Web Analytics
January 2010
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Where the purchase process is breaking down
posted by in
Sun 10th
How do you find out what visitors hope to accomplish on your site? Ask them. Simple online surveys, using as little as four quick questions, are the best way to find out the real intent of your customers. No amount of behavioral analysis, click tracking, or user-generated content monitoring is going to deliver the same level of insight as pure voice of customer feedback.
December 2009
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Could 2009 be the Last Great Year of Free News?
posted by in
Mon 7th
News publishers—at least the ones that maintain expensive newsrooms– are pissed because their online revenues have failed to offset the bleeding in their print arms. They’ve sought out scapegoats. Thus, groups like the Fair Syndication Consortium have accused Google of running more than half of the unlicensed newspaper content currently floating around on the web. Talk about biting the hands that feeds you. Consider that Google sends news publishers, in the words of Eric Schmidt, “a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle.”
November 2009
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Metrics Move from Website to Consumer
posted by in
Wed 18th
Website metrics have been slotted in alongside social media metrics in the category of new measurements that would phase out offline surveys and focus groups. I disagree. I think website metrics are increasingly in the rearview of the digital marketing ecosystem, cruising along sluggishly while social media metrics blow by them in the passing lane.
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Remember the great website engagement debate?
posted by in
Tue 10th
Remember the great website engagement debate? Remember all the hand-wringing and byte-spilling about formulas that were supposed to represent the holy grail of web analytics? Mercifully, the echoes of those debates have subsided. But now something new, and equally fatuous, has emerged: the concept of twitter influence.
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When it comes to research, proximity is critical
posted by in
Sat 7th
When it comes to online research (or any research for that matter), proximity to an event is critical to establishing accurate, precise, and reliable recollections and descriptions of an event or experience. Confounded recall is the bane of much post-purchase market research; as a person’s memory gets fuzzier, the quality of the data they provide gets more and more specious. That’s why I’ve always advocated measurement approaches that capture data in close proximity to the actual (buying or non-buying) experience.
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How much is enough when it comes to Voice of Customer?
posted by in
Tue 3rd
Voice of customer research can be a wonderfully responsive early warning system for a small website owner. Don’t get caught up in obsessing over respondent counts. If you’ve got 25 or so pieces of real visitor feedback at hand, you can go a long way in constructing a visitor-centric website experience that will help your website to grow and flourish.
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We all work on Commission
posted by in
Mon 2nd
As never before, all of us who are vendors in this space–consultants, optimiziation specialists, marketing pros–are being challenged to substantiate our value, to empirically demonstrate the real returns that we can furnish. We don’t believe in history or in laurels. Judge us according to our ability to deliver value in the here and now.
October 2009
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Conversation is the new Marketing
posted by in
Tue 27th
Old paradigms shattered. In the formative years of the web economy, marketers tried to impose the old order on us. They used their websites as display channels, whereby they could talk AT their consumers. But something else was percolating: the emergence of the trust economy. The idea that people could talk amongst themselves online, that they could share stories, reviews, advice, conversation threads. In the coming together of the people on the social web, corporate websites became secondary channels for brand chatter. Facebook absorbs 8 billion minutes of total usage time per day. That’s just under 1% of total human attention. What chunk of total human attention do you think corporate websites have?
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Beware the Power Pukers
posted by in
Tue 20th
We live in an era of superfluous data. The first decade of the web era was about the battle to liberate the voices of real people. Well, that battle has been won and now, we have too much. We are overwhelmed. We suffer from what Clay Shirky has called filter failure. The volume of data has overpowered our basic analytical capabilities. The center cannot hold; the system breaks down, the levees crack and we are drowned in meaningless information. My friend works as a web analyst at the major canadian telco. In a perverse twist on Avinash’s famous 10/90 rule, he spends about 10% of his time surfacing insights and 90% of his time wrestling with a convoluted array of reports, charts, and dashboards from myriad suppliers. How productive is that?
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Data where only subjectivity existed before
posted by in
Mon 19th
“…in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don’t, it’s hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.”
Where the purchase process is breaking down
posted by in
How do you find out what visitors hope to accomplish on your site? Ask them. Simple online surveys, using as little as four quick questions, are the best way to find out the real intent of your customers. No amount of behavioral analysis, click tracking, or user-generated content monitoring is going to deliver the same level of insight as pure voice of customer feedback.
-
Could 2009 be the Last Great Year of Free News?
posted by in
Mon 7thNews publishers—at least the ones that maintain expensive newsrooms– are pissed because their online revenues have failed to offset the bleeding in their print arms. They’ve sought out scapegoats. Thus, groups like the Fair Syndication Consortium have accused Google of running more than half of the unlicensed newspaper content currently floating around on the web. Talk about biting the hands that feeds you. Consider that Google sends news publishers, in the words of Eric Schmidt, “a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle.”
November 2009
-
Metrics Move from Website to Consumer
posted by in
Wed 18th
Website metrics have been slotted in alongside social media metrics in the category of new measurements that would phase out offline surveys and focus groups. I disagree. I think website metrics are increasingly in the rearview of the digital marketing ecosystem, cruising along sluggishly while social media metrics blow by them in the passing lane.
-
Remember the great website engagement debate?
posted by in
Tue 10th
Remember the great website engagement debate? Remember all the hand-wringing and byte-spilling about formulas that were supposed to represent the holy grail of web analytics? Mercifully, the echoes of those debates have subsided. But now something new, and equally fatuous, has emerged: the concept of twitter influence.
-
When it comes to research, proximity is critical
posted by in
Sat 7th
When it comes to online research (or any research for that matter), proximity to an event is critical to establishing accurate, precise, and reliable recollections and descriptions of an event or experience. Confounded recall is the bane of much post-purchase market research; as a person’s memory gets fuzzier, the quality of the data they provide gets more and more specious. That’s why I’ve always advocated measurement approaches that capture data in close proximity to the actual (buying or non-buying) experience.
-
How much is enough when it comes to Voice of Customer?
posted by in
Tue 3rd
Voice of customer research can be a wonderfully responsive early warning system for a small website owner. Don’t get caught up in obsessing over respondent counts. If you’ve got 25 or so pieces of real visitor feedback at hand, you can go a long way in constructing a visitor-centric website experience that will help your website to grow and flourish.
-
We all work on Commission
posted by in
Mon 2nd
As never before, all of us who are vendors in this space–consultants, optimiziation specialists, marketing pros–are being challenged to substantiate our value, to empirically demonstrate the real returns that we can furnish. We don’t believe in history or in laurels. Judge us according to our ability to deliver value in the here and now.
October 2009
-
Conversation is the new Marketing
posted by in
Tue 27th
Old paradigms shattered. In the formative years of the web economy, marketers tried to impose the old order on us. They used their websites as display channels, whereby they could talk AT their consumers. But something else was percolating: the emergence of the trust economy. The idea that people could talk amongst themselves online, that they could share stories, reviews, advice, conversation threads. In the coming together of the people on the social web, corporate websites became secondary channels for brand chatter. Facebook absorbs 8 billion minutes of total usage time per day. That’s just under 1% of total human attention. What chunk of total human attention do you think corporate websites have?
-
Beware the Power Pukers
posted by in
Tue 20th
We live in an era of superfluous data. The first decade of the web era was about the battle to liberate the voices of real people. Well, that battle has been won and now, we have too much. We are overwhelmed. We suffer from what Clay Shirky has called filter failure. The volume of data has overpowered our basic analytical capabilities. The center cannot hold; the system breaks down, the levees crack and we are drowned in meaningless information. My friend works as a web analyst at the major canadian telco. In a perverse twist on Avinash’s famous 10/90 rule, he spends about 10% of his time surfacing insights and 90% of his time wrestling with a convoluted array of reports, charts, and dashboards from myriad suppliers. How productive is that?
-
Data where only subjectivity existed before
posted by in
Mon 19th
“…in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don’t, it’s hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.”
Metrics Move from Website to Consumer
posted by in
Website metrics have been slotted in alongside social media metrics in the category of new measurements that would phase out offline surveys and focus groups. I disagree. I think website metrics are increasingly in the rearview of the digital marketing ecosystem, cruising along sluggishly while social media metrics blow by them in the passing lane.
Remember the great website engagement debate?
posted by in
Remember the great website engagement debate? Remember all the hand-wringing and byte-spilling about formulas that were supposed to represent the holy grail of web analytics? Mercifully, the echoes of those debates have subsided. But now something new, and equally fatuous, has emerged: the concept of twitter influence.
When it comes to research, proximity is critical
posted by in
When it comes to online research (or any research for that matter), proximity to an event is critical to establishing accurate, precise, and reliable recollections and descriptions of an event or experience. Confounded recall is the bane of much post-purchase market research; as a person’s memory gets fuzzier, the quality of the data they provide gets more and more specious. That’s why I’ve always advocated measurement approaches that capture data in close proximity to the actual (buying or non-buying) experience.
How much is enough when it comes to Voice of Customer?
posted by in
Voice of customer research can be a wonderfully responsive early warning system for a small website owner. Don’t get caught up in obsessing over respondent counts. If you’ve got 25 or so pieces of real visitor feedback at hand, you can go a long way in constructing a visitor-centric website experience that will help your website to grow and flourish.
We all work on Commission
posted by in
As never before, all of us who are vendors in this space–consultants, optimiziation specialists, marketing pros–are being challenged to substantiate our value, to empirically demonstrate the real returns that we can furnish. We don’t believe in history or in laurels. Judge us according to our ability to deliver value in the here and now.
-
Conversation is the new Marketing
posted by in
Tue 27thOld paradigms shattered. In the formative years of the web economy, marketers tried to impose the old order on us. They used their websites as display channels, whereby they could talk AT their consumers. But something else was percolating: the emergence of the trust economy. The idea that people could talk amongst themselves online, that they could share stories, reviews, advice, conversation threads. In the coming together of the people on the social web, corporate websites became secondary channels for brand chatter. Facebook absorbs 8 billion minutes of total usage time per day. That’s just under 1% of total human attention. What chunk of total human attention do you think corporate websites have?
-
Beware the Power Pukers
posted by in
Tue 20thWe live in an era of superfluous data. The first decade of the web era was about the battle to liberate the voices of real people. Well, that battle has been won and now, we have too much. We are overwhelmed. We suffer from what Clay Shirky has called filter failure. The volume of data has overpowered our basic analytical capabilities. The center cannot hold; the system breaks down, the levees crack and we are drowned in meaningless information. My friend works as a web analyst at the major canadian telco. In a perverse twist on Avinash’s famous 10/90 rule, he spends about 10% of his time surfacing insights and 90% of his time wrestling with a convoluted array of reports, charts, and dashboards from myriad suppliers. How productive is that?
-
Data where only subjectivity existed before
posted by in
Mon 19th“…in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don’t, it’s hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.”
