Mymotech

Well, this is a blog about web analytics, so I guess a web analytics type post is in order.

Since Google Analytics came out last year, there has always been a question:

Isn’t Google Analytics just as good as other web analytics tools that cost more?

And while there are many different answers to that question, I ran across something today which inspired a closer analysis.

When looking at keyword reports in Google Analytics you can view the search phrases

Or You can view the Search Engines

But you can’t view both at the same time. In other words, You can’t see a report that displays all the search engines and their underlying search phrases simultaneously and vice versa. In addition the export function only grabs what is on the screen, so there is no correlation of those two data points in any exported report.

Briefly, I want to describe why it might be useful to see search engines by search phrases or vice versa. Let’s say that I am trying to optimize my site for the phrases, “wowza”, “yowza”, and “gyoza”. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to track the number of referrals I got from Google and Yahoo over time without having to expand and collapse multiple boxes within the report? But it doesn’t appear that that is the case with Google Analytics.

The lack of this feature makes Google Analytics inferior to the likes of WebTrends, Omniture, Coremetrics, and WebSideStory. Although there is still no beating the price.
BTW, I would be happy to be wrong, so if you know some way to accomplish this in Google Analytics then please let me know, and I will obviously post an update.

I wanted to quickly jot down some quick notes about Gatineau, Microsoft’s new web analytics tool, that is in pre-alpa.

I think we all know that Microsoft is doing this to follow in Google’s footsteps to provide a tool that will encourage advertisers to spend more money on their respective ad delivery systems. Unfortunately for Microsoft, since Google thought of it first they bought a better company than what was available to Microsoft. Urchin was purchased by Google and DeepMetrix was purchased by Microsoft. In my opinion Urchin was a stronger performer in the analytics space than DeepMetrix. My experience with both tools pre-acquisition is not terribly strong so this is more my perception than a well researched fact.
Also, one has to question whether Microsoft is doing a little too much “me too” when it comes to business innovation in the search space. This is something they used to great affect when launching IE, but I wonder if this method of taking over the world has become slightly antiquated. We will see, I am sure.

Microsoft has brought on Ian Thomas, one of the founders of Web Abacus, to drive the development of the Microsoft version of this tool. In my mind they will need to produce a better look and feel for the tool to make it worth adopting.

On the flip side Microsoft has a long history of entering the market slowly and crappily but eventually dominating the space. They will potentially be able to integrate some very rich demographic data into the analytics reports. I think that this is unlikely in release one. And even though they have lost some market share in the search space, they will slowly get better and better and their AdCenter product will slowly start gaining traction, especially since Google is making their AdWords product more and more complex and harder to enter for a small business.

The great news in all of this is that we will see even more attention paid to web analysis and metrics based decisioning in online business. That will be a big victory for everyone.

Obviously, I am hoping to get my hands on an early version of this tool to put it through its paces.

It could probably be said that it is a new year of blogging for half the year, if previous years are any indication. But I will stick with it, and keep this blog going on the off chance that I will eventually have something to say.

One of the things I have notices other bloggers doing is putting a pretty picture up with each post, and so maybe I will try to do a little more of that this year.

Also, I think I will probably need to start a series or two because one of the things that has kept me from blogging is that putting together a post takes so long and I have so little time.

And finally, here is one web analytics new years resolution: get some exposure to usability testing and surveys this year. I think that these two tools to increase web site performance are uber powerful when combined with good analytics. Web analytics will deliver the what and user interaction will help to shape the why of web site behavior. Awesome!

One of the things that frequently gets clouded in all the hype about web analytics tools and packages is what does a business need anyway? At the E-metrics summit in Santa Barbara Xavier Cassinova spoke about his experiences both as a web analytics vendor and now as the president of a new startup business. He talked about a disconnect between what web analytics vendors were trying to sell and what business owners wanted to buy.

So the question is, what do businesses need online? The answer is money.
Businesses need more money. And they need information on how to get more money.

How can web analytics do that? I am glad you asked. The primary way is to measure conversion. What you have to do is start peeling the conversion banana to get a better understanding of factors that lead to or take away from conversion.
Another thing that matters a lot is retention. If you can give customers that convert a reason to convert again you are pretty much guaranteeing success on the web.

Ok this post didn’t come out as organized as I intended. I may take another shot at it. In the meantime, lets focus our analytics on what really matters. Making Money.

In my work I do a lot of implementing of specific tools, mostly WebTrends. I install, configure, train and then walk away and leave the organization to figure out where to go next.
Problems abound with this scenario. Usually there are a couple of things missing in almost all of these organizations where I do this: someone to understand the data and someone to promote the data.
Understanding the data takes analysis. At Emetrics, back in April, one of the most engaging presenters, Avinash Kaushik from Intuit, detailed very clearly what is needed in this area. You can read all about it on his new blog Occam’s Razor. It comes down to a smart person with business acumen. Someone like me. :)

I was thrilled to be able to go to Emetrics Summit in Santa Barbara this year. It was very awesome. Over the next couple of weeks I will try to publish what I have learned from this conference.

Two quick notes about the conference in general:

1. Jim Sterne is a delightful and engaging presenter
2. There is an extreme amount of potential in the field of web analytics for innovation.

More to come soon, I promise.

Emetrics, web analytics, Jim Sterne

I was honored to participate on a web analytics panel recently. And while the panel was mostly targeted at which KPIs count the most and other boring number crap, during the QA time the inevitable question about Google Analytics came up.

To give you some background. I am used to working with WebTrends, Omniture, WebSideStory, ClickTracks, etc… Obviously I have used Google Analytics extensively as well. I am a big fan of Google Analytics and now of Performancing Metrics too. In fact maybe I should rename my subtitle “I am measuring the crap out of this site.”

OK, back to my story. Someone asked the panel what they thought of Google Analytics. I gave the standard answer.

• It is great.
• It is dangerous for privacy reasons.
• It is dangerous for business reasons.

Back when Google Analytics first came out I remember that a lot of people saw doom for the web analytics vendors like WebTrends etc… Personally, I never saw that. In fact I think that it is having the opposite effect. Because everything Google does creates a huge buzz, they have actually heightened the consciousness for web analytics across the internet. This is playing out to make life better for the other vendors because there are still massive amounts of FUD that they can heap onto Google’s tool.

That being said I am going to start running a couple of these tools side by side, because usually there is more to be discovered than it usually appears at first glance.

I have been looking at live.com, which is Microsoft’s new look search engine or something. It has some interesting features like a never ending page of results that you slide through. Hurray, everyone is on page one. And there are some nice feature in the image search.

But then I got a referral from live.com in my web analytics reports. Naturally, I was intrigued. Now, ranking for something in Microsoft SERPs is not particularly hard, but I am always glad for a little search engine love. So naturally I drilled into the referring information to see what search phrase brought this particular visitor. Unfortunately, there was no keyword information for that referral. Suddenly my head was filled with ideas of writing a nice how-to piece on getting keyword reporting for live.com in Google Analytics. I always like to write Google Analytics pieces. But as I was doing a wee bit of research it became disturbingly clear that this was not going to be the case. Microsoft wasn’t passing the search phrase in the referrer field. COME ON! This is search engine 101. By having the search phrase in the query string of the referring URL you allow people to understand what keywords and phrases are driving traffic to their site.

Sheesh, come on people get your act together over there.

I was sitting in a meeting this morning reviewing a statement of work with a client. As we walked through the project plan we were talking about some specifics related to the implementation of a web analytics tool. During our discussion I started talking about some exciting possibilities within the application for applying a whole new level of data analysis, and my eyes must have lit up because everyone in the room just stopped and stared at me for a second.
At first I felt a little bit sheepish, but it became immediately apparent that to the client this was a good thing. By showing a genuine interest in the capabilities of the tool and in the potential impact on their organization, I ended up making the client feel better about hiring us to do the project. Indeed, it was the first time I have ever seen someone sign a statement of work right in front of me.

I guess the moral of this story to me, is enthusiasm can be contagious. And when applied at the right time it can give confidence to the person buying your services.

web analytics, consulting, business thoughts

Performancing has released a beta of their Performancing Metrics tool to allow bloggers to track their blogs. Features include:

1. Multiple blog aggregation. neato.
2. RSS feed of metrics data
3. Adsense tracking built in

What do they need to add?

1. Filter capability to remove certain traffic data
2. comparative date ranges
3. This needs verification but, drilldown capability. For example, which search phrases produced comments, RSS subscription, or other important goal.

All that being said, this is a pretty amazing thing for this group to have put together. I am very impressed. I haven’t seen any stats yet so I will post more when I have some numbers to look at.

Performancing, web analytics, performancing metrics, blog measurement