Web Analytics India

- 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.