’s very useful resource Feed The Bot, which goes into greater detail than you’ll find at Google as well as providing links to additional resources. The only thing I don’t like about Feed The Bot is that I didn’t think of it first (Steven Bradley – a.k.a. vangogh).

Trends in Google Business

One of the greatest information sources is the company’s annual report, your can get awesome information about present and future situation and potential risk the company is going to be facing in the future. I was analyzing the Google Inc. results for the first quarter 2007 and I found this interesting analysis they do about their business. Enjoy it.

“Our business has grown rapidly since inception, resulting in substantially increased revenues, and we expect that our business will continue to grow. However, our revenue growth rate has generally declined over time, and we expect it will continue to do so as a result of increasing competition and the difficulty of maintaining growth rates as our revenues increase to higher levels. In addition, the main focus of our advertising programs is to provide relevant and useful advertising to our users, reflecting our commitment to constantly improve their overall web experience. As a result, we may take steps to improve the relevance of the ads displayed on our web sites, such as removing ads that generate low click-through rates or that send users to irrelevant or otherwise low quality sites, which could negatively affect our near-term advertising revenues. Continue reading →

Analytics 2.0

Much more than just tagging

Category Archives: Analytics Tips