Time is, of course, money. If you really want to see an ROI from web analytics, you need to reduce the time to insight. This may mean slaughtering some sacred cows and taking a fresh look at what you’re tracking and why. In this series, I outline ways to abandon bureaucracy and obligatory reports, take action faster, and point out why more automation is not always the answer. Read more…
2010 is shaping up to have a number of tight political races. The Wisconsin Governor’s race will likely be one of them. A very important component of any political campaign these days is how well the web is utilized.
In this post, I take a look at the websites of each of the three candidates, Scott Walker, Mark Neumann, and Tom Barrett, and evaluate them based on their homepage performance, promoting email signups, usage of video, and available supporter tools and resources.
Expert Review, Interactive Industry News & Events, Internet Marketing, Social Media
By now, you’ve probably seen all the top-rated ads either during the game itself or afterward online and picked your favorites. Most of the ads had some sort of mention of their web address, but not all of those sites greeted you with anything special upon arrival. Here are four that went the extra mile to create experiences to make the most out of their massive Super Bowl ad expenditure.
Expert Review, Flash, Interactive Industry News & Events, Internet Marketing, Social Media, User Interface Design, Web Analytics
Martha Coakley’s failed Senate run has led many to review the key differences in strategy between her campaign and Scott Brown’s. It’s pretty clear that Brown took the web seriously and Coakley seemed to largely ignore many of the social media and web analytics strategies and tactics that swept Obama into office.
Ad Age and Social Media Today have taken a look at (and criticized) Coakley’s overall digital and social media’s approaches. This post narrows in and serves as a reminder of web analytics best practices which can mean the difference between coming in first or a distant second.
The Obama campaign tracked digital metrics obsessively yet ingeniously with great success. The techniques they used are just as applicable today as they were over a year ago.
Interactive Industry News & Events, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized, Web Analytics, Web Strategy Consulting
With all that can be learned from clickstream web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, and Omniture Site Catalyst, it’s important to remember those tools reveal the “what” of your site visitor sessions, but not much about the “why.” Did your visitors see the pages they wanted to see? Were they able to complete their tasks? Is a high page-per-visit rate a result of an engaged visit, or visitors unsuccessfully browsing through pages not finding what they’re looking for? Voice of customer tools are an important component to any website and web analytics initiative and can provide valuable “Aha!” moments.
In this post we’ll take a look at some of the most popular tools and the best ways to utilize them.
Internet Marketing, Social Media, User Interface Design, Web Analytics, Web Development
Continuing to tread on the territory of the major paid analytics vendors, Google Analytics just announced a number of new features that raise it to yet another level. These powerful, time-saving additions allow you to spend more time analyzing and interpreting your site’s performance, and less time foraging though the data.
Among the major additions are; automated and custom alerts based on significant changes in your data, advanced table filtering, expanded mobile reporting, the ability to share advanced segments, and more.
What do these new features mean for your business? Quite a bit. Read on for the details. Read more…
Interactive Industry News & Events, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics, Web Strategy Consulting
Website testing and optimization involves the utilization of software to compare the performance of two or more versions of a page or process to determine which version is the most effective in driving desired user behavior. Tools such as Google Website Optimizer and more robust options geared toward the sophisticated enterprise such as SiteSpect, are available to automate (as much as possible) the process of conducting A/B or multivariate online tests.
Web analytics expert, Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified and website optimization software creator, SiteSpect, recently teamed up to release a white paper entitled, “Successful Web Site Testing Practices.” This must-read document provides a road map for setting up and leading a web testing team within an organization and leveraging it to yield definitive and dramatic results. Below is our take on some of the highlights of their recommendations. However, we strongly recommend you read the document in its entirety and take full advantage of case studies, testimonials, and direct examples including a sample test plan approval form (highly useful)! Read more…
Interactive Industry News & Events, Internet Marketing, User Interface Design, Web Analytics, Web Project Management, Web Strategy Consulting
Podcasts remain one of the best ways to keep up with the latest trends and to learn new methods and approaches. Whether listening while getting ready in the morning, during commutes or business travel, or even while working, there are more options than ever before as the medium has truly matured. Even better, the vast majority are free. Make the most of your downtime (in this economy, there may be more than usual), and never stop learning.
Below are some of the best podcasts that we “keep an ear” on: Read more…
Information Architecture, Interactive Industry News & Events, Internet Marketing, Social Media, User Interface Design, Web Analytics, Web Development, Web Graphic Design, Web Project Management, Web Strategy Consulting
Released in October of 2008, advanced segments for Google Analytics did more to bring the free tool up to speed with established paid tools like Omniture and Web Trends than any other single previous feature. It gives users the ability to define audience segments quickly and easily, and then apply those segments to any report in Google Analytics. The result is vastly more actionable reports.
Now you can quickly know:
The above is just a small sample of what can be revealed. Examples of criteria used to set up a segment might include, page title, organic keywords, paid keywords, internal search terms, network location, campaigns, entry page or exit page, product categories or even individual product purchases.
Fully utilizing advanced segments provides true context to your data so you can easily evaluate your site’s ability to communicate to and convert specific groups. It should be among the first steps of any web analytics initiative. Your segments should be regularly reviewed and updated to take into account new abilities to more clearly identify a segment. However, when updating segments, be sure to keep track of when those updates took place and factor this in as data totals may shift up or down. For instance, adding a new traffic source to a segment can markedly increase visit totals.
Start using advance segments today and watch your reports take on a whole new meaning.
APIs (Application Programming Interface) have a way of turning things on their head and shaking things up. When you open up a major platform to developers, very interesting things can happen. Think about the Google Maps mashups, or the iPhone app store.
Google’s changing the game again, and giving paid analytics vendors a serious run for their money, this time by releasing an API for Google Analytics.
Many companies have already leapt on this integrating Google Analytics data within their tools. Using campaigns in Google Analytics to track email marketing performance has been possible, but requires separate tagging of URLs. Using the API, MailChimp (great email tool), now allows for a single checkbox selection to add tracking code to all email links. Clickthoughs of these links are tracked using Google Analytics, and then sent right back into your Mail Chimp account reporting. If you’ve also setup Google Analytics ecommerce features and/or goal tracking, Mail Chimp will be able to report on email marketing performance in terms of ROI for the campaign, revenue created, average value per visitor, goals completed, and conversion rate.
ShufflePoint is particularly impressive in that they’ve already integrated Google Analytics with Excel and PowerPoint. This takes things one step closer to creating truly custom dashboards and custom calculations (major differentiating features within Omniture) with very little financial investment. Using ShufflePoint, you define the custom calculations, pulling specific metrics straight from your Google Analytics profile(s). Then, each time you open the Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation, a simple click of a refresh button updates all data instantly. A massive timesaver in terms of data entry, as well as a professional presentation to stakeholders with automatically updated data.
Other integration examples include, mobile phone apps, a variety of apps from YouCalc, content management systems, and more.
Many developers currently feel like kids in a candy store and are getting started by diving into Google Code, joining the developer community and keeping updated via the email list.
We look forward to integrating these new methods and tools into our own services and plan to blog about the best-in-class inventions as they spring up. Stay tuned!
Interactive Industry News & Events, Internet Marketing, Web Analytics
