A Tale of Two Surveys

Wes Yee and June Dershewitz are in charge of Semphonic's Facebook page - and to liven it up a bit they put together a little interactive quiz to discover "What sort of Web Analyst" you are.I'm pretty sure I heard them working on this - assuming the occasional gusts of laughter from June's office weren't related to some deeply humorous analysis problem.Wes had me take the quiz late last week and, surprise, surprise, I'm a...."Barry Angel: Analytics Philosopher"Well, at the least the darn thing has me pegged right. Barry the avatar is appropriately dorky - and I'm sure will fit a goodly number of my brethren as well. See if you, too, can achieve "Analytics Philosopher" status by going to our Facebook page and taking the Quiz...On a more serious note, Matthew Niederberger put together a survey about career transitions for online folks - how often and why to do people change jobs. It's the perfect accompaniment to Labor Day. It's also a fascinating subject and you can help out his research project by taking the survey.The survey only takes 5-10 minutes (though it covers quite a bit of ground) - and you can sign up to get the results. Should be interesting. I thought the section on "job-hopping" was particularly intriguing - I started off by saying that "job-hopping" was sometimes valid and sometimes not. But then in the list of reasons why job-hopping might be valid I pretty much answered that every reason for job-hopping was a good one. I guess if someone was job-hopping to a lower-salaried, less challenging job with a less prestigious company I might have an issue with it!...<br/><div align='right'>2010-09-06 13:56:05</div>

Previewing Think Tank: Advanced Web Analytics Training

There?s less than a month now until our X Change Web Analytics Conference kicks-off, making this a typically frantic time (we?re extremely busy too boot). We?re getting close to our maximum capacity, so if you do want to come, I STRONGLY advise you register soon. I?ve already posted a series of blogs on X Change Huddles, and I hope to do a couple more. But I didn?t want to forget about Think Tank ? our day of advanced Web analytics training right before X Change.We started Think Tank last year for reasons similar to those that made me create X Change in the first place. I felt like there was a substantial hole in the market when it came to Advanced training in web analytics. Advanced training is hard to do for a number of reasons: it?s expensive; you can?t get large classes because the topics need to be highly specific, and it?s hard to find the trainers. I see plenty of options for training in basic tool use - from the vendors or around GA - in basic reporting, and in basic Web analytics. But if you?re an analyst with more than a year of experience, none of that training is likely to be very interesting. We routinely send new analysts off for Omniture certification (as an example), but we?ve found it?s really only useful for people with less than 6 months experience. The idea behind Think Tank was to take advantage of the audience at X Change and the attendance of much of our staff (it used to almost everybody but as we?ve grown that?s become impossible) to offer a whole set of classes in Advanced web analytics. The classes are all taught by experienced professionals; they focus on topics that go beyond basic tool use; and they are kept quite small and interactive. It?s everything advanced training should be.Think Tank at X Change this year will feature more than twenty classes. And even if you attended last year, you should check it out since there are many new classes. Some of the new classes include Greg Dowling doing a deep-dive on Mobile Measurement, Phil Kemelor on Web Analytics Communication, June Dershewitz on Social Measurement tools, Allison Hartsoe and Ryan Praskievicz on Using Google Analytics as a Second Measurement tool in the Enterprise, and a class focused on Use-Case Analysis that I?m developing.I?ve been lending a hand on several of these and I think they should be really interesting. Greg is doing a much deeper dive into mobile measurement than we did together at eMetrics. He?ll be overviewing some of the key tools that have emerged,...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-29 15:59:30</div>

Social Media Dashboarding ? Q&A

Scott and I got quite a few questions after our webinar on Social Media dashboarding. The vast majority of the questions were about the tools Semphonic used to create the dashboard samples. I won?t repeat these in their many variations ? I?ll just talk about the whole process - which I think will answer all of the questions on this topic.The answer to how these dashboards get created is both simple and complex. Simple because every dashboard I showed was produced in Excel. Complex because the data was pulled from a wide variety of sources using a wide variety of methods. We tend to use whatever tools our clients have or make available to us. The dashboards I showed included web analytics data from Omniture, WebTrends, NetInsight and GA. They included social mentions, influencer and topic data from Radian6 and BuzzMetrics. The competitive data came from a variety of sources including Hitwise, Quantcast, and Compete as well as Google Insights for search data.These reports aren?t canned. They aren?t produced by default in any vendor tool. And one of the most important points I tried to make in the webinar is that to get interesting dashboard metrics, you need to classify and trend the basic metrics in interesting ways. Hitwise, for example, provides a list of up-stream and down-stream sites. But only by classifying the sites and then aggregating and trending the data can those reports be turned into interesting dashboard metrics.We tend to do the vast majority of this work in Excel, but as the number and complexity of information sources grow, using tools like Tableau also becomes quite attractive.So the basic answer as to how these reports were created is that we setup appropriate profiles in the social monitoring, web analytics and competitive intelligence tools. This is a considerable amount of work. And it?s important to realize that some classifications HAVE to be incorporated at this step. Most of these tools are fairly restrictive in the way they let you collect and produce information. So you can?t usually setup a single profile/account and then aggregate the data in the ways you decide are interesting. You have to collect much of the data based on the way you intend to use it. We then export the data (and the methods range from APIs to Excel integration and automated report generation to cut-and-paste) into Excel where it is further classified and aggregated in the ways we deem interesting. For example, we tend to export the entire list of...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-26 19:40:52</div>

Social Media Dashboarding?with Dashboards!

It?s probably feckless to talk about dashboards without showing any ? so my last post was really just a preamble to this one. But that doesn?t mean that the concepts I talked about in my last post don?t matter. The 3C?s (Culling, Classification, and Context) are the underpinnings of effective social dashboarding. Culling is the essential first step, the generation of a clean data set to be used for measurement. Ignore this step at your peril. Profiles setup by people whose job it is to monitor posts for PR problems and opportunities are NOT going to cut it when it comes to measurement and dashboarding. Classification provides the groupings that transform the raw metrics into categories appropriate for reporting. Context is the ?spin? you put on the data ? the way your dashboard relates the metrics to each other and to the broader business.The dashboard examples I used in the webinar were drawn from multiple clients (and I fudged and obfuscated the data or used the initial mocks) ? so they don?t necessarily represent a cohesive report set; I chose them because I thought they captured different aspects of the Classification and Context methods Scott and I discussed.I chose this first dashboard because of the way it took social metrics and integrated them into a broader funnel for the site. Using social metrics to help map the opportunity for a product or company is one of the most interesting uses of the data and a way to provide deeper context to your site metrics. Understanding the volume and share of conversation relative to actual site traffic (and subsequent conversion) gives a better sense of the whole pipeline: We used three different metrics at the Opportunity level: Share of Voice, Share of Search, Share of Site. Share of Voice is the mention share for the brand relative to the entire competitive set. Share of Search is the search share for the brand terms relative to the set of competitive brands. Share of Site is measured from panel data and is the actual share of visits to the site compared to competitors. This combination of three different ?Share? metrics not only provides a deep sense of the bigger opportunity, it highlights possible gaps in the overall marketing effort. Where share of voice is much lower than share of search, direct marketing efforts may be outweighing branding. Where share of search isn?t keeping up with share of visits, the search program may not be adequately funded or operated. If share of visits lags the other...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-24 11:11:48</div>

Recap on Dashboarding Social Media Webinar

Scott Wilder and I did our latest webinar on Social Media Dashboarding this past week and since we got quite a few questions, I thought I?d recap it (first), show some of the dashboard samples (next time), and answer the questions that I got (right after that).We broke the webinar up into three major sections. In the first, we did the obligatory ?why social matters? (I know - yawn), and talked about the heritage (PR and Brand Monitoring) of most of the tools used for social measurement. That heritage is important to understand, because it explains and highlights many of the weaknesses that an analyst coming to these tools should expect: poor aggregation, lack of automation, limited export capabilities, limited flexibility in setup, etc.In the second section, we introduced my ?3Cs? of social media dashboarding. The 3Cs, my own personal answer to Tom Shane, are Culling, Classification and Context. Culling is the process of pulling the social content you want from the ?river of news.? I call it culling because it?s very much an exercise in ongoing, patient weeding. Like my backyard garden, social networks tend to sprout the information equivalent of weeds much more often than they do fruits or flowers. Turning a social measurement tool on is a bit like connecting your garden hose to the city water main. Volume becomes the problem and weeding out the stuff you care about from the stuff you don't a real challenge.Social measurement tools don?t always provide a great set of tools for culling ? mostly because they?ve been built on the assumption that the data is ultimately being read by people. With dashboarding, that?s often not the case. So the first step in building a good social dashboarding system is a careful job constructing the information profiles you want. This is a lot harder than it looks ?it?s challenging to tell the weeds from the flowers using simple keyword selection. Most of the information value of your reporting will be dependent on the types of classifications you make. That?s jumping ahead to the next ?C?, but the two are closely related. Because of limitations in the reporting capabilities of most social measurement tools, the way you set up the software to pull the data will have a significant impact on the reporting you can do.One other thing about ?culling? ? it?s a job that never really ends. Because conversations are so dynamic, a profile definition that gets you a clean set of conversational data around your company or product today...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-22 16:09:23</div>

Is IBM Now the #1 Online Marketing and Analytics Vendor?

If I found IBM?s acquisition of Coremetrics unsurprising, the same cannot be said of their acquisition today of Unica. Just how many web analytics tools does a company need? But of course, the acquisition is a reminder that Web analytics is not Unica?s primary business line ? marketing automation and campaign management is. And with the acquisition, IBM adds another piece to a formidable online marketing suite. For several years prior to its acquisition by Adobe, Omniture was selling a vision of a complete online marketing suite ? and working in that direction with the acquisition or development of tools for PPC management, internal search optimization, behavioral targeting, and multivariate testing. That vision has been expanded and changed by the Adobe acquisition. But while Adobe offers some of the same pieces (and some additional ones), the integration of design components with measurement and marketing automation has always been more of a stretch.IBM is doing the same thing, but at a whole nother level of operations. IBM now provides one of the leading ecommerce and site serving platforms, one of the leading full statistical analysis packages, one of the leading BI and data mining tools, two of the top web analytics tools, and one of the leading online campaign management and marketing automation tools. That?s a heck of an Online Marketing Suite.Of course none of this stuff is integrated. And, as I?ve written before (with somewhat bewildering regularity as the pace of acquisitions accelerates), acquisitions are a risky business particularly when you are absorbed into a behemoth like IBM.And within our little space, the fact of two web analytics tools within that suite is particularly troubling. These are two fundamentally similar tools but with substantial differences in architecture and design. It?s unclear how or why there would be any integration path or logical co-existence between them. When Omniture bought Visual Sciences, I agreed with the prevailing view that HBX visitors would be easily transitioned into SiteCatalyst users. The two systems were very close in design and function with SiteCatalyst being superior in most respects. The situation is a little different with Unica?s NetInsight and Coremetrics. Yes, the two systems are fundamentally similar. But if you bought NetInsight for its open database, on-premise solution, soft-tag or single UI solution, you?re not likely to be excited about a move to Coremetrics. And if you picked Coremetrics...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-15 14:23:59</div>

X Change Web Analytics Conference 107: David McBride of Comcast on Hybrid Web Analytics Solutions

[Side note ? If you missed my presentation on Semphonic?s new Advanced Analytics program, you can check it out here. This is a sales presentation, but I think it?s a very cool program and there?s quite a bit of analytics content in there as well!]I?ve enjoyed a number of Huddles with David, both as a leader and a participant, and I think his topic this year should be keenly interesting to almost anyone managing an enterprise analytics effort.If you?re not sure what David means by ?hybrid? Web analytics solutions, here is the full huddle description:Thanks to increasing levels of sophistication in the web analytics space, many practitioners are considering novel, cost-saving alternatives to the standard single-vendor model. In this session, we will focus on the various flavors of ?hybrid? solutions, including combing free solutions for entry-level analysis and paid or custom solutions for deep-dive analysis. We will also address concerns many large enterprises face when considering the standard Terms of Service proffered by ?free? solutions providers and suggest approaches to dealing with these standard terms. We will discuss strategies for introducing this concept to organizations, both the initial ?selling? of the concept and the transition process. Even if you have no plans to deploy a hybrid or home-grown system in the near-term, you will benefit from attending this huddle as it will provide you with strategic, long-term options.At Comcast, David has to deal with the extraordinary amounts of data that large media and consumer properties these days routinely generate. That volume ? along with the relatively low value of each page view tend to make Web analytics seem pretty expensive to this type of company. A very large B2B company may look at the cost of measuring a page view and think it?s tiny relative to the worth of the information. A very large media or consumer company may see things quite differently.But large media and consumer companies have a genuine stake in sophisticated, visitor-level measurement. With staggering amounts of inventory, ad sales have been turned into a commodity business. Preserving ?premium? inventory means selling an audience not a page. And that means dramatically improving the quality of their online visitor-level tracking. Large consumer sites face similar challenges. The opportunities for targeting, research, and analytics nearly all reside at the individual not the site aggregate level.So high-volume sites are caught...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-07 17:03:03</div>

X Change Web Analytics Conference 106: Judah Phillips on Measuring the Social Web

Judah returns as a Huddle Leader to X Change after a one-year hiatus and he?s leading one topic that he did before (Staffing) and another topic that hardly existed when he was a Huddle Leader in 2008. I?m talking, of course, about measurement of the social web. This last is a topic I?ve gotten far more involved with than I might have expected. Some of the most interesting work I?ve done this year has been focused on the integration of social measurement into management reporting and the tracking of various social campaigns. There?s so much new ground and so much to learn in this space that it?s hard not to be fascinated even if you?re not (and I?m generally not) deeply engaged with the sites themselves.In addition to the work, I?ve found myself talking and writing on the subject a fair amount. Part of that is the series of webinars I?ve done with Scott Wilder. These have covered everything from the basics of Social Media Measurement, Social Media for Crisis Management, a fascinating look at optimizing search on the Big Three (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), and our upcoming webinar on social media dashboarding. I also co-wrote a blog recently with Semphonic?s Breen Baker reflecting on the appropriateness of ROI as a measure of social media effectiveness. It?s ironic, but my work in this field is unusually?well?social.Judah has been covering some of the same ground on behalf of Monster. Here?s part of his Huddle write-up:Social media is scorching hot these days catalyzed by the surging popularity and changes and additions to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Flickr, and the hundreds of social startups that pepper the Internet marketing landscape. But how do you measure the social opportunity given that many of the "best" interactions don?t happen anywhere near your site or application tracking?It?s this last sentence that?s really key. Measuring off-site activity has proven challenging across the entire spectrum of online activity ? from video to ecommerce to social. The web lacks the basic measurement infrastructure (particularly around visitor identification, standardized software, and standardized data models) to support effective cross-ownership site measurement.Unfortunately, social media compounds this basic problem in several fundamental ways. I call these the culling problem, the classification problem and the context problem. All social media measurement begins with an apparently simple but surprisingly challenging task ? culling from the vast...<br/><div align='right'>2010-08-02 13:58:48</div>

X Change Web Analytics Conference 105: Intuit?s Dylan Lewis on Measuring Applications and Intranets

Dylan is one of a very select group of X Change attendees who have managed to make it out every single year. During that time, he?s attended and led many Huddles on topics ranging from Team Building to Testing. He?s doing his usual yeoman?s duty this year ? with Huddle?s focused on "Testing" and "Measuring Applications and Intranets."Dylan?s an acknowledged leader in web analytics testing. He did a great speech at eMetrics last time around on the topic and he?s done deep work in it for TurboTax. And while I have to admit I?m not fond of the Huddle Title (?Test Yourself Rich? ? given my pessimistic side I would have preferred ?Testing?s a Bitch?), talking with Dylan about how to think about and run a testing program is always a treat. But it?s his second topic, Measuring Applications and Intranets, that really intrigues me.I?ve felt for years that there is an untapped need for serious measurement and analysis of SaaS applications. SaaS applications are, after all, the most complex of web sites. And while they often receive more comprehensive usability design and testing, better performance monitoring, and much better QA than traditional web sites, they simply don?t get the equivalent treatment when it comes to measurement.Internet SaaS Applications have benefited, in their creation, from the rich processes setup to build traditional software. But this didn?t carry over into measurement because traditional software never got well measured either.A combination of factors is changing all this. First, there?s a growing realization by measurement teams working on the marketing side of these web sites that similar analysis opportunities must exist on the application web site. Second, of course, are mobile apps. As I?ve blogged before, measuring applications is quite different than measuring traditional web sites. To do a good job of it, you have to deal with some fundamental challenges that either don?t exist or exist in much less serious form on traditional web sites:1. What is the fundamental unit of measure (i.e. the Page View in Traditional Measurement)?2. What happens to measurement if you?re offline (mobile) or in the background (a new twist as mobile operating systems get more sophisticated)?3. What is the appropriate way to id users and what information can be collected?4. How do you measure app performance (it isn?t page load time)?5. How do you measure success?6. How do you tell if a design is working?And, because many of the basic questions are...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-24 16:38:41</div>

X Change Web Analytics Conference 104: Measuring Multiple Business Models with James Robinson

There are some problems the depths of which don?t become obvious until you have studied them deeply for awhile. I think this topic, chosen by James Robinson of the New York Times for one of his X Change Huddles, is a good example.A significant majority of Semphonic clients aren?t primarily ecommerce focused, so one of the most common laments I hear is the difficulty in defining and measuring success. But there?s a separate and deeper problem that only begins to emerge when people take a serious pass at considering what success on their web sites is: namely, how to think about and measure multiple success criteria.Here?s part of the description of James? Huddle:Whether you add new business models or just support multiple models, how do you balance multiple goals by visitor to judge opportunity and success? How do you make site real-estate decisions that reflect the broader business imperatives? How do use metrics to ensure that visitors are getting what they want, finding what they need, and hearing what they should?As Director of Web analytics at the New York Times, James has faced exactly this dilemma. Between supporting ad-based revenue, selling subscriptions, and now driving to an online paywall, he's been faced with supporting and shaping critical business model decisions using measurement. What I think is particularly interesting about this problem is how common ? yet unrecognized - it is. Most of our ecommerce clients try to use their site for a variety of purposes beyond direct sales (store support, customer support, product information, etc.) and struggle to measure success (and opportunity cost) for non-commerce visits. The vast majority of media and publishing sites have multiple revenue streams ? or, at the very least ? a mix of inventory types. And our technology, manufacturing, and pharma clients generally have multiple goals depending on visitor-type and visit-intent.The very existence of multiple business models on a web site raises a whole set of new problems and new opportunities. Some of the challenges created by multiple business models include understanding the value of each online success, being able to identify both the ?start? or behavioral signature of the visit type as well as ?completing? events on the website for each type of success, being able to match up visitor segments to the appropriate or potential success types, and being able to measure the opportunity cost of any given navigation path.These are all fairly difficult...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-23 14:46:52</div>

ROI and Social Media Measurement

Breen Baker has been Semphonic?s lead developer for the last three or four years. But he?s not just a skilled programmer and tag developer. For the last couple of years he?s been getting his MBA at Dominican in a program focused on ?green? business. Most of us believe "green" business has a purely environmental focus, but there are strong connections both culturally and intellectually between the business of new media (social) and sustainable business practices that encompasses social authenticity and integrity as well. Coming from the Semphonic perspective, it?s not surprising that Breen has a keen interest in social media and how it relates to business and he suggested we co-write a post on Social Media measurement and ROI. Our thesis is simple ? ROI is not necessarily the appropriate measure for every business issue and may be particularly problematic when it comes to measuring social media. We?ve been kicking the post back and forth for a few weeks now. The end result is a lengthy post ? almost an article ? that I think covers some interesting ground. Perhaps it?s a bit academic in tone, but it?s nice to flex the academic muscles every now and again! We published it on the Semphonic blog because it?s really more Breen?s work than mine (though I?m sure my readers will recognize some of my thinking as well) and I thought that would be more appropriate. But that doesn?t stop me from giving it a plug here?Check it out!...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-21 18:06:26</div>

X Change Web analytics Conference 103: Lynn Lanphier on Global Measurement Strategy

One of the best things about X Change is that the Conference is extremely narrow ? web analytics ? and yet extremely broad in addressing a wide variety of problems and issues. In my last post, I talked about Adam Greco?s Huddle on CRM integration and before that I talked about John Howard?s Huddle on component-centric measurement. John?s component-centric measurement is one side of what major retailers like Lowes are facing with web analytics: how to adapt technologies to the increasingly complex problems in site measurement. At the other end of the spectrum, Lynn Lanphier of Best Buy is leading a Huddle on how to take advantage of executive interest in measurement to drive organization-wide adoption and appropriate use of analytics.Here?s Lynn?s Huddle description:Most of us realize that there is far more to web analytics than technology alone, and the best of us have experienced firsthand the complexity inherent in gaining management buy-in to build a world-class digital analytics practice. Fortunately more and more senior management teams are coming around and asking the right questions, so how can you take advantage of the opportunity? Join Lynn Lanphier from Best Buy and discuss how one of the world?s best known consumer electronics retailers is developing a top-to-bottom global strategy for digital analytics and testing.Part of what makes it so challenging to be good at web analytics from an enterprise perspective is that you have solve a wide range of problems. You have to create an atmosphere and culture where measurement is taken seriously and used appropriately ? and where there is a real vision about where analytics needs to focus. But you also ? ala John Howard ? have to be able to apply the technologies creatively to difficult measurement problems. X Change captures the full spectrum of concerns that managers in web analytics bring to the table - it?s not all strategy and it?s not all technology and it?s not all tactics. It?s all of those things because all of them really matter.I?m not, as I?ve said many times before, a deeply strategic guy. In our company, Phil Kemelor and Greg Dowling do more of the strategic consulting engagements (and, by-the-by, if you haven?t downloaded and read Phil?s recent Whitepaper on the challenges of organizing digital analytics to deal with the exploding number and variety of data sources we face, you can click here to get it). I?ve been more focused on developing a full-fledged practical program for doing...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-18 12:41:16</div>

X Change 102: Adam Greco of Salesforce on CRM and Web Analytics Integration

One of the real pleasures I?ve had this year is working with Adam Greco and Rudi Shumpert on the Beyond Web Anaytics Podcasts. They are both going to be Huddle leaders this year, Adam as a repeat from last year and Rudi for the first time. If you?ve listened to those podcasts or if you?ve ever met and talked with Adam, you probably have a sense of just how good at this web analytics stuff he is. The BWA podcasts are really all about the guest and I think we try pretty hard to stay within that format. But I often find myself wishing that I could hear more from Adam than just his consistently incisive questions. And if, like me, you think more of Adam is always a good thing, then the opportunity to sit down with him at X Change and talk about CRM and Web Analytics integration should be too good to miss.Here?s Adam?s Huddle description:As a Web Analyst, you have access to a tremendous amount of website data. But often times, your company makes money based upon post-website activity which is captured in your CRM system. This huddle will cover the various ways that you can raise your status in your organization by integrating these two systems and will involve a discussion of how different companies have dealt with the challenges involved. Also included will be a discussion about how Web Analysts can increase their relevance to Sales organization which can help you get more headcount and budget.You might think that coming from Salesforce, Adam has some kind of personal stake in CRM integration. And you?d be right, but it isn?t because he wants to sell you anything it?s because Salesforce faces exactly this kind of situation. The Salesforce web site drives leads and trials that may take months to resolve into business or failure. And their situation isn?t made easier by the fact that it?s ultimately a SaaS solution either. Understanding down-stream success, qualifying and categorizing leads, and knowing how much content to push before driving to the ask are all fundamental challenges for Adam and a host of other Web analytics professionals. For almost any B2B site, CRM integration is probably the single most important Web analytics infrastructure step. It?s the key to moving your visibility into your customers? interests and needs to the places in your organization that can use it the best. And it?s almost equally important in moving downstream activity back into your view of what happened. In my experience, lead quality is far more variable than most...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-15 19:05:38</div>

X Change 101: John Howard of Lowes on Web Analytics with a Modular CMS-Driven site

I promised a series of short posts on some of the X Change topics and I thought I?d start with one of the Huddle?s that John Howard of Lowes is leading. It?s called ?From a ?Page Centric? world to a ?Component Centric? world? and I think it?s a fascinating choice. Here?s part of the Huddle description that John put together:The world is changing ? Components are becoming much more interactive. User experience design is becoming much more efficient, far less linear, and much more personalized. All of this points to a brave new world where the internet experience is no longer governed by a web of interlinking pages but a montage of highly interactive rich media components dynamically interacting with each other creating a truly unique experience that is not bound by pages or linear steps to a desired outcome.Big retail sites like Lowe?s face this problem with a vengeance but they aren?t the only ones. Given the way CMS systems have evolved, one of the most natural paths to personalization is via modularization. And it isn?t just the way CMS systems work, web technologies, from Ajax to Flash to Silverlight encourage this focus on modules. Tracking content experiences has always been fairly challenging. While ecommerce players have always had it ?easy? from the perspective of measuring site success I?ve never been convinced that most have done a particularly good job measuring true content effectiveness. And that?s in the relatively simplified world of page-based content consumption. John?s been exploring how to measure the impact of site content loops on customer behavior and attitudes ? particularly when their modular and not page-based. And the challenges are formidable. Not only is the analysis difficult, but getting the infrastructure right is surprisingly complex. With modularization, it?s often a struggle to understand when a module was used. It?s even harder to understand when a module was viewed. If you want to understand module effectiveness, you need to be able to measure ? at the very least ? click rates for the module. That means knowing when a link within the module is clicked and being able to attribute it to the module. But if you want a click rate you also need to how often the module was shown. As sites become more component-centric and personalization drives component display, basic measurement simply doesn?t capture which modules were actually displayed on any given page. It?s almost as if you?re extending the ad-banner paradigm to every...<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-11 18:02:57</div>

Tagging Survey

Our friends at TagMan are doing a survey on Tag Management that I wanted to highlight. Tag Management is a pretty big issue in the industry right now but, frankly, I?m not sure how big. There are two kinds of problems in our (and probably any) space. There are the problems everyone talks about but that almost nobody ever really cares to solve (attribution is a pretty good example) and then there are the problems people are actually working hard to fix. Tag Management is hovering somewhere in an uneasy space between those two. I hear lots and lots of grumbling about it but I see far less real movement than I might have expected. On the other hand and I actually know a few clients and a few companies that are tackling it pretty seriously. So I?m genuinely curious about the state of Tag Management and I?d love to see how the results come out. You can take the survey here: - http://seeme.at/dyxG8 and, as a bonus, they?ll donate $10 to Haitian relief....<br/><div align='right'>2010-07-10 12:10:52</div>

Summer in the City: A Hot Time for Web Analytics

I know it?s summer because I can look out the window of my home-office in San Francisco and see little more than the gray outlines of a tree across our small yard. All else is shrouded by a chilly fog. Of course, I could drive five minutes across the bridge toward our offices or ten minutes east towards downtown and the sun, and a gorgeous day, would somehow emerge. Twenty summers in San Francisco have made me accustomed to this strange, bi-polar season ? a season where chill can swamp warmth at any moment and then, just as suddenly, retreat. And though summer is traditionally the slow season, in good San Francisco fashion it doesn?t seem to have slowed much in our corner of the world.We?re starting to really build toward X Change ? with most of the Huddle Leaders and topics decided. That?s always exciting and there are some cool topics on the board ? stuff that I can?t wait to talk about and listen to. I?m going to do a whole series of ?short? (by my standards anyway) posts on some of the topics!Naturally, the Coremetrics acquisition was big news. Traditionally, Semphonic hasn?t been a huge Coremetrics shop. We do more Omniture, Unica, and WebTrends than Core. But that?s been changing a bit in 2010 as we?ve added some major retail and hospitality clients that run Coremetrics. So the IBM purchase actually meant something to us. I?ve seen the pros and cons of this acquisition argued? but it?s a bit like rating NBA draft picks the minute after the draft. Nobody really knows how it?s going to turn out but we all have an opinion we pretend to be sure of. So here?s mine. The simple truth is that most acquisitions fail. And I think it?s particularly dangerous to be acquired by a giant like IBM. You can all too easily get swallowed, lost in digestion, processed into blandness, and left stinking on the ground without ever having the slightest effect on the monster that ate you. So it?s not unreasonable or unduly pessimistic to be skeptical. On the other hand, I think IBM is a natural home for Coremetrics. First, I don?t think Core could continue to flourish on their own. It?s hard to compete with Adobe; harder to compete with Google. Second, IBM has built up an impressive suite of analytics tools ? arguably the best analytics oriented suite in the world. So Coremetrics is a natural complement and becomes part of a stable of products that delivers powerful solutions across the whole enterprise business intelligence front. These products aren?t going to be easy to...<br/><div align='right'>2010-06-26 18:44:24</div>

Profiling Content Interest with Unica NetInsight

I never quite finished my series on building profiles of visitor segments. Where I left off, I?d put together a pretty nice little profile of the sourcing for a single visitor segment that I was examining (from a Financial Services site) using Unica?s NetInsight and Excel:  In building this profile, the key concepts were the creation of a control group and the use of indexicals comparing the target segment to the contro to represent where the target segment was distinct.In this post, I?ll use some of the same concepts while I explore the more complex issue of profiling content interests.For visitor segments, content interests are the single most important defining characteristic. In this case, my target segment was actually defined as those who showed interest in a particular product. The fact that the segment includes a content selection complicates the task of building a profile since we have to make sure the differences we see between our target and control group aren?t simply the result of viewing our targeted area (and the navigation necessary to get to it).Another complicating factor is the way NetInsight works for segmentation. If I simply build a segment of visits where my target pages were viewed, the only page views contained in the segment will be my target pages. That isn?t what I want at all! So for this analysis, I had to build a Visitor Profile in NetInsight and then apply the Profile. Profiles allow you to select all of the Visitor and Visit behavior that applies to some filter condition ? in this case viewing my target pages.For our target population, a large percentage of our traffic came directly to the product area and then left. That won?t make for a very interesting content profile. So I started by selecting only Home Page Entries for this group and then evaluating the content viewed (minus the target pages) compared to the content viewed by the control group when entering on the Home Page.Here?s what I got, shown in a simple columnar chart:  While I see some fairly interesting differences here, I don?t think this the best view I can get. The problem is that while I used the Home Page, many of my target group visitors viewed the Home Page and went directly to my Target Content via the Target Category page ? viewing nothing else along the way. That distorts the comparison between my target and control groups.So I further refined my segmentation by picking only visits that included the home page plus some other type of...<br/><div align='right'>2010-06-21 17:33:27</div>

Further Thoughts on Data Warehousing

Late last week I got together with the Beyond Web Analytics guys again and did a podcast with Jason Rushin from Quantivo on the recent series of posts regarding data warehousing of web analytics data. As I thought about that broadcast and the three blog posts (Avinash, Jason and my own), I felt like the biggest missing piece was any really substantive discussion of why you MIGHT actually warehouse data. Adam Greco was pressing for this on the podcast and I think he?s right - it's pretty much missing.I?m fairly satisfied that my last post is persuasive in responding to the arguments against warehousing analytics data. But one of the drawbacks to writing in response to someone else's post is that you end up using that framework and not necessarily arguing your own case.So today, I wanted to discuss the class of questions, analysis problems, and marketing opportunities that are better supported in a custom warehouse than in a traditional web analytics solution.Questions a Warehouse can AnswerWhen web analytics professionals start talking warehousing, there?s a natural suspicion that what?s really at stake is just a bunch of fancy tools designed to solve esoteric problems. So I think it?s important to lay out the types of questions that a warehouse might address that aren?t readily answered in a traditional web analytics solution. Taking a look at the questions may give you a better sense of whether you really need a warehouse or not.Here's a list of questions I came up with that I think are either much easier, or only possible, to answer with a data warehouse: Do I have more visitors increasing in usage or decreasing in usage? For visitors who decreased in usage, what are they doing less of? What did visitors do in the 1st (and following n) weeks after registration? What did visitors do in the session after a purchase? If a visitor is coming to site more often than before, are they more likely to purchase? Is it better for a visitor to view product features in their initial visit to the site or is it better if they view product features in a subsequent visit? Are visitors who view multiple different products in a session less likely to convert than visitors who view similar amounts of content but focus on a single product? When, in their session, did visitors tend to use Tool X (say internal search) ? and did the tool perform better when used early in the session or late in the session? If a visitor came to my site on PPC branded search in May, what did they...<br/><div align='right'>2010-06-15 00:56:21</div>

Fundamental Truths and Other Unlikely Beasts

I got several emails in the last few days asking my opinion of a recent Quantivo blog concerning a post from a couple of months back by Avinash on ?10 Fundamental Truths About Web Analytics.? I hadn't read either till I got the emails and I ended up reading them backwards (critique first) which isn't always ideal. I don?t suppose my overall opinion on the issue in question (is data warehousing web analytics data useful?) is any mystery since I?ve been a long and consistent advocate of data warehousing behavioral data. But I think there?s enough substance in the exchange to warrant some thought. Read both posts and I think you'll agree that, at least tonally, Quantivo may have missed some of the sly humor inherent in Avinash?s writing. When he writes a title like ?10 Fundamental Truths? what he generally means is ?The 10 Most Controversial and Entertaining things I can think of that have at least a grain of truth in them and will make you think a bit.? But if he titled it that way, what would be the fun? Reading Quantivo's post, I don?t think they quite get the joke. When your main goal is to be interesting and thought-provoking, it?s hard to be simultaneously nuanced and thoughtful. You don?t get Bill O?Reilly and Robert Stavins in one package. Now it?s probably no surprise that the ?truth? that Quantivo takes most exception to is #7: ?A majority of web analytics data warehousing efforts fail. Miserably." It might seem that Quantivo would have little to complain about in this thesis since they make (and admit to) a pretty similar claim. After all, one of the great virtues of the Quantivo solution is that you aren?t mired in the fearful prospect of any large IT project using old-world warehousing technology. But what got the guys at Quantivo upset isn?t so much the headline as the sub-arguments Avinash provides for why warehousing online data is a bad idea. They can be briefly summed up as: There is too much data The data is thin and inaccurate There is little structure or relation in the data It?s hard to integrate with offline data even if you have the keys BI Tools are worse than web analytics tools for clickstream data Web sites are too dynamic to be managed effectively at the warehouse level You can see why Quantivo might take issue with these sorts of claims. Even if you grant vendors like Quantivo or Netezza the performance issue, nothing in their solution would obviously address any of the issues beyond the first.Here?s the full elaboration of...<br/><div align='right'>2010-06-06 20:38:58</div>

Coming Back and Looking Forward: Unica MIS 2010 and X Change 2010

I?ve been on the road for the past two weeks ? a long trip for me ? so it?s nice to be home although it?s bitterly cold today in San Francisco. After a week in Orlando, our cutting SF winds seem positively evil. My two week stint took in multiple Think Tank training days, the usual round of client and sales meetings, and, of course, the Unica MIS 2010 Conference as well as some family time in and around Disney. Like a full day in the Magic Kingdom, it was a pretty exhausting ride. I always enjoy doing the Think Tank sessions. They are meant to be smaller classes with more interactivity and advanced topics. So they usually draw a fairly sophisticated audience and are a pleasure to teach. Plus, we carve them up so we?re teaching classes in which we have a particular interest. My classes in DC were on Behavioral and Online Survey Integration and Data Warehousing and my NetInsight classes in Orlando at Unica?s MIS 2010 were on Functionalism, SEM Analytics, and Visitor Segmentation for Database Marketing. If you?re reading this blog, you know these are topics I care about.I thought the most interesting aspect of the Unica MIS Think Tank and the panel on visitor segmentation was how different the audience was from web analytics conferences. Unica?s flagship product is a campaign management solution. And the vast majority of attendees were deeply involved in campaign management and traditional segmentation. It made for an unusual panel session and class since the questions were from people who were more concerned with targeting than analytics. That?s healthy. Targeting is a huge analytic task and the melding of web analytics and campaign targeting would really benefit both disciplines.I got to relive my old days in credit card database marketing and think a bit about how the work we?re doing in data warehousing, developing segmentations for testing and use-case analysis, and helping sites drive to PII-capture events like registration blends with and supports the increasing need for targeting based on online data.The only real downer was that I was pretty sick during the last days of the Conference. I?ve been plagued by bronchitis for more than a month, but it went backwards on me in Orlando. From being an annoying but not very troublesome cough it ballooned to a full-blown achy-awful, congested fever. And, of course, it managed to peak right on the day of the training. To make matters worse, Jason Viger (who co-taught and did all the presentation driving) was...<br/><div align='right'>2010-05-23 20:27:30</div>

Telling a ClickTale

At this year?s eMetrics I was both surprised and pleased at the number of new and interesting tools entering the web analytics ecosystem and I'm trying to post on a few that seemed particularly interesting. One of the tools in the not new but significantly improved and definitely very interesting category was ClickTale.ClickTale has actually been around for awhile. They?ve always had a unique approach to the web analytics tool-space ? with their product falling somewhere in the uneasy realm between a classic web analytics tool and a pure Customer Experience Management (CEM) tool like TeaLeaf. But if their tool has always been a bit hard to classify, it seems to me that they?ve stuck with their vision and concentrated on building out and improving the very features that make their product unique and hard-to-define. The end result is a compelling tool that can usefully serve as an addition and a supplement to the web analytics arsenal.What makes ClickTale so different?The key is the approach they take to data collection. Like the vast majority of vendors in the web analytics space, they rely on a tag. But the Clicktale tag is extremely aggressive ? it collects everything the client does: every mouse move, hover, scroll and click is tracked. Of course, it doesn?t issue a server call with every mouse move. The tag loads at the end of the page and then starts collecting. It packages up the information and sends it as a set of small, staggered asynchronous calls to ClickTale.There are three implications to this. First, you?ll lose behavior prior to full page load. Given ClickTale?s functionality, that could be significant and is certainly worth bearing in mind. Second, ClickTale collects a LOT of data. It collects too much data to use (and for them to store) if your site is heavily trafficked. So ClickTale provides an option to sample your site (or the pages it?s deployed on) and track just those sampled sessions. For a pure web analytics package, that would be unacceptable. But as you see the ClickTale product, I think you?ll agree that in the context of their offering it might make perfect sense to aggressively sample your data collection. Finally, all that extra data drives some unique and deeply interesting reporting.One of the key features of ClickTale is the ability to replay entire sessions. Because the data is captured client-side, you?ll see the session replay in extraordinary detail: where the mouse moved, what it hovered over, and when it clicked....<br/><div align='right'>2010-05-16 16:47:33</div>

Notes from eMetrics : Lots of Cool New Technology!

I?ve spent a good chunk of the last three days at eMetrics at it?s been ? as usual ? rewarding. It?s great to see everybody, get a chance to chat, and hear about what?s going on: from both speakers and attendees. Yesterday I did my presentation with Russ Rueden (Kohler) on Use Case Analysis. As a presentation, it?s a very practical, hands-on look at several different real analysis projects all of which spent some significant time focused on specific use-cases. From that, we drew some lessons about use case analysis in general and why it?s one of the easiest and most impactful types of real-world analysis project there is.For me, the biggest take-away from eMetrics is how much new and interesting technology has come down the pipe recently. Some of this I was already aware of and some it was new to me. But it feels like a host of new tools are emerging. I?m not thinking about tools around new areas like social and mobile ? of course there is rapid movement there. What impressed me is how many new tools targeted at either broad web analytics or industry-specific web analytic problems that I?ve seen leading up to and at eMetrics.I?ve seen very cool stuff from CalmSea, ClickTale, EasyAsk, iPerceptions, Quantivo, Scout, Tagman, Truviso, and WebTrekk (and I?m probably forgetting some). That seems like way more interesting new technology than in years past ? and that doesn?t even count stuff like MongooseMetrics or Codebaby that were interesting but somewhat peripheral to our main focus.I?m going to write about some of these in more detail and I wanted to start with Truviso. Full disclosure here ? Truviso has been a client of Semphonic ? they actually paid us to help them understand the web analytics marketplace and they?ve asked us a whole load of questions about what people need to do better measurement. What?s cool is that they clearly listened pretty closely. Truviso was a technology company looking for a solution ? they?d built a powerful complex event processing (CEP) engine that was ideal for working with large streams of real-time data and doing segmentation and event-driven analysis and processing. Sound like familiar problems? It?s really no wonder that they honed in on the web analytics space as a potential vertical.They?ve gone ?live? at eMetrics (VIA is the product name) and I got my first chance to see the initial version of their release. It has some striking, original and cool features. Their tag-line is ?Measure People not Pages? and the product...<br/><div align='right'>2010-05-06 20:35:33</div>

Building Visitor Segmentation Profiles with Unica?s NetInsight

I?ve been working through one of the truly fundamental tasks for any web analyst ? producing a rich descriptive profile of a visitor segment. I?m using Unica?s NetInsight for this just as a change of pace from all of the Omniture Discover and Data Warehouse examples that I?ve done in the past. In my last post, I started off building a profile of a particular group of product-interested users on a financial website. The first variable I chose to profile was visit source ? and right away I found a fairly significant difference between the target population and my chosen control group. As you can see, my target population is much more likely to come Direct, from Yahoo and from key Financial sites than is my control group ? and much less likely to come from Google. At the end of my last post, I made the point that the profile isn?t like a report ? it?s more like a mini-analysis. This Yahoo discrepancy, in particular, begs explanation and so I wouldn?t leave it as is. I want my profile to explain how we're getting these visitors and the numbers about Yahoo and Google are far from self-explanatory.So my next step in building out this profile is to drill-down on the Yahoo numbers. In NetInsight, you can easily add a dimension to any report. I had this report which shows more Yahoo traffic than Google traffic: By adding the Campaign Channel dimension, I get this report which shows almost no Yahoo campaign traffic: NetInsight's handling of missing values in sub-dimensions is confusing. When you add a dimension, missing values from the sub-dimension are simply eliminated from the whole report. So instead of seeing a line-item under Yahoo with no campaign channel, I see the Yahoo number reduced to the visits that have a campaign channel assigned. I sure don?t love that approach. But for our Profile, the important point is that it isn?t a known campaign driving the Yahoo traffic.That?s puzzling. So I went back to the original report and drilled-down to get the actual referring URLs. In NetInsight, I get this break-down just by left-clicking on a line-item. I?ve blurred the actual lines here but what?s important is that 75% of the traffic came from a single page and the rest came from a long-tail of pages and Yahoo searches. So I clicked over to that page and lo and behold, I found a large featured ad for the product in question driving directly to the content I?m analyzing. It?s a campaign after all! It?s just not properly tagged so NetInsight isn?t recognizing...<br/><div align='right'>2010-05-02 11:43:53</div>

Profiling Visitor Segments with Unica NetInsight

Profiling a visitor segment is one of the fundamental tasks in web analytics. It?s the key to answering like: ?Why did some visitors register and not others?? or ?Who actually uses this new tool on our site?? or ?How do our offline visitor persona?s translate into online behaviors?? It?s the key answering these questions because in all of these cases the answer hinges on what is different and interesting about a specific set of visitors. Perhaps because it?s such a common task in web analytics, it doesn?t get much attention. It?s more like delivering a baby than brain surgery. And in our field, everyone wants to be a brain surgeon. But if you don?t deliver babies, there won?t be any brains to work on. And there is more to this seemingly mundane task than meets the eye. Compared to What?If the key to a good visitor profile is to show what?s different and interesting about a specific set of visitors, the obvious question is: ?Different compared to???The obvious answer ? the site average ? is not often the right answer.We all know that averages can hide what?s interesting and site averages are particularly prone to this problem. Many sites exhibit a bipolar distribution around most key behaviors: there is a group of non-regular visitors who skew below all of the site averages and there is a group of highly-engaged visitors who skew far above all of the site averages.Each of these groups may exhibit something like a normal distribution when considered on their own, but when viewed as a total population they would produce a distribution that looks more like this: The average in a system like this may be somewhere around 4 ? but if you are looking at segment in the lower set (non-regular visitors), 4 would be at the very high-end and, of course, for the upper segment a value of 4 would be at the very low-end. So by comparing your visitor segment to the site average, you?re almost certainly going to miss the point.Not every site is like this. If your site is ?logged-in?, your visitors are more likely to follow a normal distribution. But this is far from certain ? there are as many different visitor distributions as there are sites. You should start with a fairly good idea of the shape of your distribution and the key populations on your site. And you?ll typically compare your target population to one of these key populations.Selecting MetricsAssuming you have your two populations (the target and control) what metrics do you use to build a profile?It?s not...<br/><div align='right'>2010-04-25 19:27:56</div>

Profiling Segments with Unica NetInsight

In my original series on visitor segmentation, I promised to provide some examples from Unica?s NetInsight as well as Omniture?s Discover and Data Warehouse. The previous installments covered numerous Omniture examples, so I decided to use NetInsight for this topic ? building descriptive segment profiles.Not every analysis or use of segments requires building descriptive profiles. If you're analyzing a conversion funnel and build a segment of 1st time users, you may only need to see the funnel performance for that segment. The segment itself (1st time users) is self-explanatory and additional descriptive information isn?t necessary.But for the majority of segmentation uses, it?s important not just to build a segment but to show how it differs from the average site visitor and from other visitor segments. What are some examples? If you code your site visitors with offline personas, you want to be able to see how each persona actually behaves and compare them easily. If you want to understand the before vs. after behavior for visitors around a key event (like Registration) you need to be able to profile those before and after time-periods to reveal what changed. If you want to understand how a group of visitors in a specific use-case (like catalog searchers) behave differently from other groups (like non-catalog searchers), you need to be able to easily identify and describe those differences. The ability to create a rich and interesting description that shows how the visitors in the segment actually behave is an essential skill for an analyst. You can?t use the same profile for every problem and nearly every business has its own unique variables and requirements when it comes to segment descriptive. But there are some obvious and common techniques that apply to nearly any segmentation. In today?s post, I?m only going to cover some of the basic elements in NetInsight for creating these profiles. In following post(s), I?m going to show more complete examples using some of the approaches described below.I decided to work with an example based on offline categorizations of visitors. Many, many companies track important visitor types, personas, and visitor characteristics for logged in and registration-based sites. Moving these categorizations into your web analytics solution is tremendously useful. These ?natural? segmentations profoundly improve reporting and analysis. One of the first things you?ll probably want to do when you integrate these categorizations...<br/><div align='right'>2010-04-18 13:03:25</div>

High Season in Web Analytics World

I?ve been working on a couple of posts focused on segmentation with Unica?s NetInsight. But I?m still putting the finishing touches on them and since it is high-season in the Web Analytic's conference world I wanted to mention a whole slew of stuff that I have coming up that might be worth checking out.First and foremost, Semphonic is doing three(!) different Think Tank Training sessions and I?m going to be teaching at all of them. In early May, we kick things off in association with eMetrics. For eMetrics, we?re doing a set of the most popular classes from the Think Tank we did at last year's X Change. I?m going to be teaching a class on Functionalism and a class on Warehousing and Web Analytics ? sandwiched in-between is a class on tagging and measuring Web 2.0 sites that Jesse Gross and Breen Baker will be teaching. These are general purposes classes ? appropriate to any web analytics solution ? but they are meant to be advanced training. If you?re coming out to eMetrics and are interested, check it out.We?re doing something slightly different just a little bit later in May. In Washington, D.C., Paul Legutko and I will be teaching a two day Think Tank Training heavily focused on Omniture - particularly Excel integration and Segmentation. Let?s face it; a fair amount of advanced training just has to be tool specific. And Omniture?s Suite is the tool of choice for the majority of our clients. If you aren?t coming out to eMetrics in San Jose, if you?re on the East Coast, and particularly if you are an Omniture shop, this Think Tank training session is ideal for you.Lastly, we?re doing a Think Tank Training day in conjunction with Unica?s MIS 2010 Conference. It?s our first ever NetInsight-specific training and I?m going to be joined by Paul Legutko (for the SEM Analytics course) and Jason Viger. Jason and I will be teaching a NetInsight version of the Functionalism class and a new class I?ve been developing on (you guessed it) visitor segmentation. This will be hands-on training using NetInsight and, like all Think Tank training, is designed not to teach the point-and-click of a product but the actual ways to do analytics with a web measurement tool. Unica?s NetInsight has been getting some real traction in the space lately and if you are a Unica customer and coming out to MIS 2010 (and I hope are not flying AirTran!), this will be a chance to get a great feel for what NetInsight can do.Each of these is a little different, but I think the reason for all...<br/><div align='right'>2010-04-11 19:55:43</div>

Content Marketing and Measurement: Some Notes from Red Door?s Speaker Series

I had the whole last week in the office (our new, improved, larger offices where so far even the air conditioning works!) which was blissful after my mad dash around the country the week before. But before it drops out of my mind, I wanted to give jot down some notes from the Red Door Speaker Series panel I did on Content Marketing.Red Door is a San Diego based Interactive Presence Management firm. They put on a regular series of speakers and panels ? mostly for SoCal companies ? across a wide range of online marketing topics. They host them at the rooftop club above their offices and it is a spectacular venue. The building is about fifteen stories high and right above the open center-field wall of SD?s baseball stadium. The club is obviously setup to host evening events over the games ? there is an enormous outdoor patio and one whole wall is made of glass doors. The room itself is lovely and relaxed. So picture a beautiful San Diego day (what other kind is there), sweeping views of the ocean, the skyline and green fields of the ballpark; picture a whole wall open and a light breeze floating in; is it any wonder the conversation was relaxed and enjoyable? Setting does matter ? as I always taken note of when planning X Change. And if I could have every room at X Change just like the one in San Diego, I would.Joining me on the panel were John Faris from Red Door, Marc Figueroa from Vistage International and Alex Pham from the LA Times ? all of us talking about the importance of content, how to develop content networks, how to blend professional and user-generated content, and, of course, how to measure what?s working and what isn?t.Here are a few of my notes:My Blog: Probably the perfect example of how NOT to make content pop. As I heard John describe some basic presentation no-no?s (10 pt Arial font, too much text) I was thinking ? hey that?s me. Then Alex described how important very, very regular blogging (far more than I do) is to sustaining interest. They've measured this pretty carefully and have seen substantial cliffs when production falls below some pretty high thresholds. That?s one difference between professionals and the vast majority of us amateurs: consistent (in every sense of the word) production.On Measuring Content ? the Sales-Cycle: Content measurement is trickier than people think. One of the most common questions I get asked is ?What content did visitors view in the visit where they purchased?? To show why that question may be the wrong...<br/><div align='right'>2010-03-31 18:24:07</div>

Failing at the New Basics of Customer Care

I had a non-work experience recently that reminded me why what we do in web analytics is more than interesting ? it can actually be important. I?m flying to Orlando in May for Unica?s MIS 2010 Conference. In addition to the Conference, we?re going to be doing a Think Tank training day focused on NetInsight. This will be the first time we?ve had a chance to do NetInsight-specific training and it should be exciting.Since it?s in Orlando, I?m hauling along the kids who are happily engaged in choosing one or two selections from the gaggle of available theme parks. But in booking the ticket to travel to Orlando, I got first-hand experience in why what we in the web analytics field do is important and how companies ignore analytics at their own peril.Foolishly, I thought Orlando would be relatively easy to fly to ? but from San Francisco it really isn?t. United has one direct flight but it?s expensive and the time is very inconvenient. Since I?m planning on bringing out the kids (who?ve never been to DisneyWorld), that?s a bad combination. My airlines of choice, JetBlue and VirginAmerica, had nothing promising.The cheapest one-stops with decent connections were on AirTran. This isn?t an airline I typically fly, but none of my regular airlines had reasonable prices or connections so I figured I?d give them a chance.Almost right away, bad things started to happen. Their web site is S...L...O...W ? sometimes really, really slow. As I transitioned from Kayak to airtan.com, I found myself waiting on interminable drop-down combo-box populations. Part of the problem was very long waits firing off HBX image requests.HBX requests? On an airline?s transaction site? Are you kidding me? But it?s not as if I?m going to fly another airline because they are still running a sunsetted web analytics tool and obviously aren?t monitoring key page load times in the transaction process.I slug along through the order process (including the maddening $6 seat charge no matter which seat you pick ? obviously just a cheap dodge to make their rates seem lower on services like Kayak) and confirm my order.The site fails. Here?s the message I get:  Great. Just great. Nothing like a broken web-site to make you feel good about a company! I just spent nearly half-an-hour plodding through their slow site only to have it fail on confirmation and NOT place my order.So like a good customer, I call the number provided. Thirty minutes later, I?m finally off hold and talking to a customer service rep...<br/><div align='right'>2010-03-26 18:46:01</div>

The Metrics Meltdown

I can pretty much measure how tough a week was by how often I had to dress up. So last week (with client meetings in NY on Monday/Tuesday, OMMA in SF on Wednesday, the Red Door Speaker Series in San Diego on Thursday, and client meetings in Palo Alto on Friday) pretty much scored a perfect five. My sneakers got a much need rest but my voice is a bit scratchy!OMMA and the Red Door Speaker Series sparked some ideas that I wanted to share before I embark on a more technical series on use-case analysis (and maybe a few more segmentation posts).The hook for the OMMA panel was the ?Metrics Meltdown? ? why analytics is failing. And, like most panels, the discussion probably revealed more about the panelists than the topic!You had the consulting guys (like me) saying that problem was largely about people. The tools guys (Brian Kelly from Quantivo) blaming old-generation tools. And the enterprise guys (Adam Greco from Salesforce) talking about enterprise politics and culture.Each of these is a legitimate gripe of course. And each is reflective of our own parochial view. My business is all about finding and getting good people. Brian?s is about building better tools. Adam?s is about getting things done in a specific corporate climate. But I left wondering if we all weren?t a little off the mark. The more I think about it, the more I?m skeptical of the original question?s premise. Is online analytics really much different than any other corporate endeavor? My background is in traditional IT (programming) and traditional Business Intelligence. Based on my experience then and what I hear now, I?d bet my whole small fortune that if I went to a team of BI gurus and asked them the state of enterprise reporting they?d say it?s a mess - enough to make you despair. When I hear about corporate IT, I rarely hear that it?s in good shape. My clients certainly seem to dread IT rather more than measurement. So is web analytics really that much (or any) worse than anything else? Get a group of experts in any business area and they?ll tell you that most companies are very poor at their particular discipline. They wouldn?t be wrong either. If you can commoditize a skill or discipline, you can expect many companies to be good at it. In IT, functions like PC Setup or Network Configuration have become almost commodities. Advances in software and hardware have made these tasks much easier, the high-level of standardization of the tasks across companies makes learning highly transferable,...<br/><div align='right'>2010-03-20 13:23:42</div>

Launching a Social Effort on Facebook

I thought the two most exciting new product demonstrations at the Omniture Summit were the first fruits of the Adobe acquisition with T&T for Flash and the extensive Facebook integrations that were announced. How much of this is sizzle and how much is steak is going to depend a lot on your business and your current marketing focus. That Facebook is important seems undeniable. A growing body of thought is emerging that Facebook may be in the process of becoming the de facto center of the internet universe ? effectively replacing Google. That?s not inconceivable, but there are some fairly good reasons why it may not happen. Fortunately, as a measurement company, we?re much more concerned with optimizing the present than predicting the future.As part of that ?optimizing the present?, we?ve been involved as the measurement arm for several recent large Facebook campaigns by clients. None of them have been very successful. I think it?s still unclear whether Facebook will turn out to be a really good advertising platform. The rich availability of targeting data and the impressive engagement numbers are attractive. But not every medium is conducive to advertising; Facebook is still working to find an effective format and agencies are still working to find effective targeting and creative strategies.Understanding how immature Facebook is as an advertising platform is essential to developing a good launch strategy if you are planning a buy. Since most Facebook efforts have a viral component, there is a tendency to heavily front-weight the ad buy and rely on viral spread to carry a program forward. But front-loading a Facebook effort necessarily eliminates or sharply reduces your ability to tune the campaign and learn from your mistakes.The sheer size of Facebook can also work against you. Facebook can deliver so many impressions so rapidly that your entire effort can be swallowed up before you?ve had any chance to react or optimize. This also makes wallpapering strategies virtually impossible.So Facebook is inherently a targeting platform. That?s a good thing and it plays to the strength of information that?s available. It also means that you have an opportunity to fine tune the combination of creative and demographic/interest targeting.To optimize that combination is going to take time. It will probably take significantly more time than it will take you to optimize and equivalent Display campaign: you have more data for optimization and your agency will have...<br/><div align='right'>2010-03-07 15:28:24</div>

ObservePoint: Automated Web Analytics Tag Governance and Site Monitoring

Semphonic kicks off our ?Semphonic Selects? Review SeriesAfter two days at the Omniture Customer Advisory Board, I was at the Web Analytics Wednesday on Tuesday (a name my seven year old would love) last night. That event just happened to be hosted by ObservePoint - a timely coincidence since we have news that happens to involve them.With the online analytics ecosystem growing by leaps and bounds, it?s getting harder and harder to keep track of all the different and useful tools that are available. I?m assuming that anyone reading my blog knows about at least one web analytics tool. But it?s often hard to get real-world points of view on products that are newer and less entrenched. One of the advantages we enjoy as a consultancy is getting to work hands-on with many different clients and ? along with that ? many different tools. With that in mind, we?ve decided to launch a regular series of product reviews focused on these additional tools in the analytics arsenal. We?re calling the series Semphonic Selects ? and the goal is to distill our real-world experience with these products into a short guide that will give people a good sense of what the product can do, who it?s good for, and what issues they may need to consider when using it. We aren?t in the reviewing business, of course, and we aren?t doing this as journalists. Our intent is mainly to talk about products that we think ARE useful and that we actually work with in our practice. So I don?t expect to be writing about products we don?t think people should consider using. But we will try to give you a good sense of what we like and what we wish was better about the products we cover.We?ve just released our first Selects review. We kicked the series off with ObservePoint ? an automated tool for scanning websites, capturing tag information, and then reviewing it to find/fix problems. ObservePoint is a great tool for enterprises looking to establish firm governance and quality control around measurement. It has a very nice, very clean interface and it fills an important niche in the enterprise analytics space. This is a tool that saves an analyst quite a bit of time doing a function that is absolutely necessary.It?s a tool we?ve built into our standard site audit process ? using it regularly. In fact, we like it so much that we gave it the ultimate compliment for a consulting company ? we actually paid for it ourselves!The full Selects Review is available now on our web site (free of course). Click here...<br/><div align='right'>2010-03-03 11:13:46</div>

Optimizing Social Search: Upcoming Webinar with Scott Wilder

Register for the Leveraging Social Search Webinar - Tuesday, March 9th at 10AM PSTSearch Engine Optimization has become a fact of life for any organization serious about the online channel. Social Media is rapidly becoming as important. But what about search on social media? This isn?t an oxymoron. Major social engines like Facebook and Twitter have become so enormous that they form significant search communities unto themselves. Almost nobody, however, seems to have thought much about search optimization for key social engines. And they should.At least, I think so. Scott Wilder and I decided to do a series of webinars this year on social media strategy and measurement - mostly because we like working together so much. By the way, I should mention that since our last webinar Scott has become an SVP and Social Media Architect at Edelman Digital. Very cool ? and congratulations Scott! This means his advice is probably quite a bit more expensive than it was a month ago - making these free webinars an even better deal.Of course, I?d like to think this new gig is due to the outstanding quality of our first webinar!That first webinar introduced a set of measurement concepts around various community and social endeavors. For our second, we wanted something a little more experimental ? and as we kicked around ideas, the importance of search in the social sphere seemed like one of the most interesting.There is tremendous search volume trapped in systems like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. On the other hand, the search engines on these systems are mostly primitive when compared to Google. And while optimization is, in some ways, more straightforward because of that ? each system has its own quirks.Scott and I are going to cover search on the big three: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. We?ll explain how search works on each system, show some examples, and discuss the implications. Sure, these systems are built to be social networks. So building networks and relationships is the core strategy for addressing these systems. But if you think search doesn?t matter on these systems, I think you?re wrong. Search optimization on the social networks is pretty virgin territory as far as Scott and I can tell. We picked the topic just because of that ? and we?ve been working to try and understand how each system works and develop appropriate strategies. So I won?t even begin to pretend we have all the answers. We will, I think, have some pretty thought-provoking ideas though....<br/><div align='right'>2010-02-28 16:17:48</div>

Omniture CAB and Summit

Speaking of Conferences ? the largest web analytics event of the year is hard upon us ? the Adobe/Omniture Summit. There will a lot to hear and discuss this year ? and I?m particularly looking forward to the CAB sessions. If you?re going to be in Salt Lake City, do look me up ? or just drop me a line and we?ll schedule a time to chat!...<br/><div align='right'>2010-02-26 10:34:11</div>

X Change Web Analytics Conference ? 2010

We are right in the heart of the analytics conference season, so it seems right to be talking about X Change 2010. Don't panic. The conference isn't till September. But we are deep into planning for this year?s conference, and in the past month we?ve nailed down the place (Monterey, CA just south of San Francisco), the time (Sept. 20-22nd), and the main event. Let me start with the basics for those who haven?t been to a previous X Change. X Change is a conference for and by web analytics professionals. The format is unique ? all small group discussions around key topics in web analytics hosted by accomplished enterprise managers and practitioners. It's not about speeches or powerpoint presentations, booths, or sales ? it's just great conversations among true peers. No conference brings together anything like the tremendous quality of attendees that makes X Change special. And no conference takes advantage of that high-quality like X Change does. It's a chance to talk about your problems, ideas, and efforts with other great enterprise analytics managers and practitioners. Last year?s Huddle (our name for the small goup discussions) Leaders included people like Adam Greco of Salesforce, Lynn Lanphier of Best Buy, Matt Jacobs of Adobe, Dennis Bradley of Charles Schwab, James Robinson of the NY Times, Greg Dowling then of Nokia now Semphonic, Tom Cattapan of Turner Broadcasting and a host of others just like them. The resulting conversations were passionate, fun, involving, and deeply interesting - even if (maybe especially if) you are an expert in the field. Most of them had been to X Change as attendees before leading Huddles ? and that?s the beauty of the conference. In the all conversational format, attendees can, and do, contribute every bit as much as leaders. It makes for a great experience.We try to match that experience with surroundings and amenities that support and encourage great conversation. Last year?s event was at the stunning St. Regis San Francisco. The year before we enjoyed the high-luxury of the Ritz Carlton. This year, we?ve taken the event a little to the south ? to Monterey?s unique Monterey Plaza Hotel. Perched right on the ocean, this lovely hotel is spectacular and gracious ? with a unique California-Coastal vibe. I know it's a little extra hassle to go south of San Francisco, but the setting will more than recompense everyone. I think there will be a special feel to coming to a place that?s a little different than even the best...<br/><div align='right'>2010-02-25 12:52:16</div>

Questions and Answers from the 2010 Web Analytics Vision Webinar : Part II

In last week?s post, I covered the first part of Q&A from our ?Web Analytics Vision for 2010? webinar with the entire Semphonic Executive Team. The webinar ranged over a wide number of topics ? from planning a measurement strategy to core infrastructure governance to advanced analytics and topics like social and mobile measurement. Today I?ll be answering questions from the second half of the webinar ? on advanced analytics, social measurement and mobile measurement.Let?s start with advanced analytics. Jesse Gross and I tackled a couple of what we see as the most important analytics directions this year. I complained/bemoaned/bitched a bit about how few organizations really do analysis (as opposed to reporting), which perhaps led to this question!Q: Which should be the new moto or debate topic for 2010: "Web analytics is easy" (A.K.) "Web analytics is complex", or something else? Phil Kemelor: I think we will get further away from the use of ?web? to describe analytics. Analytics today includes more than just the web?there?s social media, mobile, video, competitive intelligence, user experience testing, focus groups, surveys. Using the term ?web? for analytics has potentially caused more confusion about the value of analysis. That being said, those organizations that develop governance and planning around the use of analytics will find it easier than those that treat analytics as a tool-centric point solution. Mastering the obvious is perhaps the sine qua non of consulting and I?ll confess to getting sucked into the ?web analytics is hard? debate. I also notice that Phil kind of dodged this question in his response ? unless perhaps his answer is ?web analytics should be changed to analytics? or even the more enticing ?web analytics is dead.? In my experience, we all start talking about something being dead just when it is getting mature enough to actually deliver results. I?m not sure web analytics is there yet. And I?m not sure I have a better answer to this question either!A good deal of what Jesse and I talked about is how sophisticated analytics actually drive to easier, more understandable presentation of the data. Analytic Reporting, Behavioral Segmentation and Use-Case Analysis are all examples of this. But sometimes, it isn?t complexity that drives corporate failure to use analytics as the next question (with built-in answer) suggests!Q: Why don't more mkt folks seem to understand? I think it comes from a fear of having proof their campaign...<br/><div align='right'>2010-02-21 15:56:54</div>

Questions and Answers from the 2010 Web Analytics Vision Webinar

We did our ?Web Analytics Vision for 2010? webinar with the entire Semphonic Executive Team last Thursday. It covered a wide range of topics ? from planning a measurement strategy to core infrastructure governance to advanced analytics and topics like social and mobile measurement. As usual, we got a lot of questions and, pretty much as usual, we had no time to answer them online. Having so many people (8) speaking, it was obviously going to be difficult to control from a time perspective. I promised to answer the questions personally and on this blog ? and that?s what I?ll be doing today. In my introductory remarks, I described the webinar as more like Tapas (small plate dinners) than a traditional sit-down meal. Our goal was to provide some ?tasty-bites? across a whole bunch of different topics. I think we did that. I really enjoyed doing the webinar and I?m hoping we can make it an annual event! In a way, it?s a shame we didn?t get time for questions, because the Q&A format is one of my favorites ? more natural and spontaneous than straight presentation. One of these days, I?d like to do an all Q&A webinar. For now, I?ll just content myself with a Sunday blog. Phil Kemelor went through the list of questions and addressed some of the ones most relevant to the areas he discussed. I've included his thoughts along with my own. We started the webinar with Phil and Greg Dowling talking about building an enterprise strategy around measurement. Then Paul Legutko and Allison Hartsoe dived down into issues around creating and maintaining the core infrastructure for measurement. That transitioned into a discussion between Joel Hadary and I about more advanced infrastructure options like universal tagging and data warehousing. We followed this up with a discussion between Jesse Gross and I about directions in advanced analytics. Then we wrapped up with June Dershewitz and I talking about Social Media Measurement and Greg Dowling and June discussing mobile measurement. One of things Phil and Greg talked about most in their strategy section was the necessity for formal leadership - a ?Measurement Czar? ? to drive enterprise analytics. Given how often Czars were killed by their own people (and given how often they deserved to be), I?m not sure I?d ever want the title! But the essential point is that an effective enterprise measurement effort needs a clear leader. What sort of leader? One of the questions we were asked was whether the ?Czar? is the same as an...<br/><div align='right'>2010-02-14 15:56:21</div>

Getting Engaged

I thoroughly enjoyed this past week at the WebTrends Engage 2010 Conference ? enjoyed it for both the right and wrong reasons (note to wife ? I don?t mean really, really wrong reasons)!Let?s start with the wrong reasons. I know we aren?t supposed to go to conferences to enjoy the city, the accommodations or the parties but, of course, we do. New Orleans was an inspired choice for location. It?s a city most of us never get to visit for business; it?s distinct ? like no other city on earth ? and it?s fun. You fly into Louis Armstrong Airport and right there it?s different ? what other city names their airport after a musician? We don?t have Gershwin International in New York or Jerry Garcia (Fly High) Airport in San Francisco! It?s like flying into Hawaii ? you know you are in a different sort of place.Engage was at the Roosevelt ? a Waldorf Astoria property ? and if the styling is a little old-world for my tastes, it?s very much New Orleans and quite beautiful. I wish the weather had been a little more cooperative ? it seems to be raining/snowing everywhere in the country ? but it really is a wonderful place to be. And, of course, the city is mad for the Saints. I?m enough of a football fan to appreciate this ? I have never seen any city so obviously and thoroughly intoxicated by a team and a game. I was surprised my very pillows were not engraved with ?Who Dat? or ?Geaux Saints!?So that?s the peripheral stuff. But the real conference was excellent as well. With X Change always in the back of my mind, I?m always on the lookout for good conference ideas and Engage has some intriguing ones. They make extensive use of social networking ? mostly for good. Though I?m not sure if I liked having #engage twitters floating behind me while up on stage. Jacques Warren and I were joking about this afterward and couldn?t decide which was worse ? having something like:?Gary Angel just picked his nose on stage #engage?float up behind you or just not to be mentioned at all. I guess I prefer obscurity.But what I think makes the conference worthwhile is the nice balance they strike between WebTrends information and general information. If you go to a vendor conference you expect ? perhaps are even most interested ? in things like the Product Roadmap and company vision. But you don?t want to be hammered with sales information all the time. WebTrends has found a nice balance. I particularly enjoyed the presentation by the WebTrends UI leader (Justin Garrity) ? and I even took...<br/><div align='right'>2010-02-06 12:02:55</div>

WebTrends Engage and Visitor Segmentation

Conference season is getting into high gear and WebTrends Engage 2010 is the first big conference of the year. Engage is a pretty cool conference and I?m going to be there on a panel talking about visitor segmentation. I don?t know if it?s cause/effect or just happenstance, but it?s always nice to be talking about something I?ve been writing on. The WebTrends Conference ? rather like the company ? has gone through a pretty dramatic and positive transformation in the last couple years. If I were to say that they ripped off some the concepts we pioneered in X Change, I wouldn?t mean that as a bad thing. I think they?ve done a really nice job blending elements of X Change, lots of social engagement stuff, and a large-scale vendor conference ? no mean trick. Plus it?s in New Orleans ? which is cool. I haven?t been there for ages.They really emphasize the social aspect at Engage, and I?ve been shooting emails back-and-forth with fellow panel members (Jacques Warren, Kevin Hillstrom and Jim Novo ? pretty good panel) in preparation for the actual conference. We?ll see if this early conversation pays off when it comes time to do the panel (a tough format to have work well). My big complaint about panels has always been that they end up feeling like political debates where every candidate has their own sound-bites ? you know the sort of thing ? damn the question here?s the answer I want to give!Maybe this early back-and-forth prep will help facilitate actual conversation.The WebTrends folks asked us to kick around four main themes: What are the top trends in segmentation? Why aren?t we seeing more companies do segmentation? Can you share some examples of segmentation in action? What are some missing capabilities for segmentation? I thought I?d briefly recap some of the most interesting early comments to give you a feel for where the discussion has been heading.On top trends in segmentation, Jim is (consistently) hammering home the necessity of using time-based evaluation. He?s surely right to emphasize the importance of both extending our view of customer actions over time and paying much more attention to recency as a variable. No direct marketer would ever ignore recency ? possibly the most impactful targeting variable there is ? in the way web analytics people routinely manage. To this, I?d add the growing focus on timeliness of response. Lots of companies are gravitating to trigger-based marketing and the key to those systems is timely analysis/delivery.Kevin...<br/><div align='right'>2010-01-24 16:29:08</div>

A Belated Christmas Gift for Semphonic: Greg Dowling former Head of Analysis at Nokia joins Semphonic

January 4th is a tough day to go back to work. Semphonic closes for the week between Christmas and New Years and while I don?t exactly stop working I do take it quite a bit easier ? especially on the alarm clock front. But this year there was a nice, belated stocking stuffer for all of us at Semphonic? Greg Dowling started his new life as a Semphonic VP, Head of New York Office and unofficial leader of our Mobile Practice. This is a huge step forward for our practice and it made rolling out of bed in the January dark quite a bit easier! We started the New Year with several days of all day internal management team meetings ? so the whole executive team was on hand in Novato to welcome Greg and talk about our plans for this year. There is so much going on that I don?t know how I?m going to keep up. But I don?t think anything is more important or more exciting than adding Greg to our practice. I?ve known Greg for quite a while ? back to his days as an Analyst for Jupiter. He is, in many ways, the perfect fit for Semphonic. We?re a hands-on consultancy that focuses on actually doing web analytics for large enterprise. Greg has spent the last couple of years building a large, enterprise-wide analytics team for Nokia. He?s a real practitioner and an experienced large-enterprise manager. He knows what it?s like, first hand, to create a sophisticated analytics team inside an organization. Greg has the consulting angle covered too. He was Vice President of Strategy & Analysis for Digitas where he led their Web analytics capability supporting clients such as Delta, Kraft, Heineken, and Time Warner Cable. As our practice has evolved and grown, we?ve also become increasingly concerned with helping our clients do web analytics right and deepening our own practice understanding. This broader, strategic practice is closely tied to our hands-on consulting ? the two are inseparable and driven by each other. We want our strategic thinking to be grounded in our practical experience and we want it to go beyond that practical experience in much the same way that a good scientist builds deeper, more explanatory theories from simpler, more observational hypotheses. Greg?s background as an Analyst helps him provide that broader industry perspective flavored with the experience of what?s it like to be doing or managing the work. I think it?s going to be just great having him on our team. You can read Greg's thoughts about this at...<br/><div align='right'>2010-01-11 08:00:00</div>

I recently did an interview with Jeff…

I recently did an interview with Jeff Minich of Omniture talking about our experiences with the Omniture API. If you're interested in the API, check it out here on the Omniture blog: http://xr.com/lfny and if you are interested in the API users group - drop me a line!...<br/><div align='right'>2010-01-08 09:50:29</div>

Tactics in Web Analytics Visitor Segmentation

I didn?t quite stop working this past week (when Semphonic is closed) but it sure feels that way as I get ready for the New Year! Now that?s it time to shed the holiday mindset and immerse ourselves back into the world of work, I?m going to resume my series on tactics in web analytics visitor segmentation. Segmentation is at the heart of most real analysis ? and in this series I?m focusing on analytic segmentation ? not segmentation of large and significant populations for reporting purposes. In the last post, I showed how we used segmentation to isolate, study and improve the behavior of printed catalog searchers coming online to look for a specific product. Today, I?m going to show an example where visitor geography turned out to be the key to effective segmentation and personalization.Example: Geo-Based SearchingUse Case: A real-estate focused site knew that geography was probably important to visitor behavior, but despite many years of operation there was significant disagreement about the online population?s searching behavior and how it related to where they accessed the internet. Client Question: The client wanted to know how visitor geography and search behavior were related. Key questions included: Did most visitors use the site to look at properties outside or inside their current location? Did visitors search the same locations repeatedly? Were there significant differences between visitors searching in their own geography vs. those searching outside their own geography? Measurement Issues: Search geography was captured as an input search string ? making it difficult to consistently resolve since it had many variations.Tool: We used Omniture?s Data Warehouse tool for the analysis.Methodology: One of the challenges here was that we didn?t have a direct correlation between search term and visitor geography. Getting that kind of report is one of the reasons we usually recommend that companies deploy a Vista rule to copy the visitor geography into variables. However, with data warehouse, we could get at the data. It was more a question of how to do it conveniently. Let?s start with how we tackled the first question ? did visitors use the site to look at properties within or outside their current geography? Obviously, we knew we were going to see both behaviors, but the relative percentages were hotly debated.Unfortunately, in web analytics systems as they exist today, you can?t generally create a segmentation based on the comparison of two...<br/><div align='right'>2010-01-03 16:29:52</div>

The Year that Was

I decided there wasn?t much point in writing the second installment of my segmentation blog this week ? since so many people aren?t going to be around to read it. I?ll save that for next Sunday after which things will be back to normal.So I thought instead I?d just write a quick (ho, ho, ho) holiday thank you to everyone I?ve worked with this past year. 2009 dawned as scary as any I remember. Semphonic went through the dotcom boom and bust (yes, we?ve been around that long) and it had a devastating impact on our business. Back then, dotcoms were pretty much the only consumers of web analytics and even they didn?t care very much!When it all went bust, we didn?t lose clients, they flat-out disappeared.This past year had the same grim look.But as tough as 2009 was (and it was a much worse macro-economy), it had nothing like the same kind of impact on our business. It was, in fact, a very good year for Semphonic.I?m uncomfortable saying that ? not because I fear some kind of hexerati ? but just because I know how difficult a year it was for the vast majority of companies. It?s easy to pretend you?re better than everyone else or smarter than everyone else when most of the time it?s really just a matter of being luckier than everyone else. I think we truly were smarter than everyone else in 2000 when we recognized that web analytics was real and important. But it didn?t help our business one whit and it didn?t make it any easier to layoff, one by one, our entire staff.This year, we weren?t any smarter than back then but we were luckier - and perhaps a little better at our business too. And so we found ourselves quietly having the best year of our ten plus years in business ? best by almost any measure you could name - from revenue growth to employee growth, client growth to profitability, and even in the quality and accomplishment of our work. By year?s end, things felt strong indeed. I take this as a tribute to our industry, its importance in the online world, and the increasing recognition that web analytics really does matter. I do not pretend to predict the greater macro-economic climate. The economy could roar-back, it could double-dip. It could stagger along without either growth or disaster. I have no idea. And I?m pretty certain no one else really knows either. But at least in our little corner of the woods the wolves seem far afield and the horizon wide indeed. The joy of a business like ours is doing work we love with people we like. The hard part is...<br/><div align='right'>2009-12-27 18:49:55</div>

Tactics in Visitor Segmentation

Blogging is a bit like exercise. Do it regularly, at a regular time and a regular way, and it doesn?t feel all that hard. But get out of the pattern, miss a bit of time through travel or sickness, and it feels like bloody hell when you get back to it. So a missing week (combination of business travel and family Christmas-stuff) has me feeling a bit like I?m running up-hill.It's lucky that at least I have a topic ready-to-hand ? my promised exploration of some tactics in visitor segmentation. As I?ve written often enough, there is no single capability in doing real web analytics that is more important than segmentation.Visitor Segmentation in web analytics is used for two main purposes. The first is to setup regular reports of key populations. If your site has distinct types of users (like guests, subscribers and premium subscribers), then reporting that describes the numbers and behavior of each type is essential. This sort of segmentation doesn?t have to be very dynamic. It can be done at the tagging level or in software and the segment definitions are usually obvious and fairly simple. I?m not going to spend time on this type of segmentation ? it is supported by almost every kind of tool (including GA now) and its uses are well-understood.The second type of segmentation is the dynamic creation of filters to try and isolate a population for analytic purposes. This type of segmentation is almost always ad hoc, requires significant tool capabilities, and can be quite a bit more difficult. But it?s a capability at the heart of real analysis in our field. What I thought I?d do for these blogs is walk through some recent segmentation exercises (a little bit disguised but completely real) we?ve done for analysis purposes and show how we used segmentation tools to find an answer. I?m mostly going to draw examples from Omniture?s Data Warehouse and Discover but I may throw in a few NetInsight examples as well. We?re seeing Unica get some definite traction in the market and NetInsight is a very nice tool for this type of segmentation analysis.Example: Catalog Searchers vs. Site SearchersUse Case: The client distributes many printed catalogs and, like nearly all catalogers, allows visitors to enter a catalog id in the search field. Visitors are then taken directly to a product detail page. Client Question: The client wanted to know how many visitors fit this use can if the process was working well. Key questions included: Were catalog visitors successful? What else...<br/><div align='right'>2009-12-20 17:04:35</div>

More From Beyond: Web Analytics Staffing

Rudi just released the Beyond Web Analytics podcast on staffing for web analytics. This was my second stint as a guest and I think in many ways it?s a more interesting conversation than the first. Coming from a consultancy, our problems are both different from, and eerily similar to, the problems faced by an enterprise trying to staff a web analytics department. We have similar issues around what type of person and background works best, what roles we need to fill, and what infrastructure needs to be in place to make a person effective. Of course, there are some dis-similarities as well ? most organizations don?t have an existing base of senior and mid-level analysts to provide mentoring and don?t have a stack of off-the-shelf products to provide templates for documentation, reporting and analysis. But I think it?s fair to say that a large enterprise looking to staff a full web analytics department can learn a lot about the roles and types of people needed from a company like ours.Anyway, check it out and see if you agree!...<br/><div align='right'>2009-12-09 12:19:02</div>

Scott Wilder?s Q&A from the Webinar

Here are some additional answers that Scott provided from our webinar last week. I also wanted to mention again that if you are interested in or are working with the Omniture API, please join me next week for a small get together at Omniture?s SF offices. It?s a great opportunity to share experiences and make some good Omniture API connections!Scott?s answers:Q: What success have other sites had using facebook connect/yahoo/twitter etc, and then attempting to upsell those users to full registration on their site?Scott: Dell and Zappos probably have the most ?publicized? success with Twitter. Dell sold $1MM of merchandise using Twiitter, but they highlighted ?inventory? at a low cost and that they had to move.Like all marketing and sales efforts ?the message? and ?the offer? are key. As you can see from Dell?s message, the offer was quite appealing 30 % off any Outlet XPS One all-in-one PC! Enter code at checkout: NPZ2DD16C20BCR - http://tinyurl.com/6z8f3s - Expires 10/21 11:53 AM Oct 20th, 2008 from web. Zappos is known for driving excellent awareness and customer service online.There is a very good white paper that highlights Twitter successes (but it cost $49) at http://www.marketingprofs.com/store/product/21/twitter-success-stories/You can also find another book on Facebook successes. One Facebook success story I like to share is when Adobe challenged users to determine if a photo was real or fake. The game lasted about a month and they were constantly adding photos to the contest (which is good for stickiness). At the end of each game ? time users voted ? they were asked to 1) Buy Now, 2) Play Again or 3) Share with others. Adobe claims about 10% of the visitors to their FB page played the game and 6% of those folks purchased their products. Final note: Don?t look at these contests and just copy them. Remember like all marketing, the message, the offer, the price, etc. are all key.Q: How do you use the community and not worry about biases in the social net or making recommendations - i.e. hand-raisers...might not be your core audience that is commentingScott: I agree with everything Gary said. You know, I have some strange personal rules (of thumb), like the 5% rule I described during the call (assume that unless you have Community heavily integrated into your products, only 5% of your users will participate in your community). SO HERE, my strange rule of thumb is to cut all numbers in half. In other words, if a community is explicitly voting on...<br/><div align='right'>2009-12-08 19:03:07</div>

Measuring Social Media ROI ? Redux

I had a great time doing the Social Media ROI webinar with Scott (except now he keeps calling me Elwood)! We?re talking about doing more webinars together ? and I hope that works out. There were a lot of great questions that came through and while I?m sending out these responses personally, I thought almost all of them were widely interesting. So I?ve extracted the questions I?m answering (Scott is tackling some and I?ll post his answers as soon as I have them) here.If you missed the webinar and would like the Powerpoint, drop me a line. We?ll have the full webinar on the web site (http://www.semphonic.com) sometime this coming week.Q: What if you don't have a way to find out who is visiting your site...what if you can't track them?Gary: This is a huge problem for tracking success ? certainly on all .gov properties. When you can?t track individuals, you have no way to measure the ?halo? effect of visits. In such situations, you?ll still be able to measure the direct (visit sourcing) impact of social efforts. To understand the halo effect, I?d suggest incorporating specific questions into your survey vehicle to try and come to a research-based understanding of how often visitors to your site have social history and the difference between 1st time visitors with social history and subsequent visits. Note that this technique (online opinion research) is equally applicable to .gov and .com type sites.Q: What are good strategies to measure sentiment; are there good automated international natural language analysis tools, or do you recommend people classifying posts/tweets?Gary: I think Scott and I both agree that automated sentiment measurement is not very good right now ? especially when it comes to international. This question came from an EU-based company and they may have a better perspective on this than we do, but seeing how well (I mean poorly) the English-language ones work, I?d be really surprised if it was better elsewhere. There are tools for doing it, of course, but their miss rate is so high that I think their use is risky. If you have to check their classifications they don?t save you much time and if you don?t check, I doubt you?ll feel sufficient confidence to use the results. So I do recommend this as a manual ? probably occasional task. I think it?s better to suited to periodic research programs than ongoing reporting.Q: How do you use the community and not worry about biases in the social neti.e. hand-raisers...might not be your core audience...<br/><div align='right'>2009-12-06 22:59:05</div>

The Omniture API and Last Call for Webinar on Social Media ROI

I?m going to start working on a series about use-case analysis and techniques for visitor segmentation, but before I do that, I wanted to mention one more event that I?d love to meet people at. I?m going to be hosting an Omniture API discussion group here in SF on Tuesday afternoon, December 15th. The group will be meeting at the Omniture offices downtown ? the original Offermatica digs.If you?re a Genesis user, then under the new Genesis pricing scheme you?ve got pretty good access to the API (something you may not even be aware of). It?s a tool I?d like to see a lot more of our clients use and there?s no better way to tackle development than to talk with other developers. We?ve done some work with the API and I?m hoping to meet others who have done work or would like to. Frankly, it would be great for me ? I?d love to have people to share experiences with and exchange ideas. It should be an informal get-together ? more of a meet and chat than anything else ? but I?ll be giving a short presentation on some of the API work we?ve done and Omniture will be providing food and drinks. I don?t expect a crowd, but I?m hoping we get some real developers out to talk (not eat) turkey! Check out the details here.I also wanted to re-mention the webinar I?ll be doing this week with Scott Wilder. We?ve got pretty good registration for that ? but I?m excited about it and never hurts to have more. December is a great month to spend some time thinking about projects for next year, and measuring social media ROI and tackling the Omniture API are two tasks on the bleeding (and therefore still fun) edge! Check it out....<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-29 15:04:08</div>

Beyond Web Analytics? Me?

Last night I joined the Beyond Web Analytics panel for a podcast on going ? well - beyond. In this case, going beyond reporting to analysis. If you haven?t heard about Beyond Web Analytics, it?s put together by Rudi Schumpert who is joined by Adam Greco (always terrific) and James Dutton for what?s planned to be a regular series of podcasts on all things analytics. I was a guest last night on going beyond reporting to analysis - a topic that?s definitely meat and potatoes to me. I don?t think most organizations do nearly enough analysis on their data. Even among Semphonic clients, most could be much more aggressive about analysis not just reporting.It?s a nice forum and the panel format ? not my favorite for conferences ? works well for podcasts. Listening to one person talk always feels a little tiresome after awhile ? even when that person talks very well. The conversational style is easier to listen to (at least for me). And since they are a regular panel, I can see them really beginning to interact and converse, removing my main objection to panels which is that the participants always seem to be talking to an audience in their head not to each other.The panel has a nice balance and it could end up working quite well indeed. I?m also going to be on the next discussion (about staffing) and I?d be a guest anytime they?d have me. I?d like to see it really work and build an audience.You can hear our discussion and check out the ongoing series here....<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-24 18:54:36</div>

How do you Measure Social Media ROI?

It?s oh so typical that just when most of us start to feel pretty good about our knowledge and methods for measuring our own web sites, everyone starts asking us about what?s going on in the greater online space. Measuring communities, conversation, and social media is at once fascinating and absurdly challenging. The tools are primitive, the infrastructure almost non-existent, the questions largely undeveloped and even the business goals are poorly understood. It?s just like old times! So I?m delighted to be doing a webinar on measuring social media with my friend Scott Wilder.Scott and I worked together for the last few years as he built-up Intuit?s impressive online communities. He?s that rarest of breeds ? someone who uses social media and technology with true passion and combines that with real business acumen. Like lovers of ballet and football, neither one nor the other is particularly rare, but the two almost never to comingle!Our plan for the webinar is to start with an examination of online communities and measurement. We?ll cover some of the basics of community measurement then dive into measurement based on both audience and organizational segmentation. This is interesting stuff. If you have or are thinking about a community, it should really help you understand how to measure your success. We also hope to provide some perspective on whether ? if you are on the outside looking in ? building a community is right for your business.For many organizations, it?s cheaper and more practical to take the conversation to where your customers already live. The second part of the webinar will focus on the different uses of measurement in this broader online space. Scott and I will talk over how to find your audience online, how to measure the success of your brand-monitoring and customer support efforts, how to measure influencer programs, and how to track impacts on your own sites. Don?t expect miracles ? this stuff is hard. But we?ll try to provide real solutions and along the way we?ll cover everything from old-school techniques like opinion research to new fangled tools like Radian6.At this early stage in the game, it isn?t really sensible to talk about measurement without regard to strategy. Social Media strategies haven?t developed to the point where tactics are the primary focus of measurement. So our focus will be on how to use analytics to target your social efforts and establish whether you?re effective enough to continue.For a take-way, we?re...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-21 12:40:49</div>

Measuring Online Applications: A Simple Primer on What to Analyze

Online Applications and highly-interactive web sites written in full-on programming languages are becoming the norm on the web, not the rare exception. Measuring these applications is challenging for a whole host of reasons. In my last post, I talked about the inevitable trade-offs between the desire for extensive measurement and the cost-of-measurement in a SaaS environment. In today?s post, I?m going to discuss some of the ways that analyzing applications is a little different than analyzing more traditional we sites.One of the biggest differences I see between measuring applications and measuring websites is that application developers are far more interested in measuring the efficiency of their GUI. Traditional web sites have far fewer moving pieces ? and the main concern is how well each page (as a unit) functions. But applications have many more options to consider and GUI developers are almost always deeply interested in understanding what users need most to accomplish any given task.Much of the framework I suggested for measuring applications is driven by this recognition that applications can?t be measured quite like web sites. In my framework, units-of-work replace page views as the ?core? ingredient in measurement. In addition, I added the concepts of ?state? and ?performance? to the unit of work. From these concepts, a fairly powerful set of GUI analysis reports fall out quite naturally. It?s easy to report on which tasks are most commonly used; which tasks are done first in an application; the order of tasks and their associations (which are done together). In addition, the analyst can easily tell which application options are used most often (from application states); how application states are changed for each task; and which application states are most likely to result in task success. Finally, the performance measurements lets application developers compare how much time each task takes in total to how much of that is human time vs. machine time. It also makes it easy to see if time is impacting task success rates.This is all good stuff and tremendously useful for GUI designers. And as I?ve said before, this type of measurement CAN be done with current web analytics systems that lack my suggested framework; it just requires quite a bit more work setting up the measurement infrastructure and hacking the reports.There are some other types of application analysis that fall out a little less obviously from the framework and are distinct from...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-14 16:03:17</div>

Measuring Online Applications: Trade-offs between Measurement and Cost

Online Applications and highly-interactive web sites written in full-on programming languages are becoming the norm on the web, not the rare exception. Measuring these applications is challenging for a whole host of reasons. In my last post, I talked about the importance of automated testing to bring measurement fully into the application development life-cycle. In today?s post, I?m going to cover an issue that plagues application measurement, video and most other rich media measurement ? how to balance cost vs. coverage when it comes to measurement.The problem of cost in measurement springs from our basic model. With SaaS implementations, each server call you make to your measurement system costs money. Not a lot of money, of course. And for web sites, there has been little doubt that the knowledge gained from page measurement more than offsets the per-page cost of collection. On most web sites, a typical visitor might view six to ten pages. A really engaged visitor might view twenty to thirty pages. In an online application, however, the number of user interactions (every click, zoom, and setting) can be much, much higher.Without a clear paradigm for a unit of measurement (such as a page view), it?s unclear which of these interactions should be measured. Capture every one, and you?ll likely find that the cost of measurement outweighs the benefit.As I mentioned, we?ve seen similar issues with video measurement. Many of our media clients went from measuring almost nothing about video to detailed measurement of how far viewers penetrated into each and every visitor played. But to get that measurement, they usually had to make multiple server calls per video ? sometimes as often as every 10 seconds. For a 2 minute video, that means a full-play results in 12 server calls. That?s a lot of measurement expense relative to the value of tracking abandonment per 10 second interval.In fact, a lot of that more detailed measurement ended up getting pulled. We?ve seen similar pull-backs when clients over-measured flash experiences ? tracking roll-overs for example. After awhile, most companies find they aren?t using that level of detail about user interactions very effectively and the cost of measurement isn?t justified.In an earlier post, I described a framework for measuring applications that included four core concepts: units-of-work, application state, rest-states, and performance. Part of the reason I settled on these concepts is that they provide a reasonable...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-08 16:46:08</div>

Measuring Online Applications : Automated Testing for Web Analytics

Online Applications and highly-interactive web sites written in full-on programming languages are becoming the norm on the web, not the rare exception. Measuring these applications is challenging for a whole host of reasons. In my last post, I talked about what a real application measurement framework might look like. In today?s post, I?m going to cover an issue that increasingly plagues measurement efforts ? how to integrate testing of the measurement system into your application development process.When we talk with the development teams these days, I?m often the one who has to break the bad news that there is no reasonable automation strategy for testing measurement. Not only that, but the testing is extraordinarily difficult to integrate into basic development cycles. Someone has to run through a test plan by hand, then go to the web analytics tool and try and shift through the data to isolate the test results. It?s kludgy, manual, slow and error prone. A perfect storm for testers.This is especially frustrating because measurement isn?t ?critical? functionality. Nobody wants to slip deadlines or delay release for measurement. The changes I?ve talked about so far ? especially in the measurement interface ? would greatly reduce the burden on programmers to get measurement INTO the application. But they really wouldn?t do much to make it easier to test.I?d like to see Omniture and Microsoft and other application and measurement vendors integrate testing functionality directly into the measurement system. Ideally, developers should be able to configure ?testing? as an overlay on the existing measurement interface. In other words, I wouldn?t add any code to test, I?d simply set a variable or an object that controlled the ?testing? state. When testing was turned on, every measurement call would be mirrored to an additional destination. Since online applications typically run locally, I see several ways this might be handled. First, the application could potentially save the measurement in a flat file on the local system (given permission). Alternatively, the application could save the measurement calls to an interface object in some easily parsed format. Finally, the application could pass the calls back to a secondary server that simply recorded them in a flat file on the server side or was part of a testing automation suite.With this type of setup, testing automation tools could drive through a series of application steps which would produce a measurement...<br/><div align='right'>2009-11-01 17:11:02</div>

Measuring Online Applications ? Creating a Measurement Framework

Online Applications and highly-interactive web sites written in full-on programming languages are becoming the norm on the web, not the rare exception. Measuring these applications is challenging for a whole host of reasons. In my last post, I talked about what a good programmatic interface might look like. But even with simple, logical calls to the measurement service, measuring applications won?t be a slam dunk. Applications simply don?t adapt well to the page/link view paradigm deeply embedded in web analytics systems. In today?s post, I?m going to cover some of the most important topics a measurement framework for applications should address.It?s obvious that online applications don?t easily fit the page view paradigm of static web sites. What?s less obvious is what should replace that paradigm. I?m not prepared to give a complete answer to that question. However, in our work actually building measurement into applications, there are four themes that have emerged and seem necessary to any good framework.Measuring the Application StateWhen we build application measurement into traditional measurement systems, one of the most important concepts we?ve evolved is the idea of an application state. The idea behind an application state is that it captures all of the ?settings? that are in place while a user accomplishes some action. Typical elements of an application state are things like ?sort type,? ?filter-type,? ?zoom-level,? and ?view-type.? In my last post, I used the example of a mapping application to illustrate some of the concepts involved in a good programmatic interface. It?s a useful example, because it?s a type of online application that virtually everyone is familiar with. In a mapping application, the application state is likely to include variables like ?map type,? ?overlay-type,? ?zoom-level,? and ?route-type.? The idea behind an application state is simple. It allows you to track key combinations of interface elements by application function. It can also be used to reduce the number of calls you need to make to the measurement service (a critical factor for any high-volume application). You don?t need or want to capture every single mouse click in an application. If a user clicks on zoom or sort, sending a measurement click is generally too expensive. Instead, we capture the entire set of application variables whenever key actions happen. In the map example, this would allow us to say what the most popular zoom levels are when viewing a...<br/><div align='right'>2009-10-25 18:11:55</div>

Measuring Online Applications ? Structuring a Measurement Interface

Online Applications and highly-interactive web sites written in full-on programming languages are becoming the norm on the web, not the rare exception. Measuring these applications is challenging for a whole host of reasons. But one of the biggest problems right now is how clumsy the javascript tagging method is when applied to applications.Most measurement systems now work similarly ? they rely on a small javascript program (the tag) that allows a coder to customize the values for certain variables and then call a function that assembles those values, adds a set of environmental variables (like browser and referring site), creates an image request and then executes that image request. All of the custom and environmental variables are passed as parameters in the image request and are decoded by the vendor when the request is logged on their end.Think about it ? all the fuss and muss of tagging ? just to make a call to another server and pass a few values. In the world of applications, there are many ways of handling this basic task, by far the most common being to use a web service. Web services are vastly more convenient for the application developer than the current method (which is well suited to static HTML). Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more primitive interface for web communications than passing parameters in image requests.The virtues of web services include the fact that they are directly supported within every significant programming language (including direct support within the programmers development environment), they provide methods that allow for back-and-forth communication and error-handling when necessary, they provide more control over the nature and amount of information passed, and they typically encapsulate the information passing into much more logical and understandable programmatic units.It?s true that some measurement vendors provide data insertion APIs. Omniture, for example, has one. But the Omniture Data Insertion API is not a real web-service. It?s just a ?post? based mechanism for sending data. It?s might be the right method to select if you?re coding SiteCatalyst measurement in an application right now ? but it?s hardly a robust interface.But to me, the most important part of building a good interface between application system and measurement system isn?t the handshake mechanism, it?s the structure of the programmatic interface. Here?s some sample SiteCatalyst code that might get attached to a click-handler when an event...<br/><div align='right'>2009-10-18 20:39:37</div>

Measuring Online Applications

I?ve been doing a series of posts on topics that came up at X Change but today?s topic is even more timely than it was just one month ago. With Adobe?s acquisition of Omniture, the goal of increasing the measurability of web applications has really come to the forefront. It seems to be the core strategic rationale for the whole Omniture deal; making it an issue that?s really gotten everyone?s attention. When I blogged on the deal, one of my main points was that while the strategic rationale makes sense, capturing the benefits will not be a slam dunk. When analysts think about this deal, they tend to assume that Adobe and Omniture will be able to deliver significantly enhanced application measurability. The question for them is how big a win is that? But I don?t think the barriers to measuring applications are necessarily simple or exclusively technical. I had the good fortune to meet Michael Scherotter of Microsoft at X Change and we got a chance to talk in-depth during what I think was the smallest Huddle of the entire Conference in that brutal late-Friday-afternoon close of conference time slot. I don?t blame anyone who split out to enjoy some pretty spectacular San Francisco weather and it ended up working out great for me. It was a really interesting wide-ranging conversation but of particular interest was Michael?s current focus on creating better and more integrated measurement for Silverlight ? the development environment that may end up being Adobe?s most serious competition.Application measurement has been on mind in our work this past year; partially because of the work we are doing in mobile. For the mobile space, applications have become a huge focus ? and while mobile apps have some unique measurement challenges, they share many of the same challenges as fixed web apps. In addition, we tend to work on implementations for more complicated web sites, and in the past year we?ve tackled a range of implementations that were really applications not web sites. We even did a whole class at Think Tank on measuring applications, and though I didn?t teach that class, I wrote a goodly chunk of it. So we at Semphonic have had lots of recent practice experience in measuring applications and how frustrating it can be. In today?s post, I?m just going to outline what I see as the core problems and then I?m going to follow-up with a more in-depth look at each.Building a framework for application measurement involves at least five (five!) significant problems....<br/><div align='right'>2009-10-10 12:40:23</div>

Data Warehousing Analytics Data and the Universal Tag

The Really Big Topics at X ChangeI?ve been doing a series of posts on thoughts from X Change Huddles and I started with two on behavioral integration of survey data ? which was the very first Huddle I took part in. But this was by no means the hot topic at X Change. In fact, the Think Tank class on survey/behavioral integration was one of the least popular offerings we did (much to my chagrin). What were the really big topics? There were two ? warehousing online analytics data and using a universal tag. Both came up over and over again. I was mildly surprised by how popular the first was ? shocked by the amount of attention given the second. What?s interesting is that the two topics are more related that people might think ? and that?s what I want to talk about today.People have been talking about integrating online and offline data for years of course. But a couple of things this year felt different. Quite a few companies were actually doing real warehousing projects. Some of these were deep into production others felt more exploratory. Either way, people were clearly moving toward making this a reality. Given the broader economy, that?s impressive. Warehousing projects tend to be large investments ? not easy to do in a seriously down economy.The other thing that felt different this year was the number of companies that simultaneously feel confident of their basic web analytics infrastructure and reporting but dissatisfied with the maturity of their analysis. Achieving maturity in analysis has always been a problem ? but in past years the big issue always felt like it was just achieving a quality infrastructure and reporting system. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that those issues have gone away but it felt to me like the balance has shifted. A lot more companies seem like they are getting quite a bit from their web analytics implementations and have reached the point where the existing tools just won?t give them any more.Unlike data integration, the push for a ?universal? tag is a lot newer. The idea is to implement a single point of data capture and then move the data to each of the analytics vendors who consume it. A single tag is appealing to many enterprises ? after all, it isn?t unusual for a company to have five or six measurement tags on a single page. In addition to one or more full web analytics tags, ones for advertising, video, and various other niche measurement functions are all too common. A multiplicity of tags starts to be a...<br/><div align='right'>2009-10-04 23:49:03</div>

Validating your Online Survey Sample

More thoughts from X Change on VOC Online Survey and Web Analytics Integration[Before I dive into today?s topic, I wanted to highlight Jared Waxman?s comment on my last survey post. Jared made a really interesting point about a different way to think about sample size. I totally agree with his take. and it?s a different perspective than you usually get.]My last post on online survey and behavioral integration made the point that the demands of behavioral analysis (which typically involve fairly small subsets of the total population) make large sample sizes an absolute requirement if you really want to take advantage of behavioral integration and not just say you have it. But the news about behavior integration isn?t all bad ? even if you?re primary interest is on the survey side. Larger sample sizes are a burden. But one of the biggest concerns I heard during X Change was the validity of their online survey samples - and that's something that behavioral integration can help establish.How do you know if your online survey sample really is representative?From a pure survey perspective, you can take a methodological approach. A good methodology goes a long way toward getting you a good sample. But the online world is not as settled from a methodological perspective as the offline world and I heard lots of concern about the online surveys actually deployed at the enterprise level.In the traditional survey world, key demographic variables can be used as a check on the validity of your sample. If you?re polling a presidential election and your gender, age or ethnicity break-downs don?t match the registered voter (or likely voter) population, you know you have issues.But demographic variables in the online world provide no similar re-assurance. You have no independent measure of your actual demographics. Even if the online survey demographics match your broader audience profile, that?s no guarantee ? it might even be suspicious. Of course, you may be able to match your online survey demographics with traditional research that includes a segmentation of online. Even a good match here is no guarantee that you aren?t mis-sampling significant types of traffic. You may be missing out, for instance, on your natural search non-customer base and you?d never realize it with this type of check.If you are doing behavioral integration, however, there is a simple and powerful way to validate your sample. Simply run a set of behavioral profiles against your survey population....<br/><div align='right'>2009-09-26 17:12:46</div>

Survey Says: Thoughts from X Change on Online Survey Sample Size

In Russ Rueden?s X Change Huddle on Survey and Web Analytics Integration, the topic of online survey sample size came up. It?s a big issue because many organizations find themselves deploying almost as many different surveys as tags and they don?t want to suffer from what I?d call ?uncertainty principle syndrome? ? damaging the user experience that they?re trying to measure. But how many respondents are really enough?There are two schools of thought about sample size ? one school holds that as long as a survey is representative, a relatively small sample size is adequate. Perhaps 300-500 respondents can work. The other point of view is that while maintaining a representative sample is essential, having a large sample size is almost as important.This is a big issue because it impacts all sorts of decisions including the length of your survey, your collection mechanism, and, of course, you?re sampling rate.So what?s the right answer?If you aren?t integrating your survey data with web behavioral data, then a relatively small sample size might be okay (I?d emphasize the might). But if you want to combine behavioral analysis and survey data, then forget a sample of 300 or 500 respondents. Those numbers simply won?t work.Let me give you a real-world example showing why that?s true. We?re working right now with a client that samples more than 1000 site visitors a month for their satisfaction survey. They asked us to do a study of the impact of using one of two alternative tools on their site on both overall site satisfaction and visit accomplishment.On this site, the tools are used in about 10% of visits. Since the site gets more than 10 million visits a month, that still yields a heckuva lot of behavior to study ? more than 1 million tool visits every month. No problem there.But our representative sample only captured about 100 respondents who?d used either tool. Between the two tools, one served about 70% of the queries. So for the second tool, we had about 30 respondents to deal with. Getting the picture?For our analysis, we wanted to track visit reason vs. satisfaction vs. outcomes for tool users. With some visit reasons only accounting for about 10% of visits, there were cases where we were trying to analyze the outcomes for all of 3 visitors. Sorry ? not possible.And that?s with a survey size above 1000 and a simple cross-tabulation of visit intent and one fairly common behavior. Sure, we could add lots more months to the picture. But tracking behavior over...<br/><div align='right'>2009-09-19 16:52:00</div>

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...<br/><div align='right'>2009-09-19 14:50:00</div>

Web Analytics and Customer Marketing Webinar ? and More Thoughts on the Adobe acquisition of Omniture

I?m doing a webinar with Aleri next week on web analytics and event driven customer marketing. The webinar delves into the various stages of customer interactions, common patterns to look for when identifying event triggers, and the advantages of realtime integration. Aleri makes CEP software ? another relatively new technology for complex event processing. The software has gotten traction in areas like fraud detection and financial analysis and it?s quite well suited to this type of high-end application. Join me if you can ? (it?s free of course):We?re going to cover various aspects of the acquisition funnel ? the differences between early-stage, at-point and re-marketing programs. I?ll also give some examples of different types of programs and the event triggers to think about for each type of program. Should be pretty good I think.Thanks for all the comments about the Adobe acquisition. I echo Adam Greco that, on personal level, this feels like it will significantly change the tool landscape forever and that whatever the long-term benefits, there?s something to be missed when the founder-driven companies morph into or inside of large public entities. I've always wished Visual Sciences was still around - though of course this isn't quite the same thing at all. I was also struck by Aaron?s theme ? there certainly is a tail of Omniture integration projects out there that may well suffer and I can see why he?d harken back to the disastrous NetIQ acquisition. I think Adobe?s a better company, but the risks in non-obvious acquisitions are truly acute. Covario published quite an interesting POV on the acquisition (a little too positive I thought) and of course Eric?s post is quite cogent (though you?ll probably gather than Eric is no Omniture fan). My colleague Phil Kemelor posted thoughts surprisingly similar to my own (surprising only since we wrote completely without coordination or communication).In general, I?d say that any acquisition whose benefits can?t be convincingly described and understood in about 4 sentences may be a mistake. There?s so much friction in an acquisition that only the most obvious and low-hanging fruits can be reliably picked. I sure don?t think that?s the case here.On the other hand, I've half-way talked myself into believing that there might be some significant benefits from a tight integration and that the move could actually help Adobe in it's quest to own the web development environment. I wouldn't be on it, but I wouldn't mind...<br/><div align='right'>2009-09-17 20:36:57</div>

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