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web analytics

January 2010

December 2009

  • Could 2009 be the Last Great Year of Free News?

    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

  • Metrics Move from Website to Consumer

    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?

    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.

  • We all work on Commission

    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

  • Beware the Power Pukers

    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

    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.”

September 2009

  • The new metrics that really matter in ecommerce

    Sun 20th

    eCommerce is a fundamentally data-driven channel, and the boom in online sales has resulted in terabytes of data covering all aspects of online customer behavior. But without a context for determining what these clicks mean, most online marketers are still no closer to truly understanding their customers than they were back in the days of server log parsing. The result is that most online marketing decisions are ultimately still based on incomplete information and speculation, instead of on a real grasp of customer needs and goals.