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I’m, naturally enough, a believer in visitor tracking. I think it’s perfectly fair to try to understand the visitor experience in order to work on both improving that experience and to maximise a website’s profit/message potential. When I first began working in the industry and fully understood what kind of data could be collected, I remember finding it quite ominous and unsettling. Now that I know how the data is used, I don’t bat an eyelid. However, I think it is important to remember that the vast majority of visitors we track are those outside the industry – if you put yourself in their shoes, you see a much darker picture of targeting and analysis. But if education is all that stands between distrust and acceptance, why are we not trying to teach? Perhaps we should try a little visitor empathy, or “vempathy”. CONTINUE READING…
Absolutes are the sworn enemy of web analytics and as time goes on, the weakness of web analytics can easily be exploited by the power of absolutes. Embracing change and the nuances of behaviour should be part of web analytics. This is the reason that pure numbers should be escewed in favour of trends.
For example, if 1000 people visit your website on the last Monday in February, should you spend $75 on a new banner ad for your sister site? (If you said yes, you will make angels weep)
Absolute numbers and concrete definitions increase the chances of mis-reading and mis-understanding the data you collect on your website.
Assuming that a click on an exit link is the same as an indication that someone left your site will not take into account instances of mis-clicking and non-pursuance of the click.
Assuming that an exit page is the last page a visitor reads misses out on the fact that tabbed browsing may mean that the last page opened is insignificant to the visitor and the last page visited has been lovingly kept open on another tab.
Assuming that abandonment from a sales funnel is always a bad thing disregards the fact that you will learn more from those who abandon than those who obediently follow the path you have set to an ultimate goal.
Assuming that web analytics is only about online marketing is also a strange notion, to my mind.
Metric definitions can be a great way to communicate with others as part of the web analytics language, but it’s not the only way to communicate. Analysts tend to have to report to non-analysts, so why speak web analytics to someone who speaks a different language? The instances of overlapping terms could simply cause further confusion.
Pure numbers and restrictive definitions are a great way to learn and understand web analytics, but to develop and evolve, these need to be consigned to the toybox, only to be taken out from time to time. Interpretation is the language of love in web analytics. It is also the language of evolution.
I just finished the fourth and final module of the University of British Colombia Web Analytics course, loftily called an “Award of Achievement” and thought I would impart my thoughts on the program.
About the course
This fully online course is offered by the University of British Colombia in association with the Web Analytics Association and is comprised of four modules:
Introduction to Web Analytics
This module does exactly what it says on the tin by introducing the student to the concepts of web analysis, KPIs, SEO, campaigns etc. This unit is a pre-requisite for the other three, but may be skipped on successful completion of a prior learning assessment. I, however, thoroughly enjoyed it (my tutor, Jeff Young, was tremendously engaged and helpful throughout) and it led me to some interesting investigations into cookie perceptions – you can see the blog posts here and here. While I was already familiar with the concepts, there were some very interesting case studies in the course material and discussions with students with varying levels of experience were quite enlightening. CONTINUE READING…
We like to think of Web Analytics as a brave new world. I often see “web analytics is in its infancy” used as a means to brush away worries about measurement gaps and adoption. We seem to rest our assumptions on a main base assumption that while users may not behave as we expect, they will still behave in a fairly uniform way within that frame of the unexpected. With websites becoming more community-based and interactive, pandering to the wants and perceived needs of the visitor/customer, do insights lose focus as visits become more personalised?
Visitors are no longer plodding through websites, quietly adding to cart, leaving a site when clicking on an exit link (that old chestnut) – they’re free running all over the web creating more of a collective experience. Why open a door and step through when you can leap over a wall? Semantic arguments over art and science aside, there is a need for greater context in the way understanding is applied to outcomes measured. CONTINUE READING…
I recently (and by recently I mean not very – I’m doing my bit for the environment by recycling) spoke at a Web Analytics Wednesday in Budapest, Hungary on the subject of “Free” web analytics tools and the perception attached to them. This is not new. This is not news. But it is a subject that is quite close to my heart as I have witnessed first-hand the change in perception a change in price brings.
I joined IndexTools in 2007 as a Professional Services Consultant. IndexTools was a mid-tier web analytics tool which was not free. We often said that we had 80% of Omniture’s technology for a fraction of the price and merrily plied our trade across the world. We were then acquired by Yahoo! in May of 2008 and became Yahoo! Web Analytics (after a brief stint as IndexTools, a Yahoo! Service).
At the time of the acquisition, charging for the web analytics tool was instantly discontinued. The reaction to this particular change surprised us. There were no immediate alterations to the tool but we discovered that people were worried by the price point. We had (naively, perhaps) expected customers to be quite excited at the sudden cut in their costs, especially given the looming down-turn in the global economy, but instead we found that many were cynical and distrustful and immediately assumed that the tool was of a lower quality than previously.
Bear in mind that at this point, we had made no major changes. CONTINUE READING…
Dennis Mortensen, director of data insights at Yahoo!, has published a white paper on his blog on web analytics as it pertains to Microsites. It is important to remember that microsites and their parents must be treated differently. Download the white paper here
In another guest post on the Visual Revenue blog, I discuss the results of my second cookie survey.
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I recently surveyed 100 “internet-savvy” people to understand their attitude towards cookies and whether or not they considered cookies to be a privacy or security concern. As a follow-up, I surveyed another group. This time, my focus was the general internet user, who would not beexpected to understand the use of cookies. Getting to my target of 100 took slightly more time in this case as the respondents were not as engaged with the subject! CONTINUE READING…
I’ve just moved to Wordpress, so I’ll recycle a couple of old posts here.
***August 2009***
The first on 100 “internet-savvy” people and the second on a more general group of 100 people who would not be expected to know what cookies are. I had a guest spot on the Visual Revenue blog and will compile the results of the second survey soon.
Here’s the text of the first post:
This week, I ran a survey on the subject of cookies, cookie deletion and privacy and the results were quite interesting. The survey was run online and had 100 respondents who can generally be assumed to be at least vaguely Internet-savvy. It was sent out to and passed around by Twitter followers who are, in the main, linked to analytics/SEO/SEM etc; to the IT department of a large bank; to the IT department of a small-town local authority; to the staff in the Yahoo! Web Analytic Hungarian office, most of whom are programmers. Respondents came from at least 6 countries that I know of – very possibly more. I had considered broadening the scope of the survey to include those who use the Internet but cannot be considered to be terribly clued up on issues like targeting, tracking, cookies etc, (which would have led to completely different survey questions), but on a quick verbal survey of a small group of those who would be considered to fall into this category, I felt that the results would lose focus. I.e. most did not know what cookies were, what the difference between 1st- and 3rd- party cookies were, and those that did had were not entirely sure what they were used for. Therefore, for my purposes, I assume that this category would generally leave cookie treatment to their default browser settings. I think this group should be treated in a separate survey, which I will leave for another day. CONTINUE READING…
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