eCPM and Revenue Opportunities for Publishers

I was recently in talks with a set of publishers about a set of specific revenue opportunities, where one of the most evident (and honest) dialogue’s, was about how to quantify the potential revenue increase. These publishers, not much different from everybody else, derived their revenue from channels such as: Display Advertising (CPM) Contextual Keyword Advertising (CPC) Sponsorships (CPT) Lead generation (CPA/CPL) Think of the above list, as the publishers running internal sales departments, them using a multiple of advertising networks at the same time, having AdSense or similar applied to a subset of their pages, selling random front page take overs for 24 hours and unique lead generation for events as they happen etc. My first thought, like most of you, I am sure, was to assemble all twenty something revenue streams in an Excel, and try to come up with a model for how we could quantify, the revenue increase of a promised page view increase. Assuring myself, that I took into consideration, facts like, unsold inventory, price differences between sections, the volatility of lead generation payouts etc. Honestly, first try, it didn?t work that well. There is simply too many variables, for which we know too little, which we need to take into consideration. Remembering that some of the variables go beyond those directly inferred from the revenue streams themselves. I went back and had a second look at this, with the principle of the simplest explanation usually being the correct one. So I simply went with a monthly eCPM value [1]. eCPM = (Monthly Revenue / Monthly Impressions) * 1000 What?s beautiful, to me at least, in the above eCPM approach, is that it takes into consideration ALL known, and ALL unknown variables. AND It worked splendidly :-) Let?s create an example for Publisher X: Monthly revenue: $350,000 Monthly impression: 110,000,000 eCPM = ($350,000 / 110,000,000)*1000 eCPM = $3.18 Evaluating an initiative, which promises to provide an additional 22,000,000 page view impressions per month, the revenue opportunity is $ 69,960 ((22,000,000 * $3.18)/1000). In conclusion. I suggest the possibility of replacing sophisticated online revenue opportunity models with simple monthly eCPM values, to calculate believable publisher revenue opportunities. I am super eager to hear about your models, so please share, and please refute my simplification. [1] eCPM: Effective Cost Per Thousand Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-16 19:06:49</div>

Data Driven Online News Media Examples

I was reading an article in the New York Times, which suggest that work place burnout, starts at a younger age, in the world of online news media. I do not agree with the article?s main point, but I instantly fell in love with the authors examples of ruthless environments, a perverse opposite of the intent I guess. He assembles some of the pioneers in the marriage of Data and News Media. Find below a pool of excerpts from the article: The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each article on the paper?s Web site that day Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all display a ?most viewed? list on their home pages – (Me: Not overly data driven, but it still counts) And the usual, and still lovable example, of the perceived ultimate journalistic sweatshop: At Gawker Media?s offices in Manhattan, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall displays the 10 most-viewed articles across all Gawker?s Web sites. The author?s last name, along with the number of page views that hour and over all are prominently shown in real time on the screen, which Gawker has named the ?big board.? I personally think Gawker got it right for the most part, they should probably get slightly more sophisticated on their metrics (which they might well be internally), but the philosophy and thinking is well within my own comfort zone. I recently commented about similar endeavors; Every news-writer has a Dashboard with Metrics determining his compensation and Analytics is building the Newsroom of the Future. Picture: Gawker scoreboard for Reporters, which list most-viewed articles throughout the day. (Michael Appleton for The New York Times.) Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-19 20:52:00</div>

Optimizing News Media on the idea of people being Rational

The idea of people being rational self-maximizing actors, is obviously false, but why is that most optimization and performance models are constructed on that premise then? Rational and maximizing in the sense that people should always act in a way that leaves them better off. A premise which is assumed accurate for most automatic optimization models; models which takes a set number of fixed variables as an input, and provides a calculated output, or Rational output if you will. My point is this, some verticals, such as News Media, are not rational in nature, and as such, we cannot fairly expect our rational models to be instant true. I still believe that we (the industry) can and will succeed in increasing performance – and the above notion, is thus nothing more than a cautionary note-to-self on assuring anything I do, take that into consideration. If not directly built into a model, we should certainly accept a margin of, perhaps not inaccuracy, but conceivably a performance decrease from what was to expect. I am sure you can imagine a number of scenarios, where an optimization model will predict, with indicated high accuracy, that you or a pool of people like you, will click a given Article Excerpt, but you do not! Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) - Image by: http://jamin.org/, post idea by: @jdaysy ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-01 17:31:39</div>

Choose Daily Unique Article Views ? over Page Views

Should News Media Publishers Optimize for more Page Views or more Article Views ? I was spending my weekend in Albany, having good positive day long discussions with a publisher, about whether one should optimize for more Page views per visit (PPV) or more Article views per visit (APV). I have strong opinions about the importance of setting proper KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and applying appropriate subsequent optimization goals. In my assumption, that we are somewhat in agreement on the former, I believe it is fair to suggest that Article Views are a much stronger metric than Page Views. Some of my reasoning for choosing Article Views (AV) over Page views (PV) are: Article Views are more true to the actual atomic product of a News Media publisher Article Views are more directly aligned to the actual publisher cost structure Article Views are more directly related to the value the reader obtains Article Views are likely to be items in for-pay structures in the not too distant future ? and thus more directly aligned to Revenue. Article Views are not as easily gamed as a metric as page views are It is easy to come up with a dozen ideas on how one can game page views, and we see this all the time, from aggressive pagination of articles to aggressive use of galleries. Not only that, there is a strong possibility, that by gaming page views, you might subsequently de-optimize more true KPIs. If I were to run a News Media organization, I would choose Daily Unique Article Views as my primary success metric. Think about it – and do let me know why your organization is not using Article Views over Page Views ? Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-06-21 18:09:00</div>

Analytics ? and Choosing your optimization goals (Slides)

I Just returned from Madrid, where I did the keynote at the wonderful web analytics conference, practitioner web analytics. The conference was announced and promoted as a conference for data driven professionals ? which I took very literally and went all in, with a rather geeky presentation (at first sight). I do believe though, that choosing your optimization goals is not taken as seriously as it should be, by most analytics teams (whether internal or external). My primary point is that, in any optimization activity, you must serve the overall purpose of the organization ? and if so, can you honestly say that your optimization goals are KPI duplicates? and if NOT KPI duplicates, can you confirm them as KPI derivatives? And if NOT KPI derivatives, you must certainly be able to confirm them as KPI derivative proxies ? If none of the above, then I believe it is fair to say that the further away your optimizations goals are from your organizational KPIs ? the higher the risk of applying direct harm. (turning decent marketing initiatives into organizational de-optimization exercises). My conclusion was (is) that you want to create marketing scenarios, where you can predict an organizational aligned outcome with a high level of confidence. Find my slides below (which of course doesn?t do justice to my presentation, as the text is only pointers to the subject). Anywho, thanks to Andres, Luz, and team for a splendid day in Madrid (*even with the challenge of a power outage, mid-presentation) Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) Analytics – and choosing your optimization goals ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-05-27 16:18:32</div>

Online News Reader Value: $0.58 per month

As I was traversing a set of data from Nielsen today, and with the recent indication of the New York Times metered solution in mind, I came to think about the worth of an online non-subscribed news reader per month. I wanted a sound bite, I could use when debating the topic of pay walls, with other folks in the Analytics and news media industry. Find below, a value indication, but be a bit lighthearted about it (this is no research conclusion – and it is probably a bit unfair to multiply Nielsen and Jeff Jarvis numbers out of context), nevertheless, here we go: The worth of an online non-subscribed news reader per month: $0.58 (16.2 page views per month * 3 Ads per page * $12 CPM) Which makes pay-wall conversion rate debates more fun. Envision a $12 per month pay-wall was erected today, in a world where the above is true. This would force you to do roughly 5% unique visitor to subscriber conversion rate, to be as well off as before (aka 1 in 20 people need to sign up for your paid service before you supersede advertising revenue). Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) Sources: Project for Excellence in Journalism Analysis of Nielsen NetView Data. (Data are averages of September, October, and November of 2009) New Business Models for News Report, August 16, 2009 City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-05-18 16:33:52</div>

News Personalization as a Community Challenge

News Personalization is agreeable a technology challenge, and certainly one that have not yet been solved, but news personalization it also a potential social challenge for the community. When personalizing content, research shows that there are large optimization opportunities in using dimensions such as race, income and education (and similar aggressive demographic dimensions). If this type of personalization is used violently, it is easy to envision a scenario, where the enlightened and well educated population keep getting wiser and the uninformed and likely uneducated population stay just that. I am by all definitions a capitalist and tend to believe that free markets solve all problems. Still do! But I also believe that it is a fair question to ask, whether we should tolerate that e.g. the New York Times, serve a pool of their likely less educated articles, to sub $30,000 a year in household income visitors ? Even worse perhaps, we could foresee that publishers who do not have access to such dimensions for their visitors, will use proxies or possible use US-census information data on a ZIP code level. In such a scenario, personalization for a poor neighborhood will affect the information given to everybody in that area. I am sure we all see how this is not optimal or fair. Let me provide an example, from a recent research paper by a colleague of mine, which provided facts on this type of personalization on a search level. Search represents content selection and presentation very well. When searching for ?Wagner?, one segment was thinking of and was presented with Richard Wagner (the brilliant German composer) ? the other segment was presented with Wagner, the paint sprayer company! This example, imbalanced as it is, and by itself, is of course not disturbing and deconstructive to the social fabric as such, but I am sure you can envision a large pool of machine learned choices, activated to the extent where we move beyond just a digital divide, but a much more harmful information divide. In conclusion, if we are set out to bridge the information divide in our society, aggressive news personalization, with pure revenue optimization for eye, might actually end up extending this gap. Does this mean that news personalization is not suggested, of course not, but it does mean that we have to think about this subject, on a more sophisticated level than which existing personalization and recommendation technology to use. Think about it. Please note, that in...<br/><div align='right'>2010-05-08 02:27:43</div>

Every news-writer has a Dashboard with Metrics determining his compensation

I recently talked about how Analytics is building the Newsroom of the Future – and posted a set of excerpts from a BusinessWeek Article, about how Aol was perhaps moving towards that promised data driven Newsroom. Ironic perhaps, but the New York Times just ran a story on Bloomberg?s acquisition of BusinessWeek, and more importantly for this debate, some of the analytics processes imposed on BusinessWeek writers. Again, and as last time, I?ll leave the article to you, but have a look at the following Statements that are, not just, future fantasy, but very much existing data driven processes already in place. Every writer has a ?dashboard? where the metrics determining his compensation ? any scoops, hits an article attracts ? are tracked. Writers? salaries are tied, among other factors, to how many ?market-moving? articles they have produced Further to this, there is the acceptance that; Any breaking items from the magazine will appear elsewhere first The above three bullets certainly indicates a very data driven culture and strong views on news media content valuation. Unquestionably something I personally support. Whether you are to one or the other side, this is surely an exciting experiment. An experiment of converting a hundred something old-school BusinessWeek writers to data driven Bloomberg writers – obsessed by metrics. This is super relevant, even to those news media, that doesn?t run financial news related content (distributed on terminals like Bloomberg). -AND when you ask such questions, I suggest you ask the reverse; why shouldn?t you have a real-time and accessible writers compensation dashboard ? Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-04-28 02:03:09</div>

Defining Subscriber as an online News Media metric

I just finished Ken Doctor’s Newsonomics book and took note of several items, that I wanted to touch upon over a couple of posts, in the next coming weeks. The first commentary I have is in regards to the somewhat immediate need for online news media publishing metrics standards. Let me provide a simple set of offline publishing metrics, a set of quotes that show lack of standards and finally a suggestion on how we could perhaps look at this instead. All with the intent of moving us forward. For as long as we can remember, Circulation in many ways defined the health of news media, such as daily newspapers or weekly news magazines. Circulation being the SUM of copies distributed to subscribers plus copies picked up at newsstands etc. However; a circulation count does not equal a Readership count, as most publishers will take into consideration that every copy is read by more than one person. If you agree on this layout, we then have a set of basic offline publishing metrics that look like this: Subscriber = Customers paying for a publication Circulation = SUM of copies distributed to Subscribers + SUM of Unsubscribed copies picked up Readership = Circulation * Count of people reading it on average The above offline publishing metrics are fairly easy to understand, even though you probably, like me, spend most your day around online specific metrics. Please note that the concept of paying for, does not necessarily equal a payment in money. I identified earlier, that a newsreader is likely to pay in one of three currencies. The first decent question is likely to be, If we are ever to compare offline to online; does the above three basic offline metrics even translate into a set of online publisher metrics or specifically online news media publisher metrics? Before we consider if that?s possible, and even a valid question, I would like to present a few quotes (beginning with one from Ken?s Newsonomics book.) Ken Doctor quotes Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc. - ?She made the point that every Sports Illustrated print subscriber is worth $118 a year to the magazine, mainly in advertising. Every SI.com customer, though, is only worth $5 per year? In trying to understand the above quote, and assuming an error in using the metric, Customer, I looked up a previous quote from Ken: - ?I keep coming back to the numbers recently laid out by Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Each Sports Illustrated paid reader is worth $118 a year, mainly in advertising, while each SI.com...<br/><div align='right'>2010-04-21 22:06:19</div>

Demographic Data in Yahoo Web Analytics and its Validity

Note: The following is a post by Jiri Brazda, who is the Founder of Optimics and Web Analytics Association Regional Manager for Eastern Europe. Go connect with @jiribrazda. It?s already been a year since Dennis announced the launch of Yahoo! Web Analytics 9.5 on this blog. And one of the shiny feature announcements then, was the addition of demographic data, such as gender and age. Dennis, being such an awesome analytics expert he is, went on to suggest a few exciting ways of using these data in his screen cast overview of Yahoo! Web Analytics, which I recommend you watch before you read on if you are not familiar with the tool. With the announcement, however, a few analysts from European countries questioned Yahoo?s ability to deliver this kind of data in markets where Yahoo search market share in particular is almost non-existent. The Czech Republic like many other small European countries may well serve as a case in point. Take this purely as a rough indication, but my experience tells me that for Czech websites with as little as a couple thousand visitors, Yahoo! indeed is able to provide demographic data with a confidence level of about 80 % and for websites with more than 50 000 visitors you easily get the highest confidence level of 95 %. Yahoo?s ability to collect this demographics data is down to the fact that it comes from the Yahoo! ID / Yahoo Cookie which you need in order to use the vast array of Yahoo! web properties, most notably Yahoo! Mail and the photo sharing website Flickr, which is popular in about every country in the world – and so seems to account for a bulk of the visitors to Czech websites with Yahoo! ID / Yahoo Cookie. So for me, and I hope for many of you as well, no matter if you?re a fellow YWACN member or Yahoo! customer, the question is no longer about whether Yahoo! can provide demographic data about visitors to your website, because the answer is resounding yes. The question really is if you can trust the data, use it to analyze behavior and business outcome of different demographic segments and make decisions informed by such analysis. I therefore set out to examine the demographic data, gender to be specific, provided by Yahoo! Web Analytics and compare them with data from NetMonitor, the official audience measurement platform in the Czech Republic which provides authoritative data that drive demand in the local online advertising industry. Okoun.cz, the website in question that the data come from, is a traditional...<br/><div align='right'>2010-04-14 23:09:17</div>

News Media Monetization and available Currencies

I am sure we all understand by now, that parts of the News Media industry are in utter disarray, and that this is primarily due to the fact that monetization of their products has changed drastically. In my opinion and as we examine Online News Media, it very much seems like there is a mixed understanding of the actually currency in which the newsreader can pay for the product. If we focus on the statement, that it is always the actual newsreader who pays, something which I very much believe to be true, we should conclude on the currency in which he pays, before we even debate the actual monetization strategy. As I was talking to an executive of a major Newspaper the other day, I presented a theory that the newsreader can only pay in the following three currencies: Time Data Money Even though the above newsreader currencies are almost self-explanatory, let me just elaborate a bit. Time spent on a given News Media destination or reading a specific article is Attention and Engagement that can be sold to an Advertiser. Data is something that the reader hands over unintentionally as he navigates the news media property, but also something which he can hand over voluntarily. Data can be used to enhance the quality of what?s already sold the to the advertiser, of course, but it is certainly also something that can be sold as a separate product in a number of ways. Finally there is the opportunity to actually just charge the reader directly for the product, such as setting up a paywall, metered consumption system and so on and so forth. I am not going to add any suggestions on where I believe we could or should optimize, as I am quite eager to see if we can at least agree on the above currencies first. Because, as see it, for us to have a meaningful conversation around monetization, we need to look at the above on an individual level. Do we agree ? Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-03-31 18:47:11</div>

Analytics is building the Newsroom of the Future

BusinessWeek has a truly exciting front page story today (February 21, 2010). Especially for somebody like me who repeatedly and openly declared an obsession with the state of News Media and in particular how Data and Analytics, in that regard, can help publishers increase their current performance. BusinessWeek: AOL Moves to Build Tech `Newsroom of the Future’ I?ll leave the article to you, but have a look at the following comments (some of them, perhaps a tad naïve, but so aggressively data driven, that you have to love them): The [web analytics] numbers tell the growing number of journalists who work there how well their articles are performing Judicious use of Web-analytics software is a hallmark of what AOL Senior Vice-President Marty Moe calls the “newsroom of the future” We really want to enhance journalism with technology [Provide] journalists up-to-the-minute data on how much traffic those articles generate News editors’ computers come equipped with software?created internally by combining data from AOL’s own analytic tools with [other resources] Audience growth and audience engagement have to be the things that we judge the most off of our journalist investments AOL [is] considering sharing a portion of quarterly profits with staffers whose work fetches the most page views That’s hardcore language, when you think about how data is shunned upon in other news organizations. I for one think that the newsroom of the future is data driven! Optimization is not about driving towards the lowest possible common denominator, and better performance could as easily push relevance, as compared to the general idea of pushing everybody toward easy digestible celebrity news. Is Tim too aggressive for you ? Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-02-22 19:36:34</div>

News Media that use Galleries to increase Page-views don?t increase Time-spent (Attention)

It is not uncommon to see News Media Publishers drive un-segmented page views as one of their primary Key Performance Indicators (KPI?s) - And one of the biggest page view drivers for online News Media today are the common use of Galleries (slideshows if you will). I would argue that those additional page views, however massive they are, don?t deliver the same value to the advertiser, as compared to the core product (the news article) - and ultimately isn?t really what the user/reader wants. I studied the usage patterns of one of the biggest News Media publishers in the US as part of an optimization dialogue and created the following four News Media content segments: Galleries News articles Front pages Other Giving me a much better understanding of where the bulk of the page views and thus the advertising inventory is generated. There is no surprise in the below bar chart that visualize the total number of page views per news media content segment. Galleries make up for almost 60% of all page views, which is a dramatic number. I believe it is dramatic, because you don?t have to conduct to many studies or interviews, to find that the value of a gallery page view, is probably not the same as news article page view. I was therefore interested in telling a different story with the same data. I summed up the total time spent on each of the content segments using a simple time spent metric. Whether you believe that total time spent on news media content segments is identical to reader attention, probably doesn?t matter too much, as I am sure you would agree that, if not, it is at least a decent proxy metric. There might be a positive surprise in the below visualization, which quite clearly shows that galleries might have the most page views in total, but that the core news media article product (and the front page it is promoted on) is where the reader spend most his time, and I would argue his attention. It is therefore somewhat sad to see quality news articles getting thrown into ad exchanges and sold alongside galleries. I was therefore positively surprised and happy to see that Nick Denton and his Gawker Media announce their move away from measuring success on page-views. Starting 2010 they will measure and compensate success on Unique visitors. I?m no direct fan of one metric over the other and am not sure gawker has the ability to accurately calculate a true unique visitor. I am however a fan of not valuing every page view the same, simply because, any...<br/><div align='right'>2010-01-22 15:15:08</div>

Yahoo Web Analytics Training Webinars Launched

The following is a post by Charlie Holbech We have spent the last 18 months integrating YWA (IndexTools) into the Yahoo Network and whilst our Account Management team has worked tirelessly to ensure that our client base (both YWACN members and Direct Customers) are well supported, we have also managed to find time to run some projects in the background! Our onus has been on serving our customer base more effectively, tackling this in a variety of ways: Dedicated Account Management for YWACN members, an expansive list of FAQs available to all on help.yahoo.com as well as the recently announced YWA Status Blog keeping our customers informed in real-time (RSS, Email, Phone and Messenger Alerts). I’m pleased to announce that today we add a considerable resource to our existing support and self-serve channels! Yahoo Web Analytics Product Training on-Demand We have spent the last few months converting our original on-site product training that we use to deliver to clients and partners at IndexTools, into short, easily digestible, on-demand webinars. These webinars are accessible by all and aim to give new and existing users a complete overview of the product allowing them to concentrate on what’s important: analysis. The webinars are collated using a combination of PowerPoint Slides and in Product Demo’s. Further to this we have also added an Interactive Q&A section (Adobe Captivate) for each of the training sections. This will enable users to check their knowledge at each stage of the training, or go back and check it further down the line. N.B. We don’t capture any personal data or results :) So where do YOU go to get access to these? We have created a section within help.yahoo.com and you can access the individual sessions here. We’ve created a page for each session and you’ll currently have access to the following sessions and sections: Session 1: Deploying and Customizing the Tracking Code Session 2: Sales and Merchandising ? Deployment and Reporting Session 3: Basic Reporting: Traffic, Demographics, Techno-graphics, Content, Navigation, and Path Analysis Session 4: Conversion Analysis, Scenario Analysis Still to come over the next month or so are the remaining sessions these include: Session 5: Reporting Interface Features Session 6: Manual Campaign Setup Session 7: Automated Campaign Setup Session 8: Campaign Reporting Session 9: Dashboards Session 10: Settings We hope you find these informative and useful!...<br/><div align='right'>2010-01-19 10:00:01</div>

Tracking Mobile Devices in Yahoo Web Analytics

Tracking mobile activity has become, not just a nice to have feature, but a necessity in any mature Web Analytics tool. You of course know this already. Find below a set of entertaining custom Mobile reports from Yahoo Web Analytics, using dimensions such as. Mobile Device Maker Mobile Device Model Mobile Device Screen size Carrier name The numbers themselves are rather exciting actually, even though my point is, just to show you some of the Dimensions you can use, when doing your mobile analysis with Yahoo Web Analytics. Enjoy! :-) Custom Report 1: Custom Report 2: Custom Report 3: Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2010-01-13 20:45:28</div>

My immediate thoughts on Digital Magazines ? after buying the Kindle

As I have stated repeatedly over the last year or so ? I am obsessed with the state of News Media and in particular how Analytics, in that regard, can help publishers increase their current performance. This post is nothing more than exciting boyish musings, that does little to validate my conclusions. Anywho, this is my blog! :-) I was really excited to receive a Kindle the other day, as I finally got to actively try out a new reading experience in regards to my above fixation. If you think about it, kindle, or similar e-reader experiences, like what B&N or Sony peddle, provides the opportunity to deliver a digital magazine, while actually capturing a set of metrics. Still limited and few, but metrics nonetheless. My first set of purchases was (of course) Data Driven Insights with Yahoo Analytics, but also the Economist Magazine (both Amazon kindle links). Like you, I am most sure, I tag into an endless stream of information (news), flowing in from RSS feeds, Twitter and so on and so forth. I even believe that I am somewhat selective in my limited 28 RSS feeds, following 57 folks on twitter etc. ? BUT still en endless information stream nevertheless. I personally see that as somewhat of an issue, never being able tick a box and say that you are finished. The first positive element about e-readers, speak directly to the above issue, which is that, it creates, just as with a traditional magazine (in paper), the feeling of having consumed and completed a task. I don?t believe this is a bad feeling to emulate in digital magazines. I for one have the interest and willingness to consume an editorial package that goes beyond the actual article. There is a huge difference between me letting a friend know that the December edition of Wired Magazine was really cool, as compared to me sharing a link to Evan Ratliff?s Vanish Article (which just adds to the endless stream). The first negative element about current digital magazines on e-readers, is that they bring nothing to the party, above and beyond what I get from the printed magazine. They almost detract from what I have gotten used to from their online editions. Where I have the audio interview, the video extension, the additional pictures that didn?t fit to print etc. Conclusion (day 3): I honestly believe that a tablet of some sorts will provide the opportunity for a prospering digital magazine industry, I in particular see the need for a curated editorial product that can be consumed, completed and...<br/><div align='right'>2010-01-10 18:55:35</div>

Using Microformats to extend Web Analytics tagging

The traditional Web Analytics industry tend to bring up the concept of a universal tag (a common data collection tracking script) now and then. Which is not at all bad thinking, I even participated in a session at the X change Analytics symposium in San Francisco earlier this year, on that subject. However, thinking it through, you might agree with me, that there is probably little point in creating a universal tag, as you (the web analytics deployment engineer) doesn?t really get anything else but yet another somewhat proprietary tag. What you might get though, is a vendor independent tag, which is probably a much better way to think about this, when brought up. If this is of your interest, I suggest you go have a look at Tealium (They call it universal tag though, but describe it as one tag, any vendor). Having said that, I would like to suggest a different route, one that I in particularly talked about in my Adobe acquisition of Omniture post - where I suggest that the content and tracking marriage will be won or lost on a Web OS level. BUT - while we wait for my prophecy to come true, I?ve been thinking a lot about how we can move towards a simpler web analytics data collection deployment, and at the same time a much richer data set. This sounds like the deployment engineers nirvana, but it might not be that far-fetched, if we take a step back and look at what we already have. The universal tag should not be a standardization agreement in between a few web analytics vendors or even a forced through Web Analytics Association standard, neither should it be a vendor independent tag, developed by consultants. I suggest that web analytics vendors adopt the most popular Microformats, so that the plain vanilla tracking scripts presently in place are able to read already semantic tagged elements. Read that again. Think about it. You get more data, better data, with little or no effort - other than what your web analytics vendor have to do. When analytics experts spots an enterprise web property with nothing more than a plain vanilla tag, it creates a tiny giggle. It shouldn?t be that way though, that simple tag should be able, through settings, to adopt and read Microformats, so that it becomes a whole lot more sophisticated - and that without ANY web analytics tracking script hacking. Using this idea, the extreme scenario, will be that anything else BUT plain vanilla tagging is laughable, simply because you will overwrite semantic rich information. Example...<br/><div align='right'>2009-12-21 19:01:28</div>

Where in the World is Dennis Mortensen ?

I should ask (and probably answer) that question more often, if not for the readers of this blog, then at least just to make sure my Mom is up to speed. :-) So come and find me in this December version of ?Where’s Waldo?? ? I would love to meet up for a nerdy chat about Analytics or Media. Drinks are on me! You are most welcome to connect on Tripit (thus increasing your chance of getting that Mojito) .. Dec. 01 ? New York: Speaking and Socializing at Stratigent YWA Analytics event Dec. 03 ? New York: Speaking about Bootstrapping vs. Venture Funding at ULS Dec. 07 ? Chicago: Speaking on Analytics & Attribution at SES / (my comments) Dec. 08 - Chicago: SES Authors Book Signings Event (12:00 in the exhibit hall) Dec. 10 ? San Francisco: Customer Meetings Dec. 10 ? Sunnyvale: back to Yahoo! home base Dec. 11 ? Mountain view: Speaking on Metrics for Success at SDForum .. Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-29 20:58:46</div>

Join Stratigent (and Yahoo!) for an evening of insights, cocktails and networking in New York City

Hello everybody. Stratigent (a YWACN partner) is doing a Yahoo! Web Analytics event in New York City (actually in MY office on 18th street) next week, 1st December. Here is some of the official wording: (hmmm, so I am an news aggregator now?) Join Stratigent and Yahoo! Analytics for an evening of insights, cocktails and networking at the Yahoo offices in New York City. Learn how enterprise organizations are gaining new customer insights by leveraging Yahoo! Web Analytics as a highly customizable web analytics tool. Uncover hidden ROI as Bill Bruno of Stratigent shares best practices for deriving maximum value from your analytics program. This exclusive event is hosted by Stratigent, an official Yahoo! Web Analytics Consulting Network member in conjunction with Yahoo! Web Analytics. Highlights include: The Future of Analytics: Discover how online marking measurement and optimization is evolving and learn what it takes to keep your business ahead of the curve Best Practices for Deriving Value from Analytics: Bill Bruno, VP of Business Development and Technology at Stratigent. Yahoo! Web Analytics Product Demo: Presented by Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo! and author of Data-Driven Insights with Yahoo! Web Analytics Networking and Cocktails: Connect with analytics professionals in the area and speak with the Analytics experts of Stratigent and Yahoo! Registration to this invite-only event is complimentary. To request an invitation (while seats remain) contact Jenny Kimbley via email: jenny.kimbley@stratigent.com. Anywho.. Happy Thanksgiving. :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-25 16:04:17</div>

Search Engine de-Optimization ..and the bogus celebration of yet another Google organic search lottery winner

I am preparing my Search Analytics talk for Search Engine Strategies on December 7th at 10:30 in Chicago ? which includes smart folks likes Jim Sterne and Matthew Bailey on the panel. This is the outline in which I am asked to talk: ?Cut to the chase! Use analytics tools to get the specific answers you need about your search marketing campaign’s economic performance, your users’ on-site behaviors, and how to look for major red flags in traffic patterns. This slate of experts will keep you focused rather than poring through hundreds of pages of meaningless statistics.? I know this is the usual promotional event pitch, and that?s OK. The easy response (presentation) would have been a focus around the magic, one can pull out of behavioral data in conjunction with search data. And that would be OK as well. I was, however, reading an article from Jacques Warren [1], who as a web analyst is as smart as they come, and during the post he concludes the following: ?Google organic accounted for 65% of all visits, 89,5% in December, 87% in January, and 84% so far in February. That?s only one search engine (and its various properties)! In a word, we LOVE Google.? [2] I decided to use that as my outset and I in particular focused on what I bolded above (the capital letters are his). Before I move on, let me be clear that this is not a bashing of Mr. Warren, by no means. His post, and specifically the above comment, in combination with my talk in Chicago, just happened to trigger something in me, to finally utter my concern around the unfair relationship between content owners and search engines. This includes, what I believe to be a set of unhealthy search success metrics, or for some people, even a naïve belief in a search engine friendship. Any other person, might just agree on how fantastic the traffic influx from Google is, in the above example, and continue to thrive on the euphoria of that - and perhaps even apply additional search engine optimization processes across multiple search engines and aggregators in regards to new content. But doesn?t this seem wrong to you, that we celebrate yet another winner of the Google organic search lottery ? If I ran a business where most my revenue, if perhaps not all of it, depended on visitors to my site, I would be very dissatisfied to the extent of concerned by the fact that my life was in the hands of a random search engine. To marginally illustrate my point, but mostly for us to continue the debate, let?s have...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-23 16:22:26</div>

Tracking Products Viewed - Web Analytics

“I’m loving your book, it’s proving very helpful in getting me up to speed on YWA. I noticed this morning that on page 90 there *might* be a mistake in the code example.” - James Dutton. That?s a first, and not that I am surprised, but James found a mistake on page 90 in my Yahoo! Web Analytics Book ? minor and repeated on the next page in correct form, BUT I still own him a free Diet Coke in New York for pointing it out. Here is the section from the Book ? I highlighted the error and added in the correct deployment syntax. Tracking Products Viewed I have been very focused on the nirvana of e-commerce actions, the sale, but I am sure you agree with me that there are many steps and many actions before getting to this point. You can track any number of steps and any number of activities with Yahoo! Web Analytics. The tool has a few hard-coded events, however, that come right out of the box?one of them is the unique action value called PRODUCT_VIEW. The Product View variable provides you with the opportunity to expand your merchandising knowledge to activities, very close to the top of the sales funnel. In this way, you can see how often potential customers view your products, which products are the most popular, and whether a positive connection exists between product campaigns and product views. Remember that selling only provides you with successful customer behavior, whereas events before the sale occurs can provide you with very powerful insights on unsuccessful customer outcomes. The product view can be used in a number of ways, and you will even see some use of it as a proxy for products added to cart or sales (if they do not have volume enough to perform signifi cant campaign analysis on that parameter). To enable this type of tracking, you apply the value PRODUCT_VIEW to the ACTION variable on all the pages where you display products: Version 4 var ACTION=?PRODUCT_VIEW?; var _S_SKU=?DM112899?; Version 5 YWATracker.setAmount(?PRODUCT_VIEW?); //Correct: YWATracker.setAction(?PRODUCT_VIEW?); YWATracker.setSKU(?DM112899?); The pages where this code is applied do not have to be unique and in fact rarely are. Products are displayed on product marketing pages, technical specification pages, in search results, in recommendation boxes?and I am sure you have even more suggestions. I recommend you enhance your document-naming and -grouping skills to create opportunities to split different product views over the site. Which leads to our...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-17 18:22:07</div>

Analytics guru ?or just a Jerk!

As I walk cheerfully down 6th Avenue, on my way to the Yahoo! 18th street office this Saturday morning, I stop by a red light, well, first, because you are supposed to (I believe), but mostly because I am hand in hand with my two daughters. In this obviously selfish action by me, I slow down a chap behind me, who in all his wisdom, lets me know what a jerk I am! I?ll be honest with you ? this is not the first time somebody on the streets of New York have let me know their feelings about my traffic maneuvering choices ;-) This got me thinking about how we choose to label each other, and how that is coming through the recent launched twitter lists. So before assembling a posse and hunting down my new friend from JCPenny; I thought I would collect all the lists my twitter followers use for me. You can see the result of this in a tag cloud below (I used wordle.net to create it): So it seems like, I might actually be less of a Jerk and more of an analytics person. Personally I am fond of the terms sexy and data nerd. Ha!. (Perhaps they are actually conflicting labels though.. hmm). The other cool thing is that my blog is supposed to be about Analytics, Media and Marketing. Close eh? Have a great weekend.. I am off for a walk around Chelsea (with the same two girls and traffic standards). Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-07 21:48:03</div>

Expanding the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network

Note: The following is a post by Charlie Holbech, who is a Sr. Yahoo! Web Analytics Manager out of Los Angeles. Charlie was the one running the Partners division (and half our revenue I might say) at IndexTools. As I am sure most of you recall we (Yahoo!) launched Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN) at the beginning of August 2009. Since then we have been literally inundated with applications (apply here) from all corners of the globe from smart, enthusiastic and extremely analytics savvy consulting firms. These companies excel in their various regions around the world and provide an invaluable analytics service to their customers in areas such as: Vendor Selection Training Tracking code Audits Tracking code Deployment from scratch Universal Tagging solutions And of course Consulting and Optimization!! Expanding YWACN So today sees further expansion to YWACN and I?m extremely pleased to announce an additional 20 Consulting firms have been accepted into the network - taking the total YWACN membership to 71! We have focused primarily on expanding members in markets where, until today, we lacked representation and are very happy to have a fantastic group of experienced companies onboard. We are also welcoming a number of folks from existing markets who, based on their experience, we simply couldn?t say no to! All these consultants are a substantial compliment to the Network, have a breadth and depth of insight into their various regions that is an invaluable resource to YWA users and are, most importantly, charismatic and passionate analytics individuals! If a 60 second ?get me pumped about web analytics? pitch were a pre-requisite to joining YWACN these guys would nail it! So without further ado, our new consultants are: www.resultrix.com, www.pop.us, www.vml.com, www.bell.ca, www.techwyse.com, www.purevisibility.com, www.cadastra.com.br, www.interactivo.cl, www.mvconsultoria.com, www.neoogilvy.com, www.sqliagency.com, www.clicmetrics.com, www.overalia.com, www.hub-sales.com, www.optimics.cz, www.queromedia.be, www.freshegg.com, www.iihnordic.dk, www.wattproject.com and www.orangevalley.nl Full contact details for all of our Consultants are located on the YWA website. Welcome all of you, we?re looking forward to an exciting 2010! Here?s a snapshot from our YWACN Homepage: Yes, there are still areas of green remaining :-) But seriously, we?ll be expanding the network further in 2010 and are always looking for Consultants in Cities and...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-05 03:00:18</div>

Final: Microsite Analytics White Paper

Last week I posted a Microsite Analytics white paper preview note ? and was happy to see a dozen something folks making the effort in going through the early version as I emailed it out. I would like to thank the following in particular: Mihaela Popa, Emer Kirrane, David Kopp and Rune Flint for their great input! I created a separate download page, so take it away guys - Microsite Analytics White Paper. Not convinced it?s worth your time; here’s the abstract and the introduction: Abstract Measuring and reporting on the impact of a Microsite without taking into consideration how it uniquely differs from the expected and somewhat associated parent website is an error! This white paper points to a number of analysis items which will facilitate the right mindset for Microsite analysis and reporting - if this type of thinking is not applied, you will at best provide flawed reporting to your customers and at worst suggest actions that will negatively impact the Microsite. Introduction Any online endeavor such as a Microsite is created with a business objective in mind, and for this business objective, one must have a set of measurable KPIs and very likely a set of associated metrics that can be used to optimize the KPIs. This is a given and, with this assumption in mind, as I take you through this white paper, you must understand that this is not meant to provide you with an exhaustive list of Microsite specific KPIs. Measuring and reporting on the impact of a Microsite without taking into consideration how it uniquely differs from the expected and somewhat associated parent website is an error! This white paper points to a number of analysis items which will facilitate the right mindset for Microsite analysis and reporting - if this thinking is not applied, you will at best provide flawed reporting to your customers and at worst suggest actions that will negatively impact the Microsite. That being said, this is neither a complete reporting and analysis guide nor a template for you to replicate to your next customer - it is a way of thinking which you must apply to your own Microsite reporting. For every three suggestions I provide with regard to reporting or insight on Microsites, there should be another three as obvious recommendations from you, based upon the introduced mindset. A Microsite (and it goes by many different names) is an autonomous website, focused on a smaller subject matter. It is usually detached from the parent website and the only...<br/><div align='right'>2009-10-09 20:08:25</div>

Preview: Microsite Analytics White Paper

I am adding the finishing touch to my Microsite Analytics White Paper and I would love any feedback I can get. Should you have the time to flip through a twenty something pages draft (let’s call it v0.95), let me know, and I?ll send you a draft-copy to look at - especially if you are at an agency and report on the effectiveness of client Microsites. If you subscribe via my personal RSS feed, Email feed or Twitter feed for that matter ? you should see a notice come out in the next coming weeks, in regards to the final Microsite Analytics White Paper. The white paper will be posted as a PDF download. Abstract “Measuring and reporting on the impact of a Microsite without taking into consideration how it uniquely differs from the expected and somewhat associated parent website is an error! This white paper points to a number of analysis items which will facilitate the right mindset for Microsite analysis and reporting - if this type of thinking is not applied, you will at best provide flawed reporting to your customers and at worst suggest actions that will negatively impact the Microsite.“- White Paper: Microsite Analytics - Dennis R. Mortensen, Yahoo Inc. Cheers :-) / Dennis (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-10-01 17:26:34</div>

the Adobe Omniture marriage is a pipe dream

I and the web analytics Industry in general was flabbergasted by the announcement of the Adobe Omniture marriage and there?s been a big ?huh?? debate going on since; which I see no reason to elaborate on. Eric does (as usual) some good analysis/commentary in his two posts Thoughts on Adobe + Omniture and More color on Adobe + Omniture. However; I would like to set free my long term belief about this, as I can see some positive momentum in justifying the deal - people getting lulled into thinking that it might make sense (it does not). To put it politely, I am probably less optimistic about the value of this particular acquisition than most are (quite honestly, I believe it?s broken). Though, I am happy to see that we all agree about this not being a deal about revenue and/or bettering the overall margin of Adobe product sales, which is something Omniture cannot help with, quite the opposite actually. So it must be about the technology, and there is no doubt about the fact that uniting content and tracking is an inevitable next step for the analytics industry. That said, in the desire to unite content and tracking (and the subsequent optimization) I assume that those involved (Adobe) understand that the current data-collection methodology ? primarily Script/Pixel tagging ? is a HACK. It was never intended to be more than an intermediate delivery mechanism and a way of circumventing the IT department until we got true access to the data stream. So the future should not, and is unlikely to, include a, as some put it ?installing tags? task (something which we debated vigorously at X change earlier this month). If we think about the task (detailed event tracking) at hand for a second and extrapolate today?s web-page status into a future of web-applications (which is happening as we speak). In this scenario we must also accept the arrival of a Web OS of a kind ? which could be the browser, which is what we are seeing today, but it could also be something like Chrome OS or a Adobe AIR permutation if you like (to keep a positive tone in this post). In this scenario, which I again believe is inevitable, we have some history to draw our conclusions from, which is, if I use MS Windows as an example, 25 years of event handling and logging. You would NEVER dream of tagging a windows application, why?, because the whole application is built around an event log which you can choose to tap into if needed. The Web OS (in whatever shape or form it arrives) will most...<br/><div align='right'>2009-09-23 16:07:44</div>

Kindle DX Edition of my Yahoo! Web Analytics book

Amazon just sent me a note as the Author of the above mentioned analytics book repeating that: ?This title has complex layouts and has been optimized for reading on Kindle DX’s larger screen?. First. I am a huge Kindle fan and seeing the DX optimization is just absolutely fantastic! But wait, oh no, I don?t actually own a Kindle myself. Anyone out there who own a Kindle or even better actually owns a Kindle DX? .. or perhaps this is just a sign from God (or whomever) that I must go buy the device! :-) Amazon Kindle link: Yahoo! Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights (Kindle Edition). n.b. Optimized for means: “This title has complex layouts and has been optimized for reading on Kindle DX’s larger screen, but can still be viewed on other Kindle devices.” Cheers :-) / Dennis R. Mortensen (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-09-18 16:45:21</div>

Which Demographic is Driving Twitter?s Popularity? Not senior citizens

Before we get started, let it be clear that I LOVE the New York Times, heck, I like just saying the word; the New York Times ? and as a data geek I in particular love their data visualization unit (feel free to pack your bags and walk down to 18th street for a Coke at Y!). BUT in today?s online version of the paper, an Article by Claire Cain Miller titled: Who?s Driving Twitter?s Popularity? Not Teens, I missed a stronger dataset than the casual reference to comScore. However; This made me curious (which might actually be good journalism) - and I decided to do a bit of additional analysis on the question - with a twist. Which Demographic is Driving Twitter’s popularity; where popularity is measured by the visitors they send me (the publisher). I looked at 2,394,753 referring visits to 7 unique US News Media sites (Q3 2009). A dataset which is not supposed to represent the twitter universe as a whole, but it is confined to one vertical, and as such can be transposed to the general world; PLUS reading news is after all a pretty general activity. I added in the Age distribution from Google referrers, to provide some additional context. Find the exciting result below: Find the table based data to the chart below. I rounded all percentages because, well, I wanted them to fit on one line. :-) 0-17 18-24 25-34 35-54 55+ Average Age distribution, all referrers 1% 6% 20% 47% 25% Age distribution for Google referrers 2% 9% 23% 46% 21% Age distribution for Twitter referrers 1% 13% 31% 43% 11% So which Demographic is Driving Twitter’s popularity? where popularity is measured by the visitors they send me (the publisher). Definitely Not Teens as the New York Times correctly pointed out today, BUT neither Senior citizens. If anything Middle Adulthood is the term we should use for the demographic driving Twitter?s success. Cheers :-) / Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-08-27 00:24:08</div>

Using Web Analytics Insights to Sell More

I did a Presentation and Talk in Boston not long along (Internet Retailer conference in June), about how e-commerce (store) owners could easily take advantage of their analytics package. It ended up being two simple and very actionable ideas (tricks), which I believe most folks should be able to take advantage of. I wrote two separate posts on this: Using a Page Revenue Participation metric for Conversion Optimization Using Web Analytics Metric Alerts for Search Phrase Opportunity Insight BUT I just made the effort (it is summer after all) in uploading the actual presentation to slideshare; a presentation which you can find embedded below - the post’s hold my commentary, whereas the presentation only served as a backdrop for my song and dance show. Using Web Analytics Insights To Sell More View more documents from Dennis Mortensen. Cheers :-) / Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-08-25 15:33:47</div>

Cookie Survey Results (follow-up) - Lack of knowledge of what Cookies are is not a barrier to acceptance

Note: The following is a post by Emer Kirrane, who is a Yahoo! Web Analytics Account Manager out of the Budapest office. Go connect with her @eXXX - as I said before, she?s smart! I recently surveyed 100 ?internet-savvy? people to understand their attitude towards cookies and whether or not they considered cookies to be a privacy or security concern. As a follow-up, I surveyed another group. This time, my focus was the general internet user, who would not be expected to understand the use of cookies. Getting to my target of 100 took slightly more time in this case as the respondents were not as engaged with the subject! The survey was posted on a group unrelated to web analytics on LinkedIn.com, on Facebook.com, as comments on some blog posts on the subject of internet privacy, and in 15 random categories on answers.yahoo.com. It was also circulated by email (thanks Andy, Mom, and friends!). To my knowledge, the respondents came from at least 8 countries. In my previous survey, I asked 5 questions which assumed at least a basic understanding of cookies. In this survey, because I could not make the same assumptions, I asked 6 slightly differently-phrased questions, most of which had a yes/no answer and an optional comment field. The Results 1) I know that cookies are put on my computer by websites that I visit. YES 84% NO 16% The vast majority of those surveyed knew that cookies were placed on their machines, although several of those who responded ?Yes? were under the impression that cookies were only placed by certain types of sites, like forums or social networks. 2) I know what cookies are and understand what they are used for. YES 57% NO 43% Although more than half of the respondents claimed to understand cookies and their usage, quite a few of those who answered ?Yes? felt that cookies were solely used for website preferences or helped to load a page faster. The overall understanding seemed rather vague (some considered them to be rather benign viruses) though many grasped the basic concept. It is interesting that although 84% know that cookies are placed on their computers when they visit a website, not all of those have tried to find out what cookies actually are. 3) I know the difference between 1st-party and 3rd-party cookies YES 35% NO 65%. Given the fact that 57% of respondents claimed to understand cookie usage, it is interesting to note that only 35% knew the difference between 1st-party and 3rd-party cookies. However, this...<br/><div align='right'>2009-08-13 16:15:35</div>

LAUNCH: Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network

Today, we are launching the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN) (please note that the link might not be active just yet). I don’t know about you, but I personally think this is beyond exciting, and I am thrilled to see us take this (almost) final step towards full integration into Yahoo! What is YWACN? This is a network of third party companies with expertise in deriving insight from Web Analytics AND deploying Yahoo! Web Analytics in particular. The purpose of this network is amongst other things to help our clients get the best out of the tool - and hopefully also help us spread the gospel of YWA. It might even alleviate the stress on my personal in-box! You are more than welcome to compare this in idea to the GAAC network - there, I’ve said it! :-) Who are the Consultants? A lot of the consultants are legacy IndexTools partners - and thus a bunch of folks who have years and years of experience in the actual technology, from before we turned purple. They are… drum roll please: countquest.se, tribal-im.com, nordicemarketing.com, receptional.com, naviatech.fi, netvantagemarketing.com, e-dialog.at, Leads2Business.nl, milesbennett.co.uk, tricomb2b.com, sems.it, explido.de, booming.de, latitudegroup.com, emerite.cz, astrups.com, snowvalley.com, b-found.no, epsilonium.com, netprofiler.nl, acronym.com, networkintellect.com, coloradowebsolutions.com, contentmetrics.de, deducta.dk, eformation.de, e-interactive.es, eurorscg-riley.co.uk, engineready.com, inflow.dk, intellignos.com, onetomarket.nl, lbigroup.be, positive-thinking.co.uk, stonetemple.com, sundancemedia.ca, webcertain.com, studiocappello.it, zunch.com and creuna.dk. We even added a few additional rock stars to that: webanalyticsdemystified.com, semphonic.com, stratigent.com, sapient.com, purpleclick.com, thesedays.com, bitbang.it and insightr.com. 48 YWACN partners all in all - and you should be able to see (once the link is activated) a full list of YWACN partners on the YWA site. CALL them today, email them, tweet them .. heck, invite them out for dinner, they deserve it! (if you haven’t noticed, they are your new best friends) Can I join? Perhaps ;-) If you really excel in the field of web analytics and truly are one of those consultancies that help derive actionable insights from web analytics for your customers - we would love to hear from you. In return and as a Member of this exclusive, global professional network of Yahoo! Web Analytics consultants you will...<br/><div align='right'>2009-07-29 06:25:08</div>

Cookie Survey Results - Convenience outweighs most of the worries

Note: The following is a guest post by Emer Kirrane, who is a Yahoo! Web Analytics Account Manager out of the Budapest office. Go connect with her @eXXX - she’s smart! This week, I ran a survey on the subject of cookies, cookie deletion and privacy and the results were quite interesting. The survey was run online and had 100 respondents who can generally be assumed to be at least vaguely Internet-savvy. It was sent out to and passed around by Twitter followers who are, in the main, linked to analytics/SEO/SEM etc; to the IT department of a large bank; to the IT department of a small-town local authority; to the staff in the Yahoo! Web Analytic Hungarian office, most of whom are programmers. Respondents came from at least 6 countries that I know of ? very possibly more. I had considered broadening the scope of the survey to include those who use the Internet but cannot be considered to be terribly clued up on issues like targeting, tracking, cookies etc, (which would have led to completely different survey questions), but on a quick verbal survey of a small group of those who would be considered to fall into this category, I felt that the results would lose focus. I.e. most did not know what cookies were, what the difference between 1st- and 3rd- party cookies were, and those that did had were not entirely sure what they were used for. Therefore, for my purposes, I assume that this category would generally leave cookie treatment to their default browser settings. I think this group should be treated in a separate survey, which I will leave for another day. The survey comprised 5 questions, most of which were Yes / No with an optional “Why?” comment. The Results 1) I block 3rd-party cookies. YES 36% NO 64% Of those who answered “Yes” and commented, the main concern appeared to be around trust and privacy. There was a general consensus that 3rd-party cookies were unsolicited and set by “snoopers“. There was also some concern around the fact that something, however innocuous, was being set on the visitor’s hard drive. Those who answered “No” were generally far more blasé in their language. 3rd-party cookies were nothing to worry about and could always be deleted if there was some concern about their origin. 2) I block 1st-party cookies. YES 6% NO 94% The overwhelming consensus here was that 1st-party cookies did more good than harm. Convenience (in terms of recognition, logins etc) was cited as...<br/><div align='right'>2009-07-22 21:58:36</div>

Using Web Analytics Metric Alerts for Search Phrase Opportunity Insight

When people talk about reporting on data, they usually envision a scenario where the analytics user traverse the application from one report to the other. Which might or might not be OK. But I am sure we agree on this just being one way of communicating the information in the data we?ve collected. We can communicate this information in anything from reports, dashboards, scheduled emails, documents to presentation slides ? and no one channel is per definition better than the other. The channel is simply something which is chosen as a best possible medium to support the goals you must have in distributing this information to begin with. That said; I would like to advocate for another communication channel, the Metric Alert Email, because it tends to help focus on metrics that matter, be on time, insightful and for the most part almost actionable as is. Instead of pitching a web analytics tool feature, I?ve create a setup where we use Web Analytics Metric Alerts to illuminate a set of organic Search Phrase Opportunities. There is a whole industry dedicated to keyword research and insight, which I think is just splendid. Alerts is not to replace any of that, this is more to show you how a simple thing like alerts can create a lot of value inside your organization; which is interesting, if you don?t necessarily have a full-time analyst work your data day and night. So HOW do I use Web Analytics Metric Alerts to create Search Phrase Opportunity Insight ? 1. Go find your most popular search phrases report, which in most tools, means a report that shows a sorted list of all the search phrases that delivered traffic to your website. The list is usually sorted by visits, which is also the case in the below screen shot. This is, as I am sure you?ve heard repeated a hundred times, a traditional long tail distribution. Meaning that we have a few keywords bringing us a lot of traffic - and an abundance of keywords which drives little traffic to our site, individually, but in aggregate makes up a large traffic influx. I don?t necessarily think that this report, holds much insight by itself without further analysis. This is, being very blunt, more a report that we do for your entertainment. 2. Let?s assume, just for a second, that you are in retail and that you are driving online revenue. If that?s not the case, then the following examples and conclusions are still very much valid, but you would of course have to substitute the Revenue metric, with another success metric...<br/><div align='right'>2009-07-20 16:42:36</div>

The Analytics Food Chain - Panel from OMMA Metrics & Measurement - VIDEO

Hmm.. :-) It seems like I’m in a jolly summer VIDEO mode. @widgetgirl did a post which includes a VIDEO of The Analytics Food Chain panel we did at the OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference in New York on June 9th. You can go to the original post here: http://widgetanalytics.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/the-analytics-food-chain-panel-from-omma-metrics-measurement/ I embedded the video below; for your entertainment: Panel: Monster, Yahoo!, Razorfish, Hitwise and Neo@Ogilvy. Cheers :-) / Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-07-10 18:35:34</div>

Yahoo Web Analytics in 30 minutes (VIDEO)

I recorded a 30+ minute DEMO (screencast) of YWA version 9.5 the other day - and am publishing the outcome below. The tone of the Video is less advert-like and much more educational; or this is at least something I tried to capture. I believe the video is a great appetizer for how we approach web analytics from a feature point of view - and if you are not yet fully comfortable with YWA, I am most confident this video will shine some light on the product. Enjoy :-) The above screencast is reduced in size, simply to fit this blog page, but you can click through to the original sized (990*938) screenscast, should you want the full experience. :-) Yahoo Web Analytics in 30 minutes (VIDEO - HD) If you made it through the video, and were pleased, you might be happy to hear that we plan to do a number of 3 min. videos focused on insight - not features. Cheers :-) / Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-06-29 18:07:19</div>

Using a Page Revenue Participation metric for Conversion Optimization

Optimizing for better online conversion is, for the most part, something we do by examining our content and its layout, such as landing pages and immediate pages in our funnels ? and hopefully applying some sort of testing methodology. This is a standard practice I most certainly agree upon, but I also believe that one needs to look outside this, sometimes, closed loop of pages. I suggest, as an alternative, that you try using a Page Revenue Participation metric for your next Conversion Optimization routine, as it might reveal opportunities away from your traditional funnel. When debating this, please note that, I am purely talking about Controlled On site Content, as defined by the Online Business Measurement Quadrant. The reason for brining this up; I only just returned from Boston, where I attended the Internet Retailer conference, and probably even more exciting the Yahoo! Merchant Summit, which was delivered in conjunction with the show (On that note, the ystoreblog folks did a respectable pre-show interview about YWA 9.5 and my book). Anywho; the merchant owners had some of the most honest analytics questions I?ve heard I in a long time. You simply cannot wow these folks with a posh looking four-dimensional bubble chart ? they wanted to know exactly HOW we are going to help them make more money!!) ? Refreshing! A small disclaimer; all of the below screen-shots are from Yahoo! Web Analytics, but you have the same metric available in e.g. Omniture Site Catalyst and even though Google Analytics have a different term ($ index) and slightly different calculation, it is the same optimization attitude. So how do I use a Page Revenue Participation metric for my next Conversion Optimization routine ? 1. Go find your most popular pages report, which in most tools, means a report that shows a sorted list of all your pages, with the one receiving the most page views on top. By most standards, this report does not provide much insight, unless you derive your revenue from page views (such as advertising) - fair enough, then this might not be a bad proxy for $money. 2. Customize this particular report in a way, so that you get your tools revenue participation metric appended to it. In Yahoo! Web Analytics the Revenue Participation metric resides under the sales group under metrics, when using the Custom Report wizard. 3. The below figure, shows a standard most popular pages report, which have had the revenue participation metric added to it. This is almost per...<br/><div align='right'>2009-06-22 20:06:06</div>

Tomorrows Web Analytics Technology and Usage

What is the current state of web analytics tools and their usage today? - and to what extent should we expect today to provide us comfort for the future. What is the current state of web analytics tools and their usage today? - and to what extent should we expect today to provide us comfort for the future. That is a grand questions and I am not suggesting that I hold all the answers. I do however believe that this is something we, the Web Analytics software vendors, need to ask ourselves on behalf of the entire community from time to time. I suggest and advocate excellence on today?s current 3 steps of Web Analytics usage: Today 1. Collect Data 2. Report on Data 3. Insight from Data I don?t think any of these primary tasks have been solved to the complete satisfaction of our users yet, and I am confident in speaking on behalf of all web analytics software vendors on this. Something as basic as collecting data, is a huge challenge, especially if you think of every one of the Online Business Measurement Quadrants being important to your online endeavors. Reporting on data is far from being solved as well, and providing people a login and password to the analytics interface, is in most cases more harmful than good. Finally, I don?t think we can honestly say that we get all the insight we expect from our data just yet. However; I do believe that all of these point are well understood and that we are making great progress. That said; we must look towards tomorrow and apply new (or evolutionary) thinking to what we do today. I personally advocate the next two steps clustered around the following: Future 4. Recommendation 5. Automation Don?t get to hung up on the words themselves, that?s not the important part. When I talk about recommendation, I want you to envision us, the analytics vendors (and this might not be your traditional vendor), to apply our own modeling on your data, coming up with recommendations, for what you should do next. When I talk about Automation, I believe that you should be able to have your analytics technology (or API like offspring) act upon recommendations without your direct interference. This is all part of moving you towards the true data driven organization, where we input the objective and let data speak for how we get there - which is where I supposed you are headed? We do have players that do some parts of the above, but not to the degree that I can confidently say that we started these steps. I am the International Keynote at...<br/><div align='right'>2009-05-20 19:09:12</div>

BOOK LAUNCH - Yahoo! Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights

Well, today?s the day! The book is out: Yahoo! Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights. I am super excited about this - and even better, this coincides beyond perfect with the recent launch of YWA 9.5. I did an interview over at Web Analytics World, which includes some decent commentary about the book and who it is intended for. A few metrics for people as nerdy as I am. I announced the agreement with Wiley on Sunday July 6 2008, started writing the book in the fall of 2008 and spent about 5 months and 370 hours writing it, before turning it over to Wiley recently. Another fun trivia is; that my good friend Avinash (from GOOGLE) wrote the foreword. (Thanks Mate!) You can go preview the book on Amazon, and also on Google Book Search. AND should you fall in love, this is where you can go buy the book: YWA book at Wiley.com YWA book at Amazon.com YWA book at Barnes&Noble.com YWA book at Borders A bit of information on the three parts of the book: (..and yes, I look a tad too serious on that picture) My philosophy is that you should focus on three different but equally important tasks; A) Collecting Data, B) Reporting on Data and C) Deriving insight from Data. Dependant ones vantage point, one or more of the chapters will be in focus. I have divided the book into three parts to reflect these broad tasks. Part 1, ?Advanced Web Analytics Installation,? consists of Chapters 1 through 5. The focus is on data collection. True competitive advantage in web marketing comes from collecting the right data, but also, and no less important, from configuring your web analytics tool in such a way that you can derive insight from the data. Part 1 features detailed code examples that webmasters or developers can apply directly. Marketing people and executives will learn the opportunities they can demand from this tool. I also show you how to add reporting dimensions to the predefined report structures for fantastic filtering and segmentation opportunities. Part 2, ?Utilizing an Enterprise Web Analytics Platform,? encompasses Chapters 6 through 10, where we focus on reports. Creating reports is an easy feat, but remember that reports are never better than the data you collect. You need an exceedingly good understanding of how to work with your data. Part 2 is less technical than the first part. In it I?ll teach you to use your reporting toolbox to provide targeted answers to specific questions, such as ?How much revenue did we make...<br/><div align='right'>2009-05-06 21:55:51</div>

Yahoo! Web Analytics 9.5 Launched

I am extremely happy to announce the new edition of Yahoo! Web Analytics (#YWA) which is rolling out to clients as we speak (Y!Store post) - an upgrade process which should be finished by end of May for everybody, you know, if we are on schedule and all. Beyond all the work one would expect in regards to general backend and scalability issues, we also had the opportunity to implement some exciting NEW features, such as: New Demographic Dimensions New Psychographic Dimensions New Charting Capabilities New Path Analysis New Negative-Segmentation opportunities New version 5 tracking code (I describe the upgrade in my Yahoo! Web Analytics book) ..and 30 other smaller updates like e.g. native PDF export, use up to 50 actions (goals), introduction of 38 custom fields - and purplefication of the tool, well, you probably don?t care too much about the latter. :-) The really exciting fact is that, the Demographics Data is not just presented in pretty reports, but much more importantly, as information that you use to filter other reports with. (Note: You might remember this type of sampled data from Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics - link to Ian’s launch post) The dimensions are Age and Gender, which have the following properties: Age (0-17, 18-24, 25-34, 35-54 and 55+) Gender (Female, Male) The Psychographic Dimensions, which is called Interest Groups within Yahoo! Web Analytics, hold similar characteristics as Demographics, in the sense that you can filter and segment on this data. The Interests are categorized as follows: Automotive Consumer Packaged Goods Entertainment Finance Health Pharma Life Stages Miscellaneous Politics Retail Small Business and B2B Sports Technology Telecommunications Travel Please note that the data in reports, based on these two new exciting dimensions, are based on Yahoo! Visitor Interest data and may not be available for all your website visitors. YWA generate the output based on a sample of your visitors with their behavioral data, and YWA will only display the numbers meeting a certain confidence level. This confidence level reflects how confident YWA are that the sample accurately reflects the makeup of your site visitors. You can actually reduce this confidence level to see more data, where you of course have to understand that by lowering the confidence level you are viewing numbers that one should be less confident are accurate for your actual site. We also upgraded, as you can see from the screenshots below,...<br/><div align='right'>2009-04-28 15:17:22</div>

Vendors selected for the Forrester Web Analytics Wave 2009

Forrester Research is updating their Web Analytics Wave Research from 2007, which back then evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of eight Enterprise Web analytics products against 127 criteria. 8 Web Analytics vendors have been chosen for the new 2009 report - and I am happy to let you know that Yahoo! and our product Yahoo! Web Analytics is included. This is great validation for YWA in regards to the positioning as a Enterprise Analytics tool, and it positively solidify the positive comments from the CMS Research document: Yahoo! Web Analytics Leaps Ahead of Google Analytics for Enterprise Use. The (2009) current 8 enterprise analytics players according to Forrester are: Omniture Coremetrics Webtrends Unica Nedstat Xiti Google Yahoo Let me include the 2007 status, so you have an understanding of who left and who entered. The new report, which is headed by John Lovett, will arrive (if on schedule) in July 2009. I for one am super excited to see the output of the report and I strongly suggest you go find it when published. The Forrester Wave?: Web Analytics, Q3 2007 Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of eight top Web analytics products against 127 criteria. Coremetrics came out as a Leader, with a product suite that balances power, usability, and strong customer service for firms that want a partner, not just a vendor ? especially in retail, travel, financial services, and media. Our analysis revealed that Omniture, Unica, Visual Sciences Visual Site, and WebTrends are also Leaders in the market by virtue of their powerful, complex platforms for enterprises with specialized data needs and a dedicated Web analytics team. Visual Sciences HBX is a Strong Performer, with one of the best user interfaces we saw and the option to overcome feature limitations by adding HBX Visual Workstation, a version of Visual Sciences’ advanced data analysis tool for HBX clients. Both ClickTracks and Google Analytics are Contenders, offering streamlined reporting, some of the industry’s best data visualizations, and a few analysis tools at a low price ? a good choice for small to midsized businesses, departments within large enterprises, and anyone just getting started with Web analytics. Cheers :-) @dennismortensen ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-04-23 18:06:59</div>

Yahoo! Web Analytics launched in Japan

I know that the last few posts have been light on analytics insight and more focused on news related information, my apologies, but there are a few points I would like to share about #YWA over next months. Today, just a simple note, for those who didn?t spot it yet, that the Web Analytics space have had bit of a shift in Japan. Yahoo! Web Analytics launched in Japan Digital Forest acquired by NTT Com I think this is great news and I am generally happy to see any market and its individual actors move towards data driven decision models. Even though I completely agree, that it is always about the people, we have seen again and again, that having the right tools available can kick-start the process. I am in particularly happy, as I spent time in Tokyo speaking and presenting, then IndexTools, now Yahoo! Web Analytics, to the fine folks a Yahoo! Japan. Furthermore, I actually participated in a round table debate at Emetrics with the head of Digital Forest a few years back, so all the best to them. This is all good news. I am unaware of the actual Google Analytics penetration in Japan (please enlighten me), which might be very different from the otherwise dominant position they have elsewhere in the world. As in Japan, the story is very much different, Yahoo! remain the top search engine, according to the latest comScore data, and are even growing faster. Fascinating, isn?t it? And then there was TWO! Eric ;-) Cheers dennis :-) ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-04-01 17:08:54</div>

Search Engine Strategies New York - Come say hi

This is a low priority post, so please skip this message, should you not be in New York this week. I am walking up to the Hilton now, so If you are in town for Search Engines Strategies New York 2009, do come by the Yahoo! booth and say hi! - I’ll be around most of Tuesday and Wednesday.. And I am of course super eager to talk about anything to do with Analytics and online marketing. I’ll be presenting YWA at the Yahoo! Agency day on Thursday, including some sneak peeks of the upcoming version. So if you are a SEM agency and have not signed up, go have a chat with your account Manager. I also noticed that Wiley advertised my new analytics book in the SES programme, so perhaps you can go pre-order it. AND THATS something we would want, right!? eh :-) Throw me an email, twitter message or reply to this post if I am not around. Cheers dennis. ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-03-24 13:43:10</div>

27 most popular Web Analytics blog posts of 2008

The 3 most popular blog posts from the 9 most influential Web Analytics bloggers ? All In all the 27 most popular Web Analytics post of 2008! Last Christmas, punch drunk on Scandinavian Glogg, I managed to create a 18 most popular Web Analytics blog posts of 2007 post. Based on that and my general Christmas euphoria, I decided to do a repeat of my little Elf endeavor. I asked each of the good people below to send me their 3 most popular posts of 2008… and here goes the list: Occam?s Razor by Avinash Kaushik: How To Excite People About Web Analytics: Five Tips. The ?Action Dashboard? (An Alternative To Crappy Dashboards) Tracking Off-line Conversions: Hope, Seven Best Practices, Bonus Tips Web Analytics Demystified by Eric Peterson: How Yahoo! buying IndexTools changes Web Analytics How to measure visitor engagement, redux What is your web analytics communication strategy? VisualRevenue by Dennis R. Mortensen The difference between a KPI and a Metric What and how to measure Social Networking websites Online Video Analytics - KPIs SemAngel by Gary Angel Two Cultures I Comment ? Therefore I AM?Satisfied/UnSatisified/Already Engaged Web Analytics - Behavioral Segmentation GrokDotCom by Bryan Eisenberg and co. 33 Free Tools to Make Your Website Better The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection How to Prioritize Your Optimization Lies damned lies by Ian Thomas The Online Advertising Value Chain How does adserving actually work? Ad Networks LunaMetrics by Robbin Steif and Co. (Jonathan, John and Traci) Advanced Segments vs Profiles & Filters Copying Goals in GA (A Firefox Extension) Linking AdWords and Analytics Web Analytics World by Manoj Jasra Online Competitive Intelligence Factors 5 Great (Free) Web Analytics Tools You Might Not Know About Yet Ultimate Google Analytics Resources Digital Alex by Alex Cohen: Campaign Tagging with Google Analytics A Basic Website and Marketing Analysis Method 7 Ways to Measure and Improve Your Website If I forgot you in my little list above, do throw me an email and I will make sure you are on the 2009 list. Fa la la la la..la la la la! Dennis :-) ...<br/><div align='right'>2008-12-11 15:04:03</div>

Web Analytics Transparency, Notification, Choice and Control to Visitors

As a start-up you rarely have the luxury to set standards and drive an industry. You simply cannot wait for the industry to catch up to your thinking, as some of your few advantages are SPEED and AGILITY - you bend the rules any way possible and then figure out how to comply when you grow up. :-) That said. It is wonderful and probably one of the most pleasurable elements of working for a public company like Yahoo!, that I can participate in setting the agenda for my industry. We took a decision which would require all users of Yahoo! Web Analytics to: 1. Disclose that they do web analytics and that it is done by Yahoo! 2. Provide a tracking opt-out link in their privacy policy There is no doubt that this is working against any potential adoption goals we have, BUT it is the right thing to do! AND I am very happy to see that we (WAA) in the voice of Jim Sterne, the Chairman of the Web Analytics Association, agree and endorse these steps taken by Yahoo! I honestly believe that it is inevitable that most web analytics providers will require that their clients abide by this approach as well. Cheers :-) Dennis Letter from the Chairman, November 20th, 2008 As an independent, non-profit organization, the WAA is sometimes asked for its position on relevant topics in the web analytics industry. Privacy is important to all of us as a misunderstanding of our tracking technologies can lead to distrust. Therefore, I wanted to share a recent question about page tagging and web beacons being mistaken for spyware as well as the WAA’s official response. In 1999, Seth Godin taught us that opt-in is the right way to treat people regarding email. At the core of opt-in is notification and choice. Now that the public is becoming more aware of passive tracking technologies, the Web Analytics Association believes that there needs to be a clear, visible way for site visitors to make the choice to opt-out of web analytics tracking. Transparency as to what information is being tracked and how the data is being used is a must. It is simply an inevitable future privacy requisite from visitors on your website. The Web Analytics Association endorses Yahoo! actions to provide transparency, notification, choice and control to visitors. Additionally, Yahoo! is taking this stance one step further by requiring and enforcing that websites who are using their web analytics tool disclose this fact to their visitors and provide an opt-out link for visitors who wish not to be tracked. We...<br/><div align='right'>2008-11-20 16:19:43</div>

Are Google Analytics Motion Charts just Eye Candy?

It is certainly eye-candy, but it is in point of fact more than just that. I agree is it is not great science as such, but it is unquestionably a statistically very valuable visualization methodology that presents insights that I personally find very difficult to spot otherwise. Example We all agree that trending a metric over time provides good insight. So traditionally (incl. Yahoo! Web Analytics) one would e.g. visualize a visit to sale conversion rate in a 2 dimensional bar chart, with conversion rate on a Y axis and time on a X axis. We also agree that looking at your data without segmenting it, is non-optimal, to the degree of useless. So for you to get true insight from the above example, I might choose to segment my visit to sale conversion rate by products, thus adding more values (we could call them separate segmented metrics). Let?s say we have a 1000 products. How would we visualize this then? We could choose the 50 best selling products for the period and perhaps do a trended line graph. This is messy, with far too many lines in one chart, but still doable. However as you probably noticed, we lost the trending on the product level, as we might have had a product spike within the period, but this is lost in the averaging of the 50 best selling products. Beyond this, imagine that we would apply revenue as a 3rd dimension. A third dimension could be applied as perhaps a color code to the bar chart or as the size of the circle in a bubble chart. But as you noticed again, this is a non-trendable visualization technique unless you add TIME (motion) as a dimension. Conclusion The fact is, that it becomes very difficult to trend many metrics (values derived from e.g. segmenting a metric) and or 3 or more dimensions without using techniques like Motion Charts. So I believe it is fair to say that motion charts are indeed very valuable and not just eye-candy - and they can potentially provide insights that one would not spot by shuffling through hundreds of e.g. bar charts in Yahoo Web Analytics or Omniture Site Catalyst for that matter. And valuable even for the happy amateur analyst (like me) who can get answers to curious questions like: ?how did thousands of organic search phrases trend over the last 6 months while having an eye for how many pages the visitors look at?. This does however not imply that this is your average visualization methodology and the new communication standard and choice for your upcoming management meetings. Because it is...<br/><div align='right'>2008-10-28 21:20:11</div>

IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics

We finally made it! or we at least made a very decent first step towards something bigger. Today, we announce the final integration step of IndexTools into Yahoo! and the re-branding of the IndexTools product. From today on forward our new name is; surprise: Yahoo! Web Analytics. This is exactly 5 months after we closed the acquisition and I think that is a tremendous accomplishment ? which actually includes me relocating to New York. :-) The re-branding also includes the launch of a new website and changes to the analytics product itself. It also includes a few enhancements to the tool, beyond making it scalable and compliant with the Yahoo! stack. From a user perspective, the first most noticeable fact is that we are moving to a single sign-on provided by Yahoo! and your account will be tied into your overall Yahoo! account. As part of this announcement, we are also opening up further access to the tool and are now actively supporting: Yahoo! Store Yahoo! Developers (Y!OS) Yahoo! Head Advertisers (Microsites) And for these, this is not just random access as in handing out 15000 logins, but well thought through integration with the platforms themselves. If you e.g. are a Yahoo! store owner you can enable enterprise-class web analytics by simply ticking a box and we then automatically inflate the correct tracking script variables at runtime. You are of course allowed to turn this off and take control yourself if needed. If you are a developer you will probably not even notice that it is us, as we fully instrument on the fly and create reports through the YWA API. All very exciting stuff I will elaborate on in future posts. As you can read, this is not a free-for-all-come-and-get-it launch, but a carefully planned controlled access launch, which will keep all of our functionality in place and even enhance it. There is no dumbing down of the tool in any of the engagements above - and we will be working hard to add to the list of customers who can get access. So expect the above list to grow rapidly over the course of 2008. Anywho; The official PR message is: Yahoo! Web Analytics will be released in stages to various business units and eco-system partners! yeah yeah. ? but when can YOU get access? From me, not today, unless you are part of the groups above or one of the groups we are about to engage with in Q4. But stay tuned! If you befriend Yahoo (e.g. become an advertiser) I am most sure you will end up with this tool. There is also a very active partner...<br/><div align='right'>2008-10-08 16:41:24</div>

Microsoft adCenter Analytics Discontinued ? and the future of FREE Web Analytics

My good friend Mel Carson just announced that Microsoft adCenter Analytics is to be Discontinued. They actually call it a close of beta program, but Don’t Kid a Kidder! This is it; Microsoft just announced that they don?t want to play in the FREE Web Analytics Market. A statement which immediately brings forth the question; what is the future of free web analytics? Before answering that; I want to insure that we all agree that free web analytics as a concept doesn?t really exist, the currency simply changed from USD to DATA. So you might not get an invoice from Google or Yahoo, but you most certainly pay by sending your data their way. I am not saying this is bad, I actually think it is an absolutely fair exchange. (I know I am biased) It is also known and accepted that one cannot really be a player in the online advertising market today without access to rich visitor data. Visitor data, that we typically see enhanced with extremely valuable conversion data, when coming as part of a web analytics deployment. Finally and not uninteresting is of course the actual value of the web analytics application itself, and thus the relationship between advertiser and media owner. It is believed that people who deploy some sort of campaign control mechanism, such as a web analytics solution, are likely to spend more on online advertising. Not only that, it is also important that the media owner, such as Google or Yahoo, gets the opportunity to present their own conversion stories. It seems silly if I advertised in the Wall Street Journal and had the New York Times tell me whether it was successful or not. Just like it seems silly that Yahoo! would let Google own the conversion story. Why do you think Google Analytics provides ?Last Click Campaign Attribution? and Yahoo! Web Analytics provides multiple models including ?Original Source Campaign Attribution?? - Because last click favors Search and Google owns search and thus present a positive picture of their channel, Original Source on the other hand favors Display and Yahoo! owns Display and thus present a positive picture of their channel - same data, two different stories. Knowing the above two facts about Data and Application, I am very confident in saying that the FREE Web Analytics Market is very much alive and kicking. And if I am rude, I might just conclude that Microsoft decided that they don?t need to present the conversion story (they don’t own any of the two major channels) and that they can...<br/><div align='right'>2009-03-12 20:56:16</div>

Yahoo! Web Analytics to get Faster (and better)

I have unfortunately been getting emails over the last half year, stating that Yahoo! Web Analytic is getting SLOW! That of course hurts, as we have been pretty proud of the speed of which we could actually provide real-time data back to you, while operating as IndexTools. There is no excuse in this and the emails, tweets and comments around the web are all pretty much true; it is slow, sometimes slow to the extent of being impracticable! What most people don?t know, is that all new customer accounts, especially the thousands and thousands of Yahoo! Store Customers, were setup within Yahoo! data centers and provisioned accordingly (so they are experiencing a much faster system). BUT all legacy IndexTools partners and clients were left in our Budapest data centers and we have not really increased capacity since the acquisition in May 2008. However; partners and direct clients have kept adding accounts every single day since then, which of course isn?t really fair to anybody, as the system only gets slower and slower. I am therefore really happy to say that we are finally ready to migrate all legacy clients and partners to Yahoo! Data Centers and thus making the final step away from our previous infrastructure. This is a process that starts over the next few weeks and will be executed during the coming months. You will not only be moved to faster data centers, but even more exciting, you will soon get the opportunity to use the updated version 5 of the tracking code. A tracking code which all NEW accounts use. IndexTools legacy clients are on Version 4. A shameless self promotion, and only because I spent 5 months on it;  is a note of me actually describing both Version 4 and Version 5 in my upcoming (April 2009) Yahoo! Web Analytics book. Making the transition from one to the other for our lovable IndexTools clients a whole lot easier. Here?s an example that explains the constraints as well as the freedom of the PENDING_SALE action value and shows the difference between version 4 and version 5 of the code: Version 4 var ACTION=?PENDING_SALE?; var _S_SKU=?DM112899; DM113834?; var _S_UNITS=?2;1?; var _S_AMOUNTS=?100.00;50.00?; var ORDERID=?10099803?; var AMOUNT=?USD150.00? Version 5 YWATracker.setAction(?PENDING_SALE?); YWATracker.setSKU(?DM112899; DM113834?); YWATracker.setUnits(?2;1?); YWATracker.setAmounts(?100.00;50.00?); YWATracker.setOrderId(?10099803?); YWATracker.setAmount(?USD150.00?); So all good NEWS! And before you comment on WHEN this will be...<br/><div align='right'>2009-03-05 17:31:51</div>

My comments to Predictive Analytics World - San Francisco 2009

Predictive Analytics World was probably the best analytics conference I have attended, from a knowledge point of view, in a long time. I am really excited and energized by both the actual presentations and also, without doubt, the depth of people attending. I was present at the following sessions: Five Ways to lower costs with Predictive Analytics, by Eric Siegel Identifying Fraud with Predictive Analytics, by David McMichael New Challenges in Predictive Analytics, by Usama Fayyad Netflix. Advanced Approached for Recommender System, by Andreas Toscher Netflix. Visualizations, by Todd Holloway Models versus large amounts of Raw Data, by Anand Rajaraman The biggest direct output of this conference, for me, was the viewpoint and attitude on problem solving for how we at Yahoo! could move closer to our goal of actually provide real Recommendations within our Yahoo! Web Analytics reporting interface. I was also honestly inspired by the, quite obvious yet powerful, idea of Raw Data winning over Models, that Anand presented, which is great food for thought. As a final point and as icing on the cake, it was of great value having the opportunity to network with SMART people like Markus Frind the CEO from Plentyoffish, Dan Steinberg the CEO of Salford Systems, Nachum Shacham from the algorithms group at efficient frontier, Anand Rajaraman the founder of Kosmix (which is actually a really cool search), David Rogers the senior web analytics researcher at PayPal, Madhu Shashanka research scientist from MARS, Ross Kaplan the principal Systems Engineer from SAS, John Liu associate Director of Analytics at Merkle, Brad Terrell the GM of Netezza? and all those bright folks that I forgot to mention. To conclude, Predictive Analytics World turned into my new must-go-to conference, especially for those of us who attended Emetrics over the last couple of years and are looking for a positive and perhaps a bit more hardcore supplement! :-) That said. Great work Matthew and see you at Emetrics in San Jose in May. Cheers Dennis ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-02-23 16:00:40</div>

Web Analytics Reporting and the new Search Engine Canonical tag

From a Search Engine point of view, the web is full of duplicate content, where their (the search engines) challenge is to index and display the original, or in their word - Canonical ? version of that piece of content. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (announcement links) have agreed upon a new standard for web site managers to inform them of duplicate content. The SEO industry, in general, are all positive about this new feature, and are pretty much celebrating new highs. I?ll leave my opinion about search engine impact and control on content for another day; I would however like to post my commentary to this subject from a Web Analytics point of view, as everything you see is mostly related to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). For a detailed explanation on the use of the Canonical tag value, I suggest you go read the following two posts by respectively Vanessa Fox and my good friend Joost de Valk. Reporting on URL’s in your analytics tool, and with URL’s being the choice of grouping, such as a report like “Most Requested Pages by Page URL“, one get exactly what was asked for; a list of unique URL’s (not unique content). Unlike search engines, users of analytics tools, tend to be highly affiliated with the website in question, and therefore closely connected to the content. With that in mind, we know that the analytics users have the power, of not being forced to make guesses about what is duplicate content or not. Most analytics tools provide the opportunity to report on Title (typically the value of the HTML <TITLE> tag), which is an opportunity to group pages with different URL’s but analogous content together. The following pages are typically reported as three distinct URL’s: http://www.example.com/superman?category=lexluthor http://www.example.com/superman?category=lexluthor&sort=good http://www.example.com/superman?category=lexluthor&sort=evil Applying the variable and value to the end of my blog default page, we get the following report result using Yahoo! Web Analytics. (it is very similar in other tools) Looking at the report result above, we know that the 4 highlighted URL’s all all hold the same information about our friend Lex Luthor (..or actually just my front page), and we might choose a HTML <TITLE> tag that goes like this: <TITLE>Lex Luthor and Friends</TITLE>. OR in the case of my blog, just the Homepage Title as highligted below. Note to figures: I...<br/><div align='right'>2009-02-16 23:49:13</div>

Ultra Light Startup: Web Analytics Panel

I was asked to sit on a panel about Web Analytics at the Ultra Light Startup event. Which was great fun and actually spurred a really good debate. Usually, when a panel about analytics is put together, its all about enterprise, but this was just about the opposite! How refreshing. Debating the fact that most analytics resources are written towards operators of very high-traffic sites. That said, What techniques are important to know and apply at a startup? The event as described by Business Week - ?Ultra Light Startups was founded 10 months ago by Graham Lawlor, a tall, blond 35-year-old who used to work on technology projects in the financial sector. As Lawlor says repeatedly throughout the night, the group is set up exclusively for entrepreneurs. Venture capitalists or large businesses trying to sell services are strictly forbidden. Lawlor wants entrepreneurs to be able to share freely their advice for starting companies on the cheap and keeping as much control as possible.? Joshua Russak did great post about the event over at his blog and the two pictures above are his. Thanks! :-) He also did an appetizer of a video; that you might find entertaining (and perhaps even inspiring). The panelist from the left are Dennis, Marshall and Bryan. Anywho.. if you are in New York and like the entrepreneurial spirit, you should definitely go. The atmosphere is great and the location is super (6 blocks from my house). Cheers :-) dennis ...<br/><div align='right'>2009-02-10 16:42:50</div>

Optimizing the Thank You page using Web Analytics

Summary: Post-transaction optimization is a task of moving the visitor among a new planned path, which is beyond the acceptance of Site Exit being an acceptable result! There is an end to every funnel and this is probably the last place you would think about optimization, because the conversion just happened, so why waste the time? However; I am most sure you agree, as a consumer yourself, that this is not an unimportant page at all - and unless you have the utmost trust in the brand you just did business with, you are consuming this page quite seriously. The following is unfairly presented as the normal “Thank You” page, which hold little information beyond the actual ?Thank You?. (Tableau software is actually super cool, so don’t be fooled) Leaving the above picture aside for a second, I believe that you should really think of the ?Thank You? page as an opportunity to re-engage with a already highly engaged visitor. This is simply a great location to provide cross-sells and cross-promotions. Either as aggressive as tempting the visitor back into your store or by less aggressive tactics such as having them sign up for a next-time-buy coupon, tell a friend or perhaps have them participate in a survey. This is also a great place to inform the visitor about anything important in regards to their current situation; so information such as basic company contacts, upcoming sales promotions, user groups and forums for their product. And finally, this is the page to reassure the visitor that everything is in order, you did indeed receive their information, you understood it and are crystal clear about the next coming steps, including what they should expect next from you. This including such information as expected delivery date, should this be a physical product. Links to tracking services or help pages in regards to the process from now on forward. Making sure you remove or at least ease any post-transaction nervousness. Because for the visitor, this is not just a Web Analytics conversion! If you go look at amazon.com, as presented next, it becomes obvious that they definitely incorporate the thinking behind my points above (and a whole lot more, I am most sure) in their ?Thank You? page. Pay attention to the links to the right. n.b. this screen shot cost me $51 to create, so please pause and enjoy for a second ;-) This is not a conclusion that amazon.com is doing everything correctly, by far, but a great indication and reminder of somebody...<br/><div align='right'>2009-01-26 02:45:21</div>

As of 9/7 5:48pm. Last new 8/16 10:44pm.