Moving beyond the norm

In the next six months I will get into the best shape of my life. I mean in all aspects beyond the obvious physical "shape" - emotional, spiritual, educational, and professional.

There will be no stopping me! I will allow no one to put me into the dark place I was yesterday.

While I search for my sunrise

a good friend told me that the sky is always darkest right before sunrise breaks over the horizon. I am in the midst of  searching for this sunrise. And it in fact is dark...hope is all I have right now. I feel a bit like an empty ship floating on a huge dark ocean. Waiting in vain? Never. 

I will continue this quest. I do it for me. I do it for my son. And I do it because this is only the beginning of what life has in store for me. The destined chain of events that I will encounter cannot be in my control, but I only have the guy upthere and myself to thank for things that happen.

Adulthood Checklist.

(Inspired by Rudy-san's blog post)
Keep in mind that all adults reach their developmental milestones at their own pace. It is important not to compare your adult's rate of development to that of his peers. The following list is meant only as a guideline and not as a cause for alarm.
By thirty-years-old, your adult will probably be able to...
Feed and maintain a house pet - does an ex husband count? hehe the true answer is YES
Hold down a job - I held it down for 5 years, the past two jobs that I've held down have punched me back.
Maintain eye contact while speaking - Thankfully yes.
Refrain from discussing high school - Nah, I still talk about it at least once a week like it was...10 years ago.
Cook a meal (three-course) - I can watch it, cook it, and eat it. does that make me advanced?
Make small talk - small and big talk
Forgive his family - Oh yes. They forgive me back.
Acknowledge other viewpoints (social) - I do. but not always in agreement or with humor
Detect and respond to ambiguity - I don't respond well to it, but I can recognize it.
Finish school - NYU *buuurp* finished it, plate is all clean.


Your thirty-year-old adult may be able to...
Make a martini (vodka) - No, I can make a shot though.
Tie a half-Windsor knot - Absolutely not. But I do know how to put a garter belt together.
Drive a manual transmission - No. -1 point
Refrain from discussing college - absolutely not.
Get married - Yes, and "ungot" it too.
File his taxes (EZ form) - ez form is for noobs.
Remember 5-10 friends' birthdays - I remember friends' birthdays if i was friends with them from high school. shows my acumen for numbers lasted until i was 16.
Acknowledge other viewpoints (political) - I do.
Get a flu shot - yes, and it hurt for a week.
Give a toast - no, never have....hmm I have to consider this for a second.
Install storm windows - Yes!
Go back to school - will do after s**tstorm subsides in 2011


Some advanced thirty-year-olds may possibly be able to...
Make a martini (gin) - no but again, I can make a shot of this too!
File his taxes (standard 1040) - 1040s are for noobs
Make and keep dental appointments - hooray for not having any cavities! +2 points
Have a baby - Woopiee! +999 points * 100 points per year before Adam is self sufficient
Finish school - *buuurp* finished it again.

Will it be a White Christmas this year?

This year I'm going all out celebration. Hoping it's going to be a white Christmas so I can show Adam how to make snow angels. While I'm at it I'm making a list of Top 10 reasons...

Top 10 Reasons why Christmas is so Awesome:

1) snow angels
2) reason to drink hot cocoa with whipped cream and cocoa powder
3) always something excellent cooking in the kitchen
4) Christmas albums
5) rosy cheeks
6) sets the bar back down low so when spring comes it's amazing
7) shoveling snow until my back hurts
8) gift wrapping - a lost art
9) the shiny decorations everywhere. Us women LOVE shiny things.
10) making memories, christmas cards, etc.

What are your favs for this time of year?

Chili con Carne - Winter favorites!

I recently cooked a batch of Chili con carne and brought it into my office - to the delight of a coworker of mine, who bought a bowl for $3.

This recipe will feed a small army of 8. Garnish it with chives or sour cream or shredded cheddar - I like mine over some rice.

Chili Con Carne
1 pound of ground chuck
1 small green bell pepper, diced
1 small red bell pepper, diced
1 medium onion, diced
14.5 ounce can of Hunt's Fire Roasted Tomatoes, diced
7 ounce can of Hunt's tomato sauce
6 ounce can of Cento tomato paste
19 ounce can of Progresso dark red kidney beans
if you like it really rich, add in another 14 ounce can of pink beans
1.14 ounce bottle of McCormick Chili Powder
Goya Adobo powder
Salt, Pepper
Garlic Powder

Preparations:

In a non-stick frying pan over medium heat, brown ground chuck and onions. Season at any time with 2 tablespoons of chili powder, 1 teaspoon of Adobo, 1 teaspoon each of salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Toss in green and red bell peppers and fry for another minute before shutting off the flame.

In a soup pot over low heat, mix tomatoes, paste, sauce, beans, and one cup water. Pour in contents of your frying pan.

Simmer over low heat, stirring every 30 minutes, for about 1.5 hours.

Oh-so-deliciousness awaits!

Coming Soon...

A new background, new images, new layout.

Ideas for me? Send to cwang924@gmail.com

The Importance of Site Search Analytics for e-Commerce

Executives can't get enough of case studies. Why? Because they like to hear how others in the same vertical/industry/boat have failed in an endeavor and then rattle off at least 3 reasons why their own business is going to succeed and why they have an upper hand.

I was tasked with making a case for why a previous ecommerce client needed to invest X dollars into building a better site search engine. The following is my case study on "Company 734" (alias) that I presented to my client.

"Company 734 and Site Search" (so exciting, I know.)

The Business

Company-734.com began in 1990 with the idea of extending their reach of the brick and mortar brand online as many of its competitors began launching simliar retail eCommerce websites. The main focus was to attract the Baby boomers who were beginning to adopt the idea of the web as a new way of shopping. Through this initiative, Company 734 strove to better service online shoppers while preserving its brand.

Company 734's recent marketing strategies have included partnerships with comparison shopping sites such as CouponCabing and DealSea. On average, 85% of buyers coming from comparison shopping sites used promotion codes to make a purchase. Versus all other shoppers, these promotion code users were three times more likely to make a purchase, and their average order value was $20 higher, resulting in a positive $11 ROI [Figure 1].

Promotion code usage dropped significantly when other channels of traffic were evaluated, especially among the loyal customers, who received promotion codes weekly through email newsletters.

Considering the higher conversion rates of segments that had easy access to promotion codes, it was in Company 734's best interest to have their codes front and center in all marketing channels.

The Challenge

Compared to all customers, loyal customers of Company-734.com were unable to locate the best promotion codes for their purchase, exhibited by their lower site search usage as compared to other segments' site search usage. To counteract this, the content team published codes weekly onto a "content" page, but weekly promotion code usage did not rise as a result.

The analytics data showed that customers were not able locate promotion codes. Searches including the word "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" were trending upward month over month as the holiday season approached. At its height, "Promotion" -related search terms accounted for 20% of all site search but generated 0% conversion. The majority of these searches were coming from loyal customers.

The Technology

After initial research it was determined that iNile, Company 734's eCommerce platform provider, had built a basic site search engine that could only index product pages. This meant that the Promotion code content page that was published as a means to fix this problem was not showing up in search results. To further exacerbate this problem, iNile's system was unable to show available promotion codes at checkout, though this is not best practice for eCommerce sites, it would have been a workaround until the advanced site search engine was built.

Assuming that customers who were seeking promotions on-site act the same way as customers who came to the site with a promotion code (visitors from CouponCabin and other comparison shopping networks), this technical failure carried an opportunity cost of $5,425 in lost revenue, or 1% of annual revenue [Figure 2]. With consumer spending trending downward month over month, this opportunity to gain incremental revenue could not be ignored.

The Results

iNile's development team provided a workaround for their site search by building an "intelligent" redirect system. The content team would upload a batch of search terms - variations of "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" - and when a visitor entered a string that matched the batch, the Promotion Code content page would be served in place of the normal Search Results page.

Within a month after implementation, conversion from the "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" search terms and variations increased to 3% from 0% - a 300% increase. Average Order Value from these search strings was 15% higher than the site average. The growth in conversion was the impetus the content team needed to further optimize their search term batch that triggered the intelligent redirect. After 1 week of optimization efforts, the conversion from "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" related search terms grew to 4%.

The end result was that the segment of visitors who were searching for Promotion Codes once they got to the site outperformed the comparison shopping segment in terms of Net Revenue [Figure 3]

Next Steps: Building a Better Coupon Strategy

With the success of this site search project, Company 734 is now building a more robust shopping cart where there is much more flexibility to display and add multiple promotion codes. Customers can layer available deals in different product categories.

While Mommy is in lala-work-land...

In his first three years of life, my son has garnished $60,000 from my wages. As an auditor on my personal finances I found this sum to be stunning and at the same time, apropos. I put a lot of work into making my son's day a seamless web of caring people, nutritional food, nurturing care, and all around goodness. And while mommy is gone off to lala-work-land, my son has grown into a fine young fellow, mostly out of my direct care.

To be a working mom is to leverage all the good support (both paid and unpaid) to your, and your child's, advantage. This seamless web, however, comes with a cost, one that is at times a hard pill to swallow.

Daycare, 3 years: $50,000
Room, food, clothes, and other ancillaries: $10,000
A beautiful and compassionate son: Priceless.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

How it Works - The new series

I am happy to announce today that I am starting a new series called 'How It Works'.

In each post I will describe a metric, dimension, or technology directly related to web analytics. This series is geared towards those practitioners that are relatively new to the field or those of you who need a refresher course (or just some definitions to copy and paste into an email to your HIPPOS - see avinash's blog for a definition of this acronym). 

I will also include nifty tips and tricks to using each metric in reporting to add depth to your analysis. You can immediately go to your WA tool and begin analysis.

The first metric in this series is 'Bounce Rate'. Stay tuned!

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Measuring visitor engagement: achieving the holy grail

Eric Peterson released a white paper written in conjunction with a consulting shop that talks about measuring visitor engagement in the past month.

For those of you who are new to this community, Eric Peterson is one of the top 5 practitioners of web analytics and one of the few professionals that can say they have been in this space for more than ten years. When Mr. Peterson speaks, people listen.

That said, I appreciate tha the white paper explores the empirical formula for visitor engagement he derived with the help of several great minds in both WA and math. It simply states that engagement is a conglomeration of several well known metrics and several lesser known metrics.

I'm posting remotely...and I know you are waiting with bated breath until I give it to you, so keep on the lookout for tomorrows post with the fornula, demystified!

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

5 Thoughts on building a Tangible Strategy

Today and tonight, I realized that I like to think out strategy in my head, but i think the strategy that i am building should be centered around a tangible product. 
-

X Change 2009 - Web Analytics Think Tank

Wednesday September 09, 2009, 08:00AM to Friday September 11, 2009, 05:00PM
Organization:SEMPHONIC
Location:
St. Regis, San Francisco
125 3rd St. San Francisco, CA 94103 US
Price: $$$

Intended For:
Web Analytics professionals, from Analyst all the way to Presidents and VPs.

X CHANGE is made up of small group conversations or "huddles" where participants join 12 to 15 fellow professionals and a facilitator who Semphonic and Web Analytics Demystified.

The X Change conference is the web analytics industry's premier gathering, specifically targeting experts and those practitioners who are serious about digital measurement. Past participants include Best Buy, Schwab, AOL, PayPal, Turner, Intuit, Yahoo!, Avaya, The Gap, and many more.
For 2009 Web Analytics Demystified and Semphonic are happy to announce the addition of Think Tank Training --- an entire day of training offered by some of the most experienced "hand's on" consultants in the industry.

What Makes the X Change Special
Some things that differentiate the X Change from conferences you've been to in the past include:* All huddles are small-group sessions, typically limited to 12 to 15 participants, sometimes less
* Participants have, on average, between five and eight years experience in the industry
* Participants come from some of the best-known brands in the world
* Vendor participants are specifically invited based on expertise
* Networking opportunities are designed to promote networking, not vendor sales pitches
* Industry thought-leaders, analysts, invited vendor executives and well-known consultants are well represented at the conference


If you're cool like that and you want to register for this event, go to http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/xchange/

Rich Internet Applications and Web Analytics

Can they collide?

With the explosion of RIA sites in recent years, a visit no longer begins and ends with pages loads - rather, we have had to come up with ingenious ways of measuring a visitor's "engagement" and "conversion path". Using the traditional web analytics toolbox, analysts have been able to leverage "event based tracking" (such as is available through Google Analytics and most enterprise-level vendors). This has proven to be a tricky road, and deriving actionable insight is highly dependent on defining the right macro and micro level experiences and events to track.

What has been your experience in RIA analytics? Have you been able to build an engagement model that steps past the limitations of the traditional WA toolset?

House Music: 100 House Anthems: IBIZA

For a long road trip down to the Jersey Shore, I decided to buy a CD compilation set. Since I'm really into house beats right now, with the addition of tribal rhythms that i'm hot on the tail for, I purchased "100 House Anthems: IBIZA" thinking that this was going to be a pretty good purchase.

This purchase was made after using my Palm Pre Amazon Music app and searching for various songs in their database and listening to them right in the store. With the collapse of Virgin Megastores, listening kiosks are a thing of the past, and rarely do we get an audible glimpse into the music we're about to purchase. Go smart phone!

Cd 3 - Ibiza: Club House
This was off the track from my expectation of 'ibiza club'. Techno funky grinding noises. Too much plain singing. Thoroughly unimpressed, and not a good start to my vicarious journey through Ibiza.

So far NOT good. 1/10 stars. One song got over a minute play.

Tips and Tricks for Omniture analysis!

Yay! I found a "Tips and Tricks for Omniture" paper that SEMPHONIC had released...in it I found several custom metrics that I'm going to test out right now:

For Pages/Sections analysis:
Entry Propensity: Entries/Visit
-this measures independence", but not sure how yet. Will post back later.

Exit Propensity: Exits/Visit
-this measures how likely a visit to ths page/section will end there.

Session Engagement: (Visits - Exits)/Visits
-this measures the probability that a visit to this page/section will go on to do something else on the site.

An observation: these last two metrics are inverses of each other...

"The Art of Omniture: Tips and Tricks" Published by SEMphonic
http://www.semphonic.com/resources/wpaper_010.pdf

Avinash Kaushik interview on Web Analytics

This is one of my favorite videos, Jeremiah Owyang interviews Avinash Kaushik on why web analytics is more than "just a tool".

To begin - a definition of Web Analytics - the capture and analysis of a site's clickstream data. The process of understanding customer experience, morphing your site to best serve your customer.





Avinash's Trinity Method - Understanding "Why" "What" and "How"



To begin any sort of strategy, begin collecting data. Use a free tool. There's 50,000 free tools out there, don't spend any money trying to understand your site if there is nothing to begin with. Start putting the data in front of your marketers. Use the data, make some great decisions on marketing strategies, understand your audience, and don't fall into the bad cycle of collecting everything - "Garbage in, Garbage out." Over time, your organization is going to get smarter, and the tool will begin to be limiting. Then you look into paid tools. But always try to adhere to the 10/90 method - invest 90% of your business intelligence money into a person to analyze the data and 10% in an analytics tool. Megan Burns from Forrester released a study on the ROI of analytics staff and it comes out to something like 5,000% ROI. So start looking for intelligent analyst(s)!



Are Page Views Dead?



In some ways, yes. Page Views are dead in Silicon Valley. With the adoption of flash and ajax sites - event based tracking is coming into play. How do we measure the experience instead of just page views? There's a new concept of measuring "visitor engagement" - assigning values to different tasks that can be performed during a visit, and quantifying visits/segment behaviors. Web Analytics vendors are going to have to change their product plans and strategies to support the new thought process.



In my consulting experience, there is a huge (read - HUGE) need for post implementation analysis for event based tracking. A successful RIA analytics implementation is great, but corporations then have a need to understand what all the event counts mean. Building out a reporting "center" that pulls from these event lists and provides meaningful information on visits and experience is a huge undertaking but will make event based tracking worth the time and effort of implementation.



(video credit: http://www.podtech.net/home/2929/kicking-off-a-web-analytics-strategy-for-your-corporate-web-program)

5 Tips on Being An Analytics Consultant

This is my first time being a consultant. So take this all with a grain of salt and be glad that in this economy, there is still a need for strategists! Yay!

Glad I got that out of the way. Here's a list of what I've noticed are critical to successful analytics consulting.

1) Schmooze with a smile
2) Keep everyone on your team in the loop.
3) Over-communicate.
4) Learn Powerpoint and SmartArt function like your life depends on it. In fact, it does.
5) Get published, and speak your way into seminars.
5)

Google Analytics Training Coming to a City Near You!

Google Analytics : Advanced Implementation Training - coming to a town near you (hopefully!)

The following information was posted on Google Analytics' blog today:

We are offering Seminars in 4 cities this month. That's right.. down under in Sydney, Australia and then one on each coast (Miami and San Diego) and north/south (Dallas and Washington DC) just to balance it out.

These are great in person trainings and will jump start you in Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer (San Diego and Dallas only). Return from these trainings with a practical understanding of how to use these products for your business along with some great tips & best practices... oh and if you're lucky, a nice tan.

I'm going to the training seminar in Washington DC. Hope to meet some great people over there. Now that event tracking is enabled by default I'd like to learn how one can implement this to track RIA, video, custom link tracking, etc.

I wonder if there will ever be a usage best practices seminar.

For instance, if I had just 15 minutes to put a deck together to show Performance of Mysite.com, what reports and what slices should I be looking at? What reports will require the fewest steps of clicking to get the most value out of it?

Ideas are welcome!

In Search of my Sunrise...

Hello everyone, and welcome to my first post.

I haven't thoroughly understood how to share my thoughts in a meaningful yet censored way that doesn't invade my own private space.

Hope this comes together nicely.

here goes!!