Jim Novo, Shaina Boone, and I – engaged on a rather interesting email thread today. It centers on a certain company claiming that it has set up the first online advertising ‘hedge fund’. I don’t want to give that company any publicity, because, in part, I have reason to suspect the veracity of their statement. Middlemen are common. They buy inventory from a number of smaller website, bundle it together, mark it up, and sell it off to partners – be it clients or agencies – at a premium. Google is a really huge middleman. Google uses complex algorithms to match buyers with sellers, perhaps, in a manner that is efficient than a human dealer would be able to do[…]
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Similar origin skillsets can be derived from strange sources. Take night auditors and web analysts, for instance. Let’s start with definitions. A night auditor is somebody who works in a hotel, on the night shift, usually from 11pm until 7am, balancing the days receipts. Early in my working life, before university, I was a senior night auditor at a very large hotel. It had a night club, a gaming lounge, two restaurants, a pub, and two front desks. It also featured an overburdened accounting staff which was responsible for 4 other hotels, and as a result, much of the accounting functions were downsourced to the night audit team. Not complaining, just saying. I wasn’t a statistician then, and it wasn’t[…]
Word on the street is that Unisys is starting to bust down the Business Intelligence / Web Analytics barrier (BI/WA barrier) As Shaina Boone has said before, web analytics software was always just a stopgap between the eventual evolutions of BI integrating with the web channel. It all made sense to her while she was taking her course on BI and data warehousing…and that makes sense to me too. While in Vancouver, I warned, twice, that our entire industry would be just one disaster away from feeling very severe consequences. I’ve noted on this blog that we’re in need of some very conscious legislation that really cracks down on the abusers of data – for all of our sakes. Why[…]
I’ve been following Garth Turner on the entire Digital Democracy initiative from the beginning. He’s the only MP that has a real blog, and, he was the first MP in Canada, to my knowledge, to have been booted out of a political party for maintaining a blog. (Talk about fighting the last war.) The state of Political Web Analytics is extremely young. It largely began with the emergence of forums and usegroups, and basic volumetric figures, and has since exploded with the blogosphere. I frequently find Google Analytics tags on several blogs – so I can only assume that somebody out there is using those analytics. Whether or not there’s much optimization going on is another story. What’s possibly the[…]
A huge shoutout and thank you to Patrick Glinski of Critical Mass for organizing Web Analytics Wednesday at Bar Wellington last night. I had a particularly good time meeting a few people, talking to regular favourites, and being trolled by Mike Sukmanowski and co. (as always). We had attendance of roughly 35 to 40 people, representing a really good cross section of Toronto’s anlaytics and eMarketing talent. One of the more major discussions was around ‘talent’ and the labor market. What was interesting was that at least 5 people I spoke with were looking for new jobs. Good news for companies looking to get an eMedia or Web Analytics prescense. Bad news for the companies that are hemoraging talent. Another[…]
Web Analytics Wednesday is this Wednesday, the 27th of August, at Bar Wellington. Here’s the link to let Patrick know you’re coming! http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/wednesday/ Alright, so I shrill for WAW. It’s true. But it’s one of the big events in Toronto for us Web Analysts. Our community isn’t terribly large, and, moreover, it’s one of the few occasions that I get to heckle Mike Sukmanowski. And who doesn’t like to heckle Mike? It’s also a great opportunity for eMarketing folken to come out, along with WA-related developers, IA’s, and data modelers. In fact, a huge invite for the data modelers to come on out and meet with the web analysts. The call to action is: come out dammit! Detail in the[…]
Complexity is hard. Happily/Sadly, web analytics projects are fraught with complexity. My initial reaction is often to get a sort of ‘deer in headlights’ look, and then, I cope with complexity. Here are a few methods. Backcasting Backcasting asks, initially, “what’s the end state?”, “What’s the goal?”, or, most fundamentally, “why”. If I understand the end goal, it becomes much easier to start thinking about the prerequisites. And the step back. And step back again. Often, you run into a situation where you discover that you should have started work 4 years ago, and that, indeed, is part of the fun. Chunking / Atomization Breaking a problem out into its component parts helps. Immensely. Drawing out those boxes, and then[…]
The reaction to the Garbage Can has been fun. My good friend pointed out that I never really explained the entire theory of the Garbage Can, and he’s right. I didn’t. I’ve only briefly described the topline thought process behind it. I talked briefly, in the original post about the Garbage Can, about how process can really alleviate some of the symptoms. If key participants agree on the problem we’re trying to solve, and agrees on the criterion on the solutions, then an actual effectual outcome is more likely. Of course, even the best process in the world can save you if there just isn’t enough energy in the can to make it pop. “But how do you go about[…]
A big thank you to Andrea Hadley of eMetrics/NetSetGo for hosting the WAARM, the Web Analytics Association Regional Meeting, and for having me out. I want there to be a strong incentive for our Chicago readers to attend WAARM Chicago. 🙂 So, I’ll share a few high level outcomes. My fellow panelists were John Hossack of VKI Studios and Jason Carmel of ZAAZ Seattle. The big takeaways are to write a job description that focuses on finding very smart people – the skills development can be loaded in systematically. There’s a belief that the recession is causing an increase in demand for measurement and web analytics, and it appears to be broadbased, and, if you’re going to freelance and go[…]
I’m afraid this is yet another one of those philosophical blog entries. J Consider a web analytics vendor selection process. What a mess that can be! You have some people who genuinely believe that something is the best, and then you have some people whose salary premium merely depends on their ability to (fakely) pull reports out of a hyper-specialized piece of software, you have people who like a particular vendor because of who they know, and then you have everybody else. Worst case scenario: kick-backs or related ‘perks’ – which, just for the record, is one of the absolutely worse bases for making a decision. It’s hard to be objective when you’re making a decision though – but let’s[…]