eMetrics Toronto 2011 was excellent. A huge thank you and congratulations to Andrea Hadley, Jim Sterne, my colleagues on the advisory committee, Syncapse for putting on a great Web Analytics Wednesday, and the Rising Media team for putting it on and pulling it off. Many points of view were generated and shared. The top five that generate the very most interesting questions (for me) are: 5. Laura Callow delivered a convincing arguement in favor of testing regardless of much traffic a given site or page is doing. Traffic will eventually accumulate for significance. She also presented the relationship (dare I say correlation?) between page load time and conversion on site, and, in a delightful twist, linked it page tagging and[…]
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eMetrics is this week in Toronto and I’m pretty excited! 8. Come out on Wednesday night to catch a panel with Jim Sterne and Mark Dykeman on Convergence and the State of Audience Measurement. Mark deals with radio, tv, social, and web analytics in his role at the CBC, and you’ll learn a few of his secrets for dealing with media. 7. Corner Stephane Hamel at the eMetrics meet and greet that Wednesday night. Ask him about W.A.S.P., and then turn around and ask me how I use the product! 6. On Thursday, during the first break, visit Jim Novo at the WAA desk, and ask him three questions about analytics, certification, and professionalization. 5. Attend Stephane Hamel’s Web Analytics[…]
I learned a lot from the discussions with many of you. Here are my proposed answers. 1. What is a valid model for monetizing a web page, regardless of whether monetary transactions are possible? Yes. There are two conservative paradigms and multiple progressive ones. The most conservative one is to assign a monetary value to the conversion event, and then attribute the monetary value back through the tree using a decay curve. This method would automatically consider abandonment rates and discount those pages accordingly. The other conservative way is to assign a monetary value to each page based on paid media received or valued. A progressive way is to examine how much content upon each page is copied and shared.[…]
Seven questions. 1. What is a valid model for monetizing a web page, regardless of whether monetary transactions are possible?2. What is a valid model for costing a web page?3. What is the relationship between the complexity of a page and the monetary value of a page?4. What is the relationship between (hierarchical navigation) buried depth and the monetary value of a page?5. What is the relationship between indegree connectivity and the monetary value of a page?6. What is the relationship between an audience segmentation and the monetary value of a page?7. What is the relationship between customer affinity and the monetary value of a page? This is quite dangerous, isn’t? But how fun this will be! If your answer[…]
Without assumptions, analysts wouldn’t be able to say very much about the world. Even facts have assumptions. Consider the following statement: “There were 19,000 pageviews in October, 2010.” Okay. I’m willing to accept that fact as true. Assuming that all the tags were in place, on every page. Assuming that server errors identified and not counted as pageviews. Assuming that all the tags fired without fault. Assuming the web analytics software is calibrated to the WAA definition of the term ‘pageview’. People form associations and communities, in part, to standardize assumptions so that progress can be made. Whoever is behind the Metric System. The IEEE. The WAA. Consider the following statement: “Traffic to the website causes conversions.” Oh boy. So[…]
The title is funny and accurate. Web Analytics Wednesday Toronto is on a Thursday in March and April. I hear that people like technical presentations and business presentations. So, the March 31 edition at the Charlotte room and will feature presentations by Simon Colyer and Robin Ward. I will be presenting a recent study on Increasing Campaign Effectiveness from the business side. The eMetrics Toronto edition happens on April 28th and will have Jim Sterne, Jim Novo and Eric T. Peterson. Why should I come out? The Toronto analytics community is exciting and growing. According to Indeed, there are six published open recs for web analysts in Toronto. There are 806 open recs for analytics in Toronto. Publicly posted recs[…]
Creativity is measurable. A long time ago, two scientists, Yang and Smith, demonstrated how creativity can be quantified and linked through to marketing performance. How can you tell if a message or ad is creative? On the dependent variable side, they enumerate attention to the ad, motivation to process the information, depth of the processing, ad attitude, brand attitude, and purchase intention. What causes something to be creative? They identified divergence, relevance, and production quality. This gets broken down again – into originality, flexibility, synthesis, elaboration, artistic value, relevance of the ad to consumer, and relevance of the brand to consumer. And then, if you break it down further, you have very specific criterion, accumulated from multiple false starts on[…]
I encounter a lot of artifacts of analytics communication: dashboards, ppt decks, and excel files. You can tell a lot about an organization from such artifacts. You can see sandbagging. You can see staff transfers riddled throughout some of them, and you can sense the ghosts of analysts promoted or churned. You can definitely see the ghosts of EVP’s long gone. You can sometimes make out the intended audience, the originally intended audience, and how incredibly diluted something became over time. An analytics report is akin to sand on the beach. Sometimes the tide comes in and scrubs away the footprints. Much more frequently those footprints add up, muddle the situation, and then fossilize. Why it happens and a possible[…]
Intelligence means selective ignorance. Imagine how intelligent and ignorant we used to be as a people, just 120 years ago. Some of the first uses of sampling techniques in quantitative methods centered around the use of alcohol in society. They really didn’t have very much machine readable data back then (the first use was for the 1890 US Census), so, the practices of data mining weren’t possible. The entire purpose of sampling, and sample statistics, was precisely because no machines could be used to quantify the entire population against some policy question. You try calculating Chi Square on a very large dataset without a calculator or a spreadsheet! Indeed, sampling continues to be used to this day as a cost[…]
Have you heard about Data Market? It is one of the largest (and free) curated repository of public data. Benefits: It has internal search that doesn’t suck, so you can find what you’re looking for and get out. It offers the ability to preview the data in tables and charts before you export. It offers the ability to export in popular formats. It’s freemium. (API and LIVE data have a cost). Why am I excited about this? These data sets are very clean, and some of the data has direct uses for analysts in their social-professional lives. They’re there, and you should register and check them out.