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)