There’s a lot of really great research out there, done by academics, on topics of direct interest to web analysts. Sadly, they’re all behind a wall. So, we’re reaching around that wall, seeing what’s relevant, and later, writing an easy to digest review. If members of the WAA are interested, they can read more. Original research is great, and I think the WAA does a great deal of it. Some of this secondary research is fairly interesting too. Jane An and Jennifer Day have each written a great reviews – which are forthcoming and timely. The aim is to provide value for members of the WAA, get some research out there, and really bridge that gap between academics and practitioners.[…]
Tuesday Odds and Ends – any of which might be good Tweet fodder: 1. My team and I are doing the technical Omniture training this week. Jason, our trainer, is awesome. The technical know-how for implementation of Omniture – to really get the most out of it, is most certainly not as simple as “just dump the f—-ing tags in”. The training reinforces the need KPI’s, business requirements, technical documentation, solid standards, and proper QA. I’m very happy that I know javascript and how to program. Poorly. 2. I finally got my “Programming in Objective-C 2.0” book. Awesome! 3. It dawned on me that it takes 12 hour work days to stay ahead of the industry. It does get easier[…]
It’s time for another Web Analytics Wednesday, this January 28th. Patrick Glinski has really gone all out this time, lining up sponsors from Omniture and ExactTarget, and hauling none other than Jim Sterne, founder and chairman of the Web Analytics Association, on out. For the first time, we’re going to have a panel. I’m excited because it marks a slight maturation in WAW, which I think will be welcomed. At the same time, Patrick nor myself want to lose the essential ethos of WAW, which involves getting together, sharing pain points and editorials, and laughing alot. There are multiple conversations that happen at multiple tables, people network, and then the table of regular regulars starts to consolidate around 10pm. Good[…]
Newspapers everywhere are dying. It’s no real surprise. Most newspapers don’t really contain much news. If the central function of a newspaper is to take information from the AP Newswire, sprinkle in five or six paragraphs of what counts as ‘local news’, then convince businesses to trade paper space for money, and mash it together – a day late – then they’re doing a great job. I don’t think it’s a winning formula. These days, the people who consume news get it increasingly from the web. There happen to be newspapers that have websites (speaking on behalf of Canada – poorly designed ones. The New York Times continues to be a great website). If you’re after commodified international news, you[…]
Proposal for a general formula for a summary report: Summary statement, good news good news, good news. Figures explaining good news. Recommendation for improvement. Summary statement room for improvement, bad news, figures explaining bad news, recommendation to improve. Expand upon recommendation. Follow up statement. Briefer summary statement, repeat good news. What do you think? Win?
In the previous two posts on the Economics of Analytics (I), I laid out an overview of the problems I was having – specifically with the Hourly Model. In the Economics of Analytics (II), I argued that the agent-client relationship suffers from two horrible asymmetries in knowledge that cause the process of project estimation to become muddled and complex. In this post, I’ll write about the scalability of Analytical methods, which is just another way of saying “how much benefit can a client derive from a project given a specific agent, depending on the size of the client and the size of the optimization benefit”. The more I thought about scalability, the more I realized that analytical approaches themselves can[…]
In the previous post, The Economics of Analytics (I), I set the stage for the complications of risk management and trust in agent-client relationships. Assume that I’m a client. I know I have an optimization need, but, assume that I don’t know what is involved in fixing the problem. Assume that I have perfect trust in an agent. I tell the agent that I have a problem, and I ask for a fixed-fee estimate. (Tell me how much it’s going to cost). The agent can certainly be glib about it, and give me an estimate without probing the true nature of the problem. As a client, assume that I have some idea about the volume of work and skill that[…]
I’ve been working for quite some time this month on the problems around the Economics of Analytics. In what I think will become a series of posts – I talked with some fairly brilliant people and I’ll be getting their permission to quote them over the next few weeks. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to ask the baseline questions that were troubling me. At the highest level, the argument runs like this: It starts off with private discussions. We lamented that “the hourly model is broken” and were generally “frustrated with the way that the market rewards performance” in the client-agent relationship. I was also particularly frustrated with an inability to understand the scalability of our[…]
I’ve changed the commenting settings to allow ‘anonymous’ comments, so it should be a heck of a lot easier for people to comment. On the downside, it’s going to make it easier for certain bots to comment. But the aim is to enable a lot more people to make their opinions known and open up more discourse and cross-linking with your own blog.
A good friend on “teh client side” emailed a reply. I get a lot of email replies these days as the commenting system on Blogger isn’t so nice. “Actually CB, i would look for sources of traffic that convert, and then advertise there more. Also question why and are there any other sites like that out there that have just never heard of me and advertise there too. For ecoms, this is low hanging fruit. But, changing topics slightly, how do you judge if all that bookmarked, direct dial traffic is good? That is my specially urk these days.” On the first point – I agree. If I was noticing a big conversion lift from a source, such as a[…]