There’s a nice little thread going on at the Yahoo WA thread. Here are some of the best bits of Eric Enge’s article: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629590 The Challenge of Mobile Web Analytics By Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch, May 21, 2008 The mobile Web is a dynamic and challenging environment. One of its biggest challenges is that conventional Web analytics applications don’t do a good job of tracking mobile Web site usage. That makes it difficult to tune and enhance your mobile Web site’s performance. Today, we’ll talk about some of the different mobile analytics methods, and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. … Mobile Web Analytics With such a large and growing market, it’s reasonable to presume that more people[…]
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“I still can’t figure out what you do” Comes the common refrain – to be a Web Analyst in…well, anywhere. There are not that many of us. Officially, web analytics is supposed to be about “understanding the behavior of visitors on a website”. I’ve posited a second definition (now I’m previewing June 11) that it’s about “understanding digital behavior”. (We’ll see how that flies.) I can break web analytics out into 3 broad categories. There’s a technical side of my job – last week I analyzed log files and the results of javascript executed tags. This week I’m into Omniture and Google Analytics. There are a few flavors of web analysts who make all their money implementing difficult to code[…]
Web analytics knowledge isn’t really centralized. Jim Novo’s efforts at professional certification through the UBC courses are to be lauded as a direct effort to centralize authority in the web analytics space. After all, not everybody should be considered to be a web analyst. Let’s consider the broad space that is web analytics. So far, as with most technologies, it tends to be heavily vendor based. “Do you know Omniture”, “Do you do WebTrends”…they’re common questions. When it comes to universal web analytics knowledge, we, as a community, have 3 or 4 seminal books – and a collection of a blogs. But there’s an entirely different discourse on web analytics that’s taking place with very few practioners around the table.[…]
Goal Hierarchies are critical if you want to understand how institutions change, and why analytics need to respond to those changes. The origins of the work on goal hierarchies goes back to 2005. I worked with Dr. Perl on the first look at road safety public policy in years. We produced the first published paper linking institutional strength with a goal typology. Then we observed common sense – strong institutions set concrete goals…weaker institutions set abstract goals (or no goals!). We got it published in 2007. I took this thread and applied it in the thesis. I went further, noting that most institutions have a broad set of goals, but they almost always fall into some sort of hierarchy –[…]
Series of events 1: Someone searches using a keyword. They see your adword ad. They click on it. They click ‘order it’ on the landing page. They convert for a net profit of 75 dollars. Series of events 2: Someone searches using a keyword. They see your adword ad. They click on it. They click ‘about us’ on the landing page. They visit the home page after. They don’t convert right away. What was the ROI of the first series of events? Well then, what do you mean by ROI? If we’re talking about the ROI that is directly attributable to the adword ad, then the ROI was 75 dollars. And the second series of events…using the same attribution model,[…]
Pre-Click Analysis involves examining all the things we can measure before somebody actually reaches your website. It includes taking a look at all the sites that are linked to yours, and the context in which they’re pointing to you. (Are most of the links on forums, on blogs, or other types of sites? Are they saying good things about you? Are they recommending you? Are they condemning you?) It involves taking a look at all the keywords that people are using to find you. What’s your page rank on those search queries? How far down the search page are people going to find you? Examine the context that your banner ads are in. What is your offline strategy like? Is[…]
WebTrends is the most common server log file reader in use today. Many tools don’t use log files, but it’s interesting to talk about them. Back in 1997, one group reported that it took 240 person hours to develop perl scripts to read the files. To put just a half month’s worth of data into a ‘usable format’, it took another 100 person hours. It’s not simple, because there are four types of server logs: access, agent, error and referrer. It’s just rather hard to parse all these types of data. Access logs tell you the time, IP address, and which files got downloaded (.html, .flv, .jpeg, .pdg, and so). This is where the misleading term “hits” came from. Every[…]
Mobile analytics are going to play a huge role over the next 10 years, especially when it comes to actually driving innovation. If Canada is to remain really competitive on the world technology scene, we’re going to have to get a lot better at mobile applications and technology. A part of that mix involves prudent government policy, and on that front, I’m active. The second component is to demonstrate value when it comes to these devices. The people within different organizations that are capable of demonstrating the value of mobile applications and a mobile presence will be responsible for the ultimate success of those organizations. Some people call this movement the “Web Analytics 3.0 Movement”. I’m anticipating that the popular[…]
Risk Communication is not easy. The best way I know how to communicate risk is to understand the roots of risk perception, and then to take these into account. Here are the risks that we can perceive, and the ones we can estimate. Here are the risks that we can mitigate. If we mitigate these risks, the odds of failure are x %. There are other ways of communicating risk to be certain. Some people will criticize this approach as being “too complex”. Indeed, this approach to risk communication takes into account risk management, and bakes recommendations right into it. Typically, you could talk for 2 paragraphs before arriving at your point. Indeed, whether or not you want to start[…]
Slovic et al (1982) wrote extensively about the role that controllability and observability play in risk perception. Next we make the link to management. There are four broad categories Risks that we know we know, and can mitigate.Risks that we know we know, and can’t mitigate.Risks that we know we don’t know, and can mitigate.Risks that we know we don’t know, and can’t mitigate. So let’s break it down with respect to a new advergaming banner ad going out. We know that there’s a small risk that the banner ad interactivity isn’t going to work, but we can reduce that risk by alloted two hours to quality assurance.We know that there’s a small risk that the site we’ll be hosting[…]