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?
Showing posts with label event based tracking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label event based tracking. Show all posts
Friday, August 21, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
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)
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)
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