Web Analytics India

This is an extract of an article with interview of Nabler’s CEO Seby Kallarakkal with Shanti Anne Morais of mediabuzz.com.

The World Wide Web is home to millions of online businesses that compete against each other for top Search Engine Optimization (SEO) page ranks. So what sets your business apart from your competitors and what will attract users to visit your website or search engines to rank your site at the top? Before planning your SEO campaign you should have a fair understanding of your targeted online audience and how they navigate the web – i.e. web analytics. By aligning your website to improve the user experience as a result of web analytics, you’ll also increase your SEO.

Read the full interview at www.mediabuzz.com.sg

- Contributed by Kamesh M

We all know that using a Bubble Graph one can show three different dimensions of data i.e, X-axis, Y-axis and the Size of the Bubble to represent an additional dimension of information for the given time period. With a small set of data this may not prove beneficial but is pretty much helpful to visually represent a large segment of data. It gives a quick impression of how the large data relate to each other in terms of for example volume, position, placement, etc among many other possibilities. All that saying, it however shows only for a certain defined time such as for a week or a month of data.

The same bubble chart can however be tweaked at large to show how the relation continues over a moving time range – say across the three months in a quarter or across twelve months in a year, which is better known as ‘Motion Chart’. And all that using the very common MS Excel itself. When the data has to be shown for different time periods using the same graph it could become a bit challenging. The idea is to show how the bubbles change with time or say any other dimension. In simple words, this can be done by using a scroll bar that would allow control the progression or the change.
Let’s go about creating such a motion chart. Here I have taken an example of ‘Top ten Sites Ranked by Unique Visitors. My data points - the Unique Visitors on Y-axis, Monthly attention on X-axis, and visits to the site as the size of the bubble. To go ahead with lets plot 1 months’ data in a bubble chart as below. All sites are identified by their abbreviations.

Ok. So here we are with the bubble chart. That’s the first step. Now to bring in some ‘motion’ to it for which, a scroll bar will be the handiest tool. The scroll bar will be used to slide through different time periods. So, insert one by clicking on the Developer tab, and in that ribbon, scroll bar form control will be available under Insert option in the ribbon.

Draw the scroll bar in the sheet below the bubble char. To change control settings, right click and select Format Control option from the context menu.

Now in the Format Control options, the Control tab has settings of most importance. Enter the Minimum Value as 1 and Maximum value for as long as the period there are data. Since I am trying to show 6 months of data, I have set Maximum Value to 6. Set both Incremental Change and Page Change to 1. Finally, Cell Link is to set to a cell in the sheet. The purpose of this sheet is to return the value of current scroll change to the sheet which in turn will allow control over the bubble chart.

Now, the complicated part, write a simple nested if formula in the data table such than when ever there is an increment/decrement in the Scroll Bar Current Value, the data table shows the required data. In my example, taking my data from January to June, values 1 through 6 would represent each month. The logic used here is
IF (cell$A$1=1, show value of Jan, IF ($A$1=2, show value of Feb…… IF ($A$1=6, show value of Jun))))))
Similarly for the rest of the dimensions as well, similar formula is written to update numbers based on scroll bar current position value.
After required beautifying process in the graph, the scrollbar, any accompanying texts and also the data table, if required to show along with the chart, the final output is a neat Motion Chart.

Reference: http://lists.compete.com/

We are looking for a business development manager (BDM) to take our web analytics services to customers and partners. This person would be responsible for new customer acquisitions as well as building a network of partners.

Job Specification
Our ideal candidate would be:

• - From the digital marketing industry
• - 2 plus years experience in sales and marketing
• - Proficient in networking, especially through channels like social media
• - Excellent communication and presentation skills
• - Experience in building partnerships

Roles and responsibilities
The BDM would be responsible for all sales and marketing efforts including:

• - Creating marketing collaterals
• - Creating proposals for customers
• - New customer acquisition
• - Online presence including website, social media, etc
• - Building partnerships with digital agencies and technology vendors

The job would be based out of Bangalore, but might require travel once in a while.

About Nabler
Nabler is India’s first full-service web analytics company. Since inception, Nabler has been involved in analyzing more than 80 websites. Nabler was founded with the idea of helping companies leverage the Internet. The Internet world is rich in data and Nabler helps companies define, collect, process, present and understand this data.
Nabler’s services include:

• - Website optimization based on data to increase engagement, subscriptions, leads and sales on the website
• - Campaign analytics to help companies realize better ROI on online marketing efforts
• - Testing services that help companies make better decision on promotions, offers and products
• - Strategic inputs on customers, products and services to help companies take better business decisions
• - Brand analysis using data from social media

Nabler also has an R&D division that is creating products that helps customers get the best out of their websites.

If interested, kindly send your updated resume with the following details at hr@nabler.com.

Name:
Email ID:
1. Contact Number:
2. Best time to call:
3. Current CTC:
4. Expected CTC:

- Contributed by Deep Moni Hazarika

It’s so much a ritual now to find out the depth of a page or website. How different is it to say rhyming with “death of a page or site”! Fear not. Depth or alternately called Page Views per Visit is says how deep inside your site did a visitor go in a regular visit. However do note that its Average Page Views per Visit that we are more likely to look at. This is a figure we more often than not don’t avoid calculating, to add that “extra piece of valuable information”. A greater depth of visit for a content generation site would mean a “Wow!” but the same for a support related site would mean “Oh no! I gotta bring it down”. So, reactions differ depending on the nature of the site.

But wasn’t I going to speak about some ‘misleading’? Well on a quick note, let me ask this - what does an Average Page Views per Visit of 0.87 mean? i.e. if there were say, 100 Visits, then there were 87 pages viewed. How do you explain that? Under ideal conditions, every visit has to have at least one page viewed. But the scenario looks confusing here. There are extra 13 visits and if every visit has to have at least one page view, then we are either missing some data or our calculation is wrong somewhere! Funny ehh! Technically, would it also mean that for those visits, a page did not get loaded in the browser completely or returned some error? Nope! Because, an incomplete page means a client to server status code was passed which was not 200 (the success status code). And as it goes, all web analytics tools reports only successful page requests when showing up those numbers. Then what did those extra visits actually do?

Looking at it another way, are we looking at the complete picture? Is anything wrong with that formula? How can that be? World over, the formula has been laid out plain and simple, again and again. Now let’s look at the same thing with an additional bit of information. There were 100 visits. There were 87 pages viewed. In addition to that, in those 100 visits, let’s say there were 13 pdf files downloaded. Going by the standard definition, the average page views per visit is still 87/100 = 0.87, but with a slight modification in the formula to include the pdf files downloaded, we get the same browsing behavior as 1 now, i.e. (pages viewed + downloads)/visit. Seems to make sense!

On dissecting this scenario, we can see that when we say pageviews per visit as the depth, we have been considering only the ‘pages’ viewed and not the downloadable contents. Considering the scenario where a visitor is not aware of your website but frantically looks around for some information through search engines and one of your websites pdf file gets listed amongst the top results. The visitor now willfully clicks on that pdf link and in effect has caused one visit and one download but no page view. This situation cites that accessing a single pdf also is an engagement with a depth of 1 for that visitor, considering the visitor didn’t access any other content in your website. Visitors of such kind coming from a search engine are one of the many possibilities where content is directly accessed without necessarily causing any page view. In effect to that, the depth of the website can be a number less than 1 if considered only for ‘pages’ and higher than 1 when considered for both ‘pages’ and ‘downloadable’ content.

This also shows how the simple formula can lead to confusing interpretations. So what is your take on the depth of visits to your site? Are you sure you are getting it correct?

My next post will elucidate on how the simple formula of page views per visit can itself be an all in itself when looking into some of the available analytics tools.

Reference links:

1. http://blog.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2005/07/average-page-views-per-visit.html
2. http://elementsinc.net/blog/2008/08/04/a-key-indicator-for-your-website-is-the-average-number-of-pages-viewed/

- Contributed by Mukesh Sharma

Numbers numbers numbers… where are the metrics??? Where are the reports??? Can i have the reports by noon? …demanded one of the managers.

It was a tense morning, not the first time though! It got even worse when we wanted to “export reports” from our trusted WebTrends. Now, so what if the report extractor is not working and throws up an error which analysts like us don’t understand?

Here’s a snap shot of the error.

Looking at the error file one can only say what the heck! How do I go ahead with this now?

Looks pretty messed up!! Isn’t it? Maybe there is a quick solution, but my focus was more on how to get the reports requested for and how to get back to the manager that his report might possibly get delayed. I terribly needed an alternative. Was there any? Well there’s always an alternative! And here the alternative was using the “Scheduled Jobs” feature in WebTrends. I had never used the scheduled job for extracting the reports before, but this turned out to be a perfect opportunity to learn and implement the feature. This feature does pretty much the same thing as the report extractor does, but the only difference being, one needs to schedule a report just like scheduling a profile. Now if you are thinking about the time, believe me it’s much better to use this feature instead of collecting the numbers manually.

Coming back to the reports which were to be delivered, the manager was pretty pleased to see the reports by noon!

Hey wait a minute, what about the “report extractor “? Well, that problem went on till a week or two, making calls to the WebTrends vendor, uninstalling and reinstalling the java plug-in several times. Add to this, a funny part in this tense situation - the vendor goes missing all of a sudden!

Finally the vendor returns. Ahh! Thank heavens. A call is set up with the WebTrends support team along with one of the much used remote support tool. But this wasn’t going to be a smooth ride. The next few hours saw me going through three different support guys with them again asking me to uninstall and reinstall the java plug-in, that in spite of me telling them that I already tried installing java plug-in afresh.

The problem wasn’t getting anywhere to a closure until I was put across the third guy. This guy too asked me to uninstall and reinstall java. Oh damn! This is too frustrating, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t really help. The call and the remote session went on for about an hour when suddenly the guy, asked me to open up IIS on the server where WebTrends was hosted and check the path where the exporter was installed.

Bingo! There was the problem. The home directory setting of the IIS setting had got changed - the setting for “The content for this resource should come from” had somehow changed to “A share located on another computer” instead of “A directory located on this computer”. Some magic!

Finally I checked if the exporter worked now. As a matter of fact it did and I thanked the guy for figuring out the problem. Was that the real problem? Should it have actually taken so many days to solve this problem? I thought, after the call ended that carried on for an hour and half on the final day, putting an end to over a week long problem.

Well I at least now know where to look for the problem if the exporter is throwing errors.

- Contributed by Deep Moni Hazarika

The presence of the internet as we see it now is more than a decade, though it took time to become a dependency in many matters – be it corporate presence, buying and selling online, news matters, hobby and what not. In this short span of time however, what happens to websites which are relatively grand dads or an elderly to any website which went live in the very recent present? First thing that came in my mind about them was whether they are able to generate the same level of interest to their visitors as before or not. In all probability, if they survived for long, then they sure have got something. Next thing then hits me is how much of visitor behavior data they will be having now. Think about sites of NASA, FBI, etc. which dates back as much as to 1995-’96.

Presence of enormous amount of data all around is so profound that at one point or another, we happen to hit at a time when we seem to be running out of space. Website data is not excluded. If you are living with web log files and your website gets even about 10,000 daily visitors, and also considering that the last time you did a live pages count in your site was somewhere even around 5,000 to 10,000 pages, you must be struggling at times to cope with the growing amount of data. Log files are growing; your visitors are creeping up. There is a goldmine of information with you but how do you extract out that gold.

As most would agree, more the data we have on a matter, more predictable is its future. In that view, considering those grand daddy websites had implemented some form of web analytics solution, are they able to decipher the code of predicting the future of their website data? I doubt! It’s just a strong feeling though and just a few reasons on why I think so. To support that, look at the long list of all kinds of web analytics products that had been around for a long time now – enterprise wide highly charged ones, some super jazzy ones, some with extra level of complicacies, and even to those which are smartly free to use. In my opinion, if we roughly speak about a plain vanilla web analytics tool (most of the free ones and some of those super jazzy and super cool ones fall in this category), none meets to the expectation of straightforwardly showing possibilities or outcomes based on your heap of past analyzed data. They just generate numbers and reports. Well that’s good but satiate a couple of your managers. But there can be more to the story. You are lost when it comes to the situation of “What – if’s”. There is a level of intelligence incorporated into some of the web analytics tools that takes into consideration non web data and also has the capability to churn out some of the “What – if’s” and there is more to be seen.

Companies now go for a mix n match of two or more web analytics tools, each of which would answer to certain specific requirements which are prevalent at that time. And there are people talking about actionable insights. Well, out of a couple of simple reports from your much used free web analytics tool, you can make out that a page doesn’t perform well, a landing page needs to be optimized better, set of keywords can be better targeted, fall-out of visitors from your best pages can be minimized and blah blah. Congrats that you are able to add insights. But more often than not, you forgot about the past data and what value that would have added. But alas, apart from using that dull calendar to calendar compare, there is not much to look into. The question here however would be – how do I…? what do I…? The sole matter is that there is very little guidance on what are the possibilities out of it. Next time when working on those commonly looking reports and numbers, think out that there could be more to it.

With the last we heard about Omniture, we now know that Adobe Systems Inc. is all set to acquire Omniture Inc. for a whopping $1.8 billion. The deal, said to have been mutually agreed upon by both the companies on a fully diluted equity-value basis, will help Adobe offer better user interface solutions to its customers. As the two companies join hands, Omniture’s web analytics and optimization technologies would complement Adobe’s content creation tools and help the company deliver effective web solutions across all digital platforms. This is good news for Adobe’s customers as they would now be entitled to receive more in terms of value creation. As from the web analytics point of view, would this mean more and more creative media sites and agencies would vie for Omniture than Google Analytics? Only time can tell.

Expanded Opportunities for Adobe and Omniture

This is a natural move for Adobe, a company that wanted to get into digital advertising. Adobe will definitely capitalize on this deal by offering Omniture as a built-in solution for most of its development tools.

With the inclusion of Omniture in its offerings, Adobe will be able to provide mission-critical solutions to its enterprise customers, further increasing its ability to appeal to online marketers and chief marketing officers. On the other hand, Omniture will benefit from a global operational scale and the ability to move into newer markets.

Finer Aspects of the Deal

According to the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all the outstanding common stock of Omniture, at the rate of $21.50 per share. The deal (pending regulatory approval) is expected to be closed in the fourth quarter of Adobe’s 2009 fiscal year.

As part of the deal, Omniture will become a new business unit within Adobe. Omniture’s CEO, Josh James, will join Adobe as senior vice president of the new business unit, and will report to Adobe’s president and CEO, Shantanu Narayen.

Head Honchos Speak

“This is a game changer for Adobe and its customers. We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets. We really think that we can actually transform how digital content is created,” said Shantanu Narayen, the chief executive officer of Adobe.

“Omniture’s mission has been to enable our customers to optimize every digital interaction. By joining forces with Adobe, we will accelerate our ability to deliver on that vision and together bring new innovation to the market that improves content engagement, advertising effectiveness and the overall user experience, which will drive more advertising dollars online,” said Josh James, the CEO of Omniture.

Reference Websites

• www.watblog.com
• www.omniture.com
• www.techcrunch.com
• www.online.wsj.com
• www.adobe.com

Company Profile:
Nabler is India’s first pure play web analytics company. We are looking for web analysts who are excited about analytics and the Internet. We analyze data for some of the best brands in the world and work on a range of tools including Site Catalyst, Coremetrics, WebTrends, ClickTracks and Google Analytics. The selected candidate will get an opportunity to work directly with the customers. He or she will get a chance to analyze not just web data, but a mix of traditional and online media.

Job Title:
Web Analyst

Job Profile:

• - 2+ years experience in analyzing websites
• - Expertise in one of the following tools – WebTrends, Site Catalyst, Coremetrics, NetInsight
• - Experience in handling customers directly in the area of providing web analytics services
• - Excellent written and spoken communication
• - Should have an analytical mind
• - Should be based out of Bangalore
• - Should have very good hands-on experience in creating powerpoint slides
• - Should be a power user of Microsoft Excel
• - Should have an eye for detail and quality

Key Responsibilities:

• - Interfacing with the customer, understanding the requirements and delivering on time (Some of our customers are in the US and you might have to stay back on some days till about 10 PM to talk to them)
• - Providing insights on the data being reported
• - Delegating work to colleagues when situation demands
• - Building reports and analyses using powerpoint or Excel

We are located close to the outer ring road, in a place called HRBR layout or Kammanahalli in Bangalore.

If you meet our criteria, you would be called to our office to do some hands-on analysis and reporting. If you like what you are doing and if we like how you are doing, we’ll get you on board.

If interested, kindly send your updated resume with the following details at hr@nabler.com.

1. Name:
2. Email ID:
3. Contact Number:
4. Best time to call:
5. List web analytics tools that you are familiar with:
6. Rate yourself on SQL / MS Excel / MS Powerpoint on a scale of 1 to 5:
7. Have you interacted with customers directly while providing the service of web analytics (yes / no)
8. Current CTC:
9. Expected CTC:

- Contributed by Anish Jacob

“Can you confirm that there is no overlap between the organic search traffic and the paidsearch traffic reported in Google Analytics?”
This was the question posed to me by a client recently…

I immediately turned to the Advanced Segmentation feature of the tool. I quickly set up three custom segments as follows:

1. Organic Search Traffic: The segment of visitors that originated from organic search sources
2. Paid Search Traffic: The segment of visitors that originated from paid search sources
3. All Search Traffic: The segment of visitors from all search sources i.e, paid and organic

My hypothesis was that if there is no overlap of traffic then the sum of visits form organic sources and paid sources should be equal to the visits reported by all sources. However if the numbers don’t add up then we need to investigate and see what is causing the overlap.

I applied the segmentation to the Visitors Overview and the numbers spoke for themselves… no overlap! Thanks to the Advanced Segmentation feature answers such questions from clients is quick and easy.

- Contributed by Robin Browne

Recently got like a beta invite to Viralheat.com. They describe themselves as,

a “simple and an affordable way brands, agencies, marketers and content producers to monitor consumer generated content on social networks to identify key trends, understand community engagement and perform competitive analysis.”

A rather tall order that. In the beta phase you get to create 3 profiles. Unfortunately, the snag begins here. Each profile is a single keyphrase. Which Viralheat then uses to track content across the social sphere. But, a single keyphrase per profile? I found this incredibly limiting. At the very least, you would like to specify a series of rules to define the profile.

Moving on

Once you have defined your profile (aka the single keyphrase), Viralheat reports on its mention from various platforms like:

• Microblogs : Twitter
• Sites : WP, Tumblr etc
• Video : A bunch of them, sadly the Youtube doesn’t seem to be on the list. Well, there goes 90% of the action.

But limited as it is at the moment, it has still been useful to me. Recently one of our clients launched a new product and it has been great to see in one place mentions of it across the social web. Thousands of tweets, blog posts and videos about it have been uploaded. And we have been able to track it on a daily basis. Viralheat also does some kind of semantic analysis of the conversation, it rates them in Positive, Neutral and Negative terms. I found it intriguing but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much information on how this thing works.

Moving Further On

In its limited manner, I like what I see so far. Would love to see them concentrate on:

• Coverage : More Platforms, More Sites (Youtube is a must)
• Profile Definition: At the minimum I should be able to include and exclude terms within a single profile

- Contributed by Gunjan Aggarwal

The best way to measure success of a blog is through RSS subscribers. Usually we get data about the RSS subscribers through feedburner. But we can also use Google Analytics to get that figure.

To Track the Clicks on RSS button, add following code within the :-

onclick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (’/rss/rsspic’);”

You can use any page name instead of ‘/rss/rsspic’.

Through OnClick function we are calling virtual page. We don’t have to create that page in our website.

This virtual page you can see in your top content list in Google Analytics. But if you want to analyze which post or category leads to more clicks on RSS button, then you have to set goal.

If you are using Blogger then to add the code go to Layout ->Edit

And if you are using WordPress, then go to Design->Theme Editor->Sidebar.php

To create a Goal in Google Analytics:-

1. Login to Google Analytics
2. Click on Analytics settings
3. Under Conversion Goals and Funnels, click edit



4. Enter the information as shown in pic above. Goal URL should be same as given in code.

   Through this you will come to know only about number of clicks on RSS button. It doesn’t tell exactly about subscribers as someone might have clicked on RSS button but not have subscribed.

   It will be helpful to you to analyze the best performing post or category in terms of increasing subscribers.

   You can also use virtual pageview concept to track:-

   1. Clicks on banners
   2. Ajax-based activities
   3. File downloads
   4. Videos
   5. Dynamically generated pages - cgi, asp,php
   6. External Links

What more are the possibilities where you can use virtual pageview concept?

- Contributed by Seby Kallarakal

I’ve been hearing and reading about emetrics for a while. Few years back, I had even initiated talks to see if it’s possible to have an Emetrics Bangalore. Finally, I got to go one of them - I was told that this was the best of the lot. Emetrics at San Jose.

I can understand why this conference is attended by a lot of digital marketers. The arrangements, speakers, topics, the crowd, everything was good.

Having spent three days listening to people and interacting with them, I thought it would be good to blog about what I heard and learned.

Jim started the conference with his keynote on ‘Time to Shine’. I must say that Jim is a great speaker. Speaks well. Is funny at times. His keynote was peppered with slides that took people to the older days of web. How Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft websites looked years ago. Some of them gave much food for thought and some of them were just hilarious.

Jim also was a great host - introducing speakers, asking the first set of questions, meeting people. Now I know why emetrics is doing well.

Sponsor presentation by Foresee results

Emetrics let the big sponsors do a keynote or sponsor presentation. Foresee was the first to go. Foresee is an interesting tool. I got to see the demo at their booth in the exhibition hall. Foresee results take customer satisfaction to an all new level.

WebTrends
The next to go was WebTrends. I still have not figured out what they have been up to in the last two years and where they are going. One thing is for sure. They have a great design and visualization team. Their presentation was easily one of the best to look at, visually. Interestingly, WebTrends chose to talk about what they refer to as ‘Digital Maturity Model‘ or DM3. DM3 promises to give organizations a framework to assess their maturity in the area of digital marketing. WebTrends says they don’t want to necessarily own this framework and are willing to move the ownership to the web analytics community.

WebTrends seem to have changed, including their logo. They have now integrated Radian 6, which must have been a great selling point. Radian 6 is a pretty cool tool to see how you are doing on the social media (more on that later).

I’m planning to take the DM3 survey and download their white paper in the coming days.

Always be Testing by Bryan

This was a session I was looking forward to. Having read the books by Eisenberg brothers, I was keen to listen to Bryan and the whole idea of personas. Unfortunately, I joined the session too late. Got carried away at the SAS booth looking at their take on web analytics.

So, not much to add on his session. But a quick look at his website got me to this book written by hm. It’s called Always be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. Planning to purchase this to see what I missed at the session!

Measuring the success of a movement by Mark Skidmore

Now, this was an eagerly anticipated session. Mark was going to talk about barackobama.com and how the campaigns were done during US presidential elections. Needless to say, the audience was eagerly waiting to hear if digital marketing had to do anything with Mr. Obama getting elected.

Mark was speaking fast and numbers were coming thick and fast. Some of the numbers were amazing. 500 million USD raised online, 4 million individual donors, 1 million SMS subscribers and 2 billion emails sent. Mark was primarily talking about how they used emails affectively. Got me really tempted to start looking at emails lot more effectively.

As part of the presentation, Mark shared a few tips like:

1. Ensuring consistency in the visual branding even as you encourage creativity
2. Allowing supporters to support you. This was an interesting take. Instead of gunning for 5 people with 1 million dollars to give, they were gunning for 1 million people with 5 dollars to give
3. Taking advantage of key opportunities. The email campaign was extremely responsive. Within hours of an issue breaking out, an email would have gone to the supporters of Mr.Obama explaining what’s happening and what supporters can do about it
4. Forget seasons to send email, email every day

Looks like Mr.Obama’s team knows how the web works. I took a quick look at http://www.barackobama.com/ and I’m impressed by how the president of United States is using this website to interact with people. And check out the screenshot. He is everywhere. Facebook, myspace, youtube, flickr,…

Mark also shared some of the tools that were used as part of building the engagement. Cements my belief that you need more than content to engage with people. You need to build features and applications on the website to engage with people. Good news for all those programmers!

Sponsor presentation by technology leaders

Technology leaders is a large web analytics consultancy company. They were showcasing a tool that they have built called dynamic alerts. I almost jumped out of my seat because we built something quite similar for a customer of ours a year back at Nabler. Just shows that

1. People / companies from around the world can have similar ideas independently
2. Time to market is shrinking

If you have an idea, better have a system for launching it or you might have to see another company launching it before you.

Printing a business card in 3 hours

One of the great things about the US is the number of innovative products available. Think of an idea / a need, chances are that someone else also has thought about it, built it, packaged it and is available.

I ran out of business cards and wanted to get a fresh set. I had heard about Fedex Kinko (now Fedex Office) a while back and thought this is a great opportunity to test it out. Turned out that there was a Fedex close to where I say staying in San Jose.

Reprinting our existing card proved to be difficult. It had rounded corners and there was no way I could have got that done at Fedex. Without the corner cut, the design didn’t make sense. The original design was done in Corel Draw and editing that was not an option since I didn’t have Corel draw on my laptop. The friendly lady at the counter suggested that I design my own card using Microsoft Publisher. And that’s what I did. Spent about 15 minutes, designed the card in Microsoft Publisher, got it transferred using USB drive and vola - I had my new cards with me in 3 hours.

I thought that was really cool.

Landing page critiques with Tim Ash

Tim has written a book called Landing page optimization and I was curious to hear him speak. The general principle of the clinic session was very simple. Someone from audience would show Tim a website and Tim would without any delay start with comments and suggestions. Some of the suggestions were pretty interesting.

Maximizing performance across time periods - Jason Burby

When we started Nabler, I kept buying any book that I could get on web analytics. And so, yes, I bought the book by Jason as well. So, I landed up at Jason’s session to hear him speak. I would have liked to hear from him about analytics in general. However, the presentation was limited to a very specific topic - something that we have done for ourselves and for our customers. Of course, Jason was good with what he spoke and what he showed. The talk was about taking advantage of changing traffic and behavior across a day / week / month by showing different things to visitors at different times / days / dates.

- Contributed by Saagar Shinde

Why does a unique visitor differ from report “A” and report “B” even though it is tracked for Europe territories in both the cases? We use Omniture tool to extract analytics data.

The problem was Report “A” consists of different territories across Europe, when unique visitors amount is aggregated it differ from Report “B” which reports on complete Europe traffic.

For a new web analyst he might start scratching his head! He could say what the hell went wrong. Did he make a mistake in pasting the value in the report or did he miss out any territory in Report “A”.

The first thing to understand is differences the way the data is extracted from Omniture:

(Note: “T” represents Territory of Europe & V represents value)

This could be an ideal picture to elaborate the points & will help us to understand better. “Europe” represents Global Reporting Suite whereas “Spain, France & Brazil” represents Individual Reporting Suite.

Here we can see 2 types of Omniture tags used to collect data. Europe Suite Tag is common in all websites. It’s called as Global Reporting suite for Europe as we have defined earlier. The function of this Global Reporting suite for Europe is to collect aggregate data from website 1, 2 & 3. Additional feature of this Omniture tag data is “Deduplication”. Let say Mr. X visits Website 1, 2 & 3.

Through typical implementation Mr. X could be counted as unique visitors by 3 websites. Now the wrong understanding comes in. If data for all three websites are aggregated Mr. X could be counted 3 times in global suite. This is not true. Remember Omniture using “Deduplication” by which Mr. X is counted only once.

Report B – Values are taken from Global Reporting Suite of Europe which uses “Deduplication” so Mr. X is counted just once as unique visitors.

So Report A – Values are taken from individual Country Reporting Suite, which uses the traditional way to track Unique Visitors. If Mr. X goes to Website 1, 2, & 3: he will be tracked as Unique Visitors on all three website. When you sum up the data of all three websites Mr. X will be counted as thrice as Unique Visitors, ending up with mistaken & misleading data.

Mistakes:

• You can’t compare these two reports because they are tracked differently.
• You can’t sum up the Unique Visitors in Report A because they are Unique Visitors across different territories of Europe it doesn’t mean they are Unique Visitors across Europe.

Please share your views and experiences about the problems faced regarding individual & global reporting suites or the solution you came up with.

- Contributed by Robin Browne

At work, we constantly emphasise  on learning. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is not. Comparisons can be futile but I will risk my neck with one, Omniture has a large help section, but it is not always easy to find a solution to your problems. This may be due to the complexity of the entire Omniture ecosystem, but come on at least they can improve their search functionality.

Google Analytics on the other hand has a refreshingly useful help section. And now with their updated Conversion University, it has become even better. The video presentations are a must see for anybody dabbling in GA.

This they have coupled with an online certification program called GA Individual Qualification (honestly, never pick IQ as an acronym, too many stupid questions are asked). It’s been out since March of this year, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was only number 854 to pass this test. It costs 50 bucks USD, and you get a PDF certificate at the end of it. Would have really loved it if they gave us some sort of badge I could displayed on our website.

Far as the test was concerned, if you have used GA for a while you will find it pretty easy. I sat on it for a long time thinking it would be far more challenging. Just brush up on Goals and Adwords and you should be fine.

Certification is necessary step we all should look forward to, it may not tell apart the good from the great, but it does establish a baseline. And if we as an industry are to have more credibility these are steps all of us can take to reassure our potential customers.

- Contributed by Deep Moni Hazarika

Just about a month back, on 14th April, Google announced about a change to come in the Google search referrals. Next day on, there were series of discussions on enlightening the rest of the world about the present search referrer and newly structured search referrer. The flames can still be seen :-). Not going too much into the same conversation that had been around for this long, there is another reason for writing this post.

Like nature had intended, there were optimists who cheers Google for almost any upcoming changes and there were pessimists who are mostly infuriated, probably not because Google came up with the idea, but because they have to rework on the settings that they had settled on once defining the requisite structure. This primarily includes search related products and web analytics products but may not be limited to these. There had been a concern around the environment I am present as well. My approach – I don’t care whatever changes come up, it shouldn’t mess up the system we and our client had settled in. If it does, tweak it up to handle any such changes.

Why did they make that move? What purpose do those extra search parameters serve? What else are they going to track now? Apart from the obvious parameters, what do those alphanumeric parameter values mean? How can they help us?

Now, there were streams of questions like these that mattered more than just to be informed about the change in referrer string. Oddly enough, not much was clear on any of these questions. The emphasis had mostly been on the “/search” being upgraded to “/url”.

google.com/search will soon be an old format
google.com/url will be the de facto standard

Going through the Google Analytics Blog Entry, below are additional few such url standard Google follows:
google.com/ie for mobile search
google.com/webhp for searches which contains hash query

A #hash query example: http://www.google.com/webhp#hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=flowers&fp=g9hIhDHDw6s – notice the “#” instead of ”?”

Now to get an of the various parameters being used and newly introduced, Kent Davidson had put up this post Google outbound link tracking about google’s use of JavaScript to track outbound links from the search results. He has neatly described the various parameters of the JavaScript, which helps in understanding what all items Google is tracking.

Here is a snapshot if the Google search link with the query strings –

http://www.google.com/url?sa=T&source=web&oi=(Parameter 2)&cad=(Parameter 3)&ct=(Where you clicked)&cd=(Search Position)&url=(URL to be sent to)&ei=(Security Code)

To get the details on what each of the parameters mean, read his post.

In short, leaving aside the encrypted values in the parameters, the most useful one is “cd” which shows the search position. “url” gives the landing page in your site which I believe Google is going to use for their purpose as we would already have the landing url from [cs-uri-stem]. “ct” is another parameter which can help in identifying whether a search result was clicked or cached results.

Now, the ball is back in our court as to how effectively we are able to use these additional items.