The European Special Interest Group (SIGEU) of the Digital Analytics Association put out a whitepaper on privacy compliance in December. You can get a copy of it here. It’s an excellent paper. It not only summarizes cookie laws in the EU, but also contains evidence of tracking collapse and the consequences of the interruption caused by the opt-in provision. This is particularly important. The HTTP Cookie was invented in 1994. Its original purpose was the measure the proportion of browsers that were first time visitors to a site. It spawned thousands of new inventions. Because that’s what technologists do. That’s what humans do. We use tools and invent new uses for them. So it went with the cookie. Look at[…]
Category: Analytics
Kleinbl00 wrote an excellent synthesis of the phenomenon gripping Reddit right now. (Explanation of what Reddit here.) Here’s the link. Here’s the quote for posterity: “It isn’t a brain drain, it’s climate change. Early Reddit was an environment friendly towards tech geeks who wanted something more indepth than slashdot or HN. As such, it attracted erudite geeks. Middle Reddit was an environment friendly towards thinkers and seekers who were looking for discussion beyond what was available on the archetypal PHPBBs, news outlet comment sections and, notably, Digg. As such, it attracted thinkers and seekers. Late Reddit is an environment friendly towards image macros and memes. As such, it attracts ineloquent teenagers. Something Reddit did early on, under Alexis and Steve,[…]
Well, that’s one way to validate your heuristics. http://5000best.com Note the use of an aggregate average rating as the first column. That’s likely designed to have an effect on your perception. (Machines can adjust your opinion!). Check it out.
Why is SoLoMo the best trend? It’s the newest! (#YOLO) Remember that meeting in 2003, and then again in 2004, and 2005, and 2007, and again in 2009, when somebody would come into the room and pitch: “Imagine this, you’re walking down the street, and you get an SMS for a free Starbucks coffee because you’re 40 feet away from one! Wouldn’t that be AWESOME???” Picture related. (No, that would not be awesome. I’d get a coupon offer every 50 feet walking through downtown.) Well, they’re back, baby! And, with new jargon to boot. SoLoMo! SoLoMo had a competing concept, called LoSoMo, during the early part of 2012. I’m not quite sure if the repositioning of the Lo to the[…]
Consumer centric analytics. A lot of money is about to be spent convincing you that a 360 degree leveraged of the consumer can be constructed using scrapped data sources. The clickstream paradigm isn’t consumer centric analytics. I’ve said it before. In this post, we’ll look at a problem-solution-opportunity set. The Problem Set There’s a lot of counting going on. The counting of views through the iPad versus views through Facebook versus views through the work computer versus views through the home laptop. There are pockets of some pretty good usability analysis, some very good optimization, and, we’re finally getting some real statistical rigor into digital analytics in a few places. It’s great to see. Better information ought to be causing better[…]
Why are so many, so hesitant, to make a claim of causality? This symbol, the honking red arrow, is the most powerful and important one in analytics. The arrow represents a claim that one variable causes another. To say that X causes Y involves judgement. Statisticians are quite right to say that correlation doesn’t prove causality. Statisticians have tests that attempt to rule out causality. But to assert that a relationship is causal requires judgement. Statisticians still have a few issues to work out with Father Time and Mother Positivism. To a certain extent, digital analysts have inherited a few of these issues. Is there a deficit of judgement in digital analytics? Probably not. Leading digital analysts generate loads of[…]
My first experience with product management was a course called ‘software engineering’. Of the fifteen teams of students who were using the full throttle software engineering method, complete with UML and a short burst of requirements gathering in the up-front, eight teams failed to deliver a product. Of the three teams I knew that succeeded, they each had one person that did all the software development, while the rest of the team was responsible for the documentation and working the waterfall. Certainly, this was quantitative evidence that software engineering, as it was conceived of back then, was really ineffective. How could mechanical engineers hang a VW Bug from a sculpture, reliably and safely, using their engineering principles, while, a group of software[…]
Most figures I found, for the month of October 2012 (Including Mobile): Google’s search market share around 86 to 90% in the United States and 89% globally. Bing is ~7% in the US and ~5% globally. Yahoo 3% US / Baidu 3% globally (China). Search, as a design pattern requires, at minimum, a box into which you enter words or numbers, and a medium to display results, what is today called a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). (It doesn’t really have to be a page at all, which is why I use the word medium. Siri is a good example. Glass is another. That sort of thing.) The more places Google can put that box, the better it is for[…]
Decision Orientations pose their own special challenges for folks used to delivering situational awareness artefacts. Typically bounded by time, involve prospection, and contain a weighing of preferences, Concretely: Time Bounded: Planning for a major strategy roll out may take quarters. Deciding to discount a SKU may take only a few seconds. Time horizons vary. And they matter. Propsection: thinking about outcomes in the future. How much do you expect to gain from a decision? How much do you expect to lose? Preference of the people making them and those around them: Is that future something that you believe is desirable? Optimistically, you can view these facts as opportunities. Pessimistically, you can view these facts as constraints. Let’s view them as[…]
Both US campaigns make use of analytics and good practices from Operations Research. According to an article from ARS technica, the Republican machine, ORCA, didn’t do so well. Summary: The Romney campaigns Get Out The Vote mobile app / engine was called ORCA. There were severe deployment failures, including using a single server to power the mobile app, and made a complete mess of secure sign on and credentialization. It cost the Republican ticket many resources, most notably, the time of 30,000 of their greatest supporters many hours of frustration on voting day. Editorial: The ORCA’s fail whale has the potential to provide comparative operations researchers a great chance to compare and contrast IT and analytics practices. Good will come[…]