by Judah Phillips 

SELECTING A WEB ANALYTICS TOOL is never an easy decision.  There is no standard, scientific way to do so — it’s a bit of an art.  The decision is full of compromises — no one tool or fancy family of tools from one brand will be able to do everything you think or want them to be able to do.  Nor will any one tool have all the bells and whistles you want. 
Lots of resources exist for helping you select a web analytics tool and vendor - from Marketing Sherpa to CMS Watch to a whole slew of consultants.   Even with good resources and the best consultants, it’s still tough to narrow down the selection and really identify what’s important to your business.  The first thing I’d recommend before beginning the due diligence process is asking yourself or your boss the following (relatively) simple questions:

·    How much money can I spend?

·    What resources do I have?

·    Do I have the organizational capability and maturity to run an in-house software solution?

·    Do I prefer to eliminate overhead and technology expense by delegating control of my Web analytics technology and infrastructure to a hosted solution run out of a vendor’s data center?  

·    Do I want to integrate Web analytics data with data from offline systems? If so, what systems and what methods (i.e. web services)?

You’ll have a short list of potential vendors rather quickly.  I would recommend framing your vendor evaluation across these dimensions in the context of how they are relevant to your business needs and goals:
1.    Company and Technology
2.    Product and/or Services
3.    Features
4.    Vendor Organization
5.    Strategic Fit
6.    Cost

Create a matrix so that the attributes presented below are on the left axis and the companies you are selecting are on the top axis.  Fill in the cells with your custom information evaluating a vendor:

Useful attributes for beginning your evaluation of a potential company and technology for Web analytics include:

·    Company Description. Describe the company using publicly available sources.  How long has the company existed?  How solvent is it?  What do customers say about the company?

·    General Technology Description. Explain the technology and how it works. If technology uses OLAP, what happens to the confidence level and confidence interval (i.e. margin of error) when drilling down on the data?  Can I report on every dimension and attribute of available data about a segment or is the reporting limited?  How about when exporting?  

·    Product and Service Capabilities. Assess the overall ability of the vendor’s technology and services organization when compared to the industry.  What percentage of the company’s customers successfully deploys tags and gets complete tag coverage across every page from day one?  Or successfully transfers and correctly parses customized log files from day one?

·    Product(s) Required for Solution. List the product or products required to support the full solution.  Can I run identical queries and get identical answers across all company technologies?

·    Ease of Use. Indicate the complexity of interacting with and navigating through the interface and reports.   Assess the user experience of the GUI from usability and information architecture perspectives. Can I simply find the data I need to gain analytic momentum?

·    Product Updates and Difficulty. Indicate difficulty of product updates and general migration path for upgrades. Does taking advantage of new functionality in a release usually require upgrading the code throughout my Web site? 

·    Real-time reporting latency. Identify the delay or lag in availability of the data within the technology.  Continuous processing?  Batch?

·    Time to Implementation.  Indicate the time to deploy the baseline, out-of-the-box solution. What percentage of the company’s customers have successfully tagged all site pages and/or processed logs within one month after beginning? Three month? Six months? 

·    Ease of Implementation. Indicate the difficulty level of implementing the technology. What percentage of the company’s application can I use if no changes are made to the javascript page tag?

·    Data Collection Model. Identify data collection methods.  Does the company’s data schema simply roll up and report “unique” counts across time periods and delete the underlying data (even if I don’t buy an additional product)?  Does it cost more money to retain full, unsummarized visitor data for 12 months? 24? Longer?

·    Data Retention and Ownership. Indicate if I retain ownership of my data.  If so, for how long and at what level of granularity? For what duration does the company retain visitor data?  Is that the same across all applications (not just a data warehousing component)?

 ·    Integration. Identify features and methods for integration with external systems.  API? Web services? Summary extracts?  Just Excel?

·    Innovation. Indicate the level of innovation perceived by looking into the company when compared to industry competitors.  What do the analysts say?  How large is the company’s engineering organization?  What percentage of overall expense does the company spend on R&D?  Partnerships?

 ·    Security. Identify the security model. Does the tool support integration with Active Directory or LDAP?  What is cost per seat or license?

·    Segmentation.  Identify the flexibility and ease of segmenting data.  What is the total, maximum number of segments available for use “out of the box”? How much more does it cost if I want to increase segments or filters?

More attributes exist.  More questions should be asked.  Truly understanding a Web analytics technology means asking hard questions and assessing the way a company answers those questions to frame your subsequent analysis and guide your selection.

Typical for any business to do some web data analysis is a must do. Web analysis is used to determine sales, profit, loss rate, conversion rates and market interest. However, establishing a strong e-presence for your website niche, there is one tool that you could used in order to collect necessary data that you would need to promote your site.Web analytics has been gaining steady popularity among websites, blogs and portals. It is used to analyze market trends and to identify website users or visitors.
It is also used to determine the behavior of website users. It is a great tool to determine your latest website trends and your visitors or users preferences in terms of site features. Here are the benefits of web analytics.

Web analytics is the process of measuring site statistics and analyzing traffic behavior. Here are there of the main benefits of web analytics.

Number 1: Monitor your visitors and users

With web analytics, you would know how long your visitor stayed in your website, who they are and where they came from. You will be able to know their clickstreams, the keywords they used, and how they came to be in your website (referrer pages, search engines, etc). You would be able to determine how many times a user or a visitor returned to your website and which pages were given preference.

In fact, a web analytics tool would tell you your website usage down to the last specifics. It would tell you about your visitor s nationality and language. It can even pinpoint the city of origin. Of course, it will tell you the IP addresses and the host used for access. Further analysis would reveal if your visitors were there to actually check out your site or if they were mere strays. Most certainly, you will know how many visitors you get daily.

Number 2: It can help you Optimize your website

Once you have carefully studied the actions of your visitors or web users, you would be able to act accordingly in order to optimize your website.
You would also have an idea about the things that need changing and the aspects of your website that may appeal more to your market. You would know which pages are most viewed and which are basically ignored. You would be able to adjust certain aspects of your website that need improvement or adjustments. You could then fix any technical problems; or you could also improve, streamline or reshape site navigation to better assist your site users or visitors.

Number 3: It can help you formulate a sales and e-marketing plan

Web analytics will be able to assist you in preparing for an e-marketing plan and course of action. This will be more effective because your plan would be based on actual facts and not mere probabilities. You would be able to really know what your market wants. By tracking the items which were highly viewed, you would learn which products received the highest response. You would also be able to enhance other programs that you have already employed like pay-per-click or PPC advertising. You would be able to get more clients, as well as monitor and keep your clients interested.

Anyone in the analytics community knows Eric Peterson.  He’s an author, blogger, consultant and general advocate for the community as a whole.  Having recently struck out as a consultant, Eric is now vendor relationship free and spreading the gospel about web analytics process and, at this particular session of eMetrics, Web Analytics 2.0. 

There was a time when the complications of an analyst were centered around more finite challenges like cookie deletion.  But in a world of user generated content, an entire web experience inside one “page view”, automated agents executing JavaScript, content distribution through XML and RSS feeds, and non traditional browsers like iPhone and Blackberry, you can see how the analyst’s life has become a bit more complex.  Eric notes that the markers of web analytics 2.0 are quantitative & qualitative, it captures multiple browsing sessions, measures content distribution, complex event tracking, data from multiple sources, focused on data analysis & optimization, and visitors are persistent as individual indefinitely.  This isn’t simple page or logfile analysis, it’s a “website optimization ecosystem”.

Within that ecosystem, web analytics 2.0 is meant to address actions and measures in both the traditional quantitative sense (web analytics, testing and targeting) and the qualitative sense (voice of the customer, personalization).  For each stakeholder, designer or blogger, programmer or marketer, it’s a lens to focus on the question, “How is my site helping or hurting my customers and prospects?”

For some businesses, web analytics 2.0 can include a measure of engagement, currently a hot topic in the analytics community.  “There is no universal measure for engagement,” says Peterson, but he did use his own company’s site to demonstrate one way to tackle the measure (originally mentioned here).  He suggests this equation:

Business Intelligence (BI) is a business management term, which refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about company operations.  BI systems can help companies have a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, internal operations, and they can help companies to make better decisions.

Where Web Analytics services are working with high volume, clean data, the resulting information becomes invaluable.  The ability to analyze and compare activities, determine marketing trends, to view behavior, and maximize your marketing dollars is what it is all about.

Most people seem to think that Web Analytics and Business Intelligence are separate and almost competing systems.   Perhaps this was caused by the size and dynamics needed for data bases that capture many dimensions of data across many Web page views.  Traditionally, Web Analytics has been used to measure behavior and attitude.  The “meat” from BI is in the opinion surveys, satisfaction surveys and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications doing trend analysis etc.  

The real value is in using Web Analytics with Business Intelligence is to develop creative ways to bring products to market that help build brand credibility.  Currently, most web marketers are just concerned with getting more people to view ads.   There is some hope on the horizon that Web Analytics with eventually feed data to the BI data warehouses.  Flexible reporting within Web Analytics systems allows for semi-automated feeds today.

The bottom line is that the information you glean from your visitors and customers will determine the future of your business.  If you are not analyzing the statistics and trends, start doing it today.  If you are just counting visitors, start using the other valuable tools that come with your Web Analytics systems.

Frequent testing of offers, copy and product display (i.e. “ads”) should be an essential part of a continuing website improvement process.  Whether conversion objectives are measured in unit sales, revenue, subscriptions or click-throughs, testing can help verify that a site’s pages are producing conversions at peak performance. The most common format is A/B testing, where visitors view one of two ads, and the ad producing the highest conversion rate is considered the “winner”. The winning ad is then served to all visitors.  Multivariate testing is a variation of A/B testing, using more than two ad variations.

Working with our clients, we have come to realize that conventional A/B and multivariate testing is cutting conversions short. These testing methodologies have been transferred from the direct mail world where the objective is to find the one best ad to mail to each household, and assumes that it will be viewed only one time. The issue is that these methods (and the associated math) don’t take advantage of recurring visits.  Furthermore, in contrast to direct mail, serving ads online has practically no marginal cost.

Reducing ad performance to simple conversion rates tends to obscure and hide details of ad performance, details that are the key to providing additional lift.  Our research shows that each ad has a unique conversion rate. Ads that may convert at high rates the first time they are seen but then quickly decline in productivity (humorous ads which quickly become non-numerous) may appear at the end of the test to perform as well as ads which improve steadily with each ad viewing.  Understanding the performance details of ad saturation and conversion rates by the number of times an ad is seen are essential for getting the most out of an inventory of ads.

Numeric Analytics, a website analytics consulting firm, has developed a testing and monitoring process that takes advantage of these performance details. Based on predictive modeling techniques, this method produces lift over and above conventional A/B testing in a way that compliments behavioral targeting and other optimization techniques.

For additional information, please contact Steve Chidester Business Development Manager

801-456-3750 – Office

801-831-5730 – Cell

stevec@numericanalytics.com

http://www.numericanalytics.com/

Over the years of web analysis there have been a lot of different terms for what has now come to be known as “Web Analytics”. This has caused some degree of confusion for many, as I personally have been confused by it myself. There have been many terms: Log Analysis, Web Logging, Site Tagging, Web Statistics, and Web Analytics being some of them. “Web Statistics” and “Web Analytics” seem to be the two more commonly terms used now, but do they refer to the same thing? A lot of services have used them interchangeably, but I believe there is a difference.

When it comes to services on the web, there have been a lot of innovators, and a lot of followers. Of all services available it seems that every one of them falls into two basic categories: Statistics and Analytics.

A service that falls under the “Statistics” category involves an application which collects and assembles your data into useful reports that you can browse at your leisure. The reports are nearly instant, because the data is aggregated as it is collected into the report’s format. Most services offer the ability to go back to previous days and view the data for custom date ranges as well. The reports are usually pretty standard from service to service, although there may be some slight differences in a definition here and there. Generally the reports are pretty static and standard, giving a one dimensional view of the collected data.

Software that falls under the “Analytics” category takes reporting a step further by allowing the user to filter or “dig down” into the data. The reports available are merely the top view with the ability to ask the reports questions. By defining the details of the visitor type you are interested in (e.g. a min/max number of pages they viewed, time they spent, or even which campaign they came through), you can target a portion of your audience that you are interested in to see how they are interracting with your site.

When selecting a package for your business, it is important to determine which kind of service your company needs. If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the data, ask questions, and use the program as a marketing troubleshooting tool, you would do better getting an analytical package that will allow for this kind of flexibility. If used appropriately, an analytics package can provide hugely beneficial insight into your visitors, what they are thinking, and even ways to increase sales and revenue. If you are more curious about measuring total visitors, visits, or pageviews then a statistical package might be better.

Regardless of the package you end up choosing, no site should be without at least a basic ability to measure visitor interraction. The data is too critical to miss if the site plays an important role at all in your company.

Survey: Companies Need Web Analytics Education
 
by Les Luchter, Monday, Jun 11, 2007 6:00 AM ET
 
COMPANIES USING WEB ANALYTICS ARE placing too much faith in technology and people, and not putting enough effort into education and training, according to former JupiterResearch analyst Eric T. Peterson, whose new consulting firm Web Analytics Demystified has just released the results of its initial research.

The “March 2007 Global Survey”, sponsored by the Web Analytics Association, surveyed 1,000 analytics practitioners, consultants and end-users, and came up with some results that would seem to leave ample room for improvement:

·  82% of respondents said Web analytics is poorly understood in user organizations, and that the majority of people interacting with Web data do not understand what it means.

·  56% of respondents said Web analytics is difficult, despite the majority having at least two years of analytics experience and 23% having more than five years of experience.

·  50% of end-user respondents said they had considered looking for a new Web analytics job in the past six months.

Peterson said that while “some in the industry have a tendency to play up how great everything is and how powerful the technologies are,” the results by and large were “what we were expecting.”

One of the more surprising results, he said, was the number of potential job-changers. This could be partially a result of the frustration caused by a lack of understanding of analytics at their own companies, Peterson acknowledged–adding that he was also “a little surprised that so many companies still have no dedicated analysts to manage those technologies.”

“As many as 63% work in companies that are understaffed,” he stated, “and half of those have zero staffs. No one’s responsible.”

Another surprising result, Peterson said, was a discrepancy between how end-users and industry consultants see the situation at user companies, with the end-users actually more “upbeat” than the consultants.

For example, when asked how companies integrated Web analytics into the decision-making process–strategically, tactically, or not at all–15% of end-users said analytics was fully integrated, but only 6% of the consultants. And 36% of end-users said their companies were using Web analytics for tactical and strategic decisions, but only 16% of consultants felt that way about their client companies.

“There’s clearly a need for companies to reinvest in the process of doing Web analytics,” said Peterson.

Web Analytics Demystified plans to repeat the survey next year, and to release results of a separate survey on features and functions in the fall.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — Google Inc.’s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet’s top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.

In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy.”

None of the 22 other surveyed companies — a group that included Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL — sunk to that level, according to Privacy International.

While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to “achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy,” Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings.

In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users’ privacy and stands behind its track record. In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests.

“We are disappointed with Privacy International’s report, which is based on numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings about our services,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel.

“It’s a shame that Privacy International decided to publish its report before we had an opportunity to discuss our privacy practices with them.”

Privacy International contacted Google earlier this month, but didn’t receive a response, said Simon Davies, the group’s director.

The scathing report is just the latest strike aimed at Google’s privacy practices.

An independent European panel recently opened an inquiry into whether Google’s policies abide by Europe’s privacy rules.

Meanwhile, three consumer groups in the United States are pressuring the nation’s regulators to make Google change some of its privacy policies as part of its proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc., which also tracks Web surfers’ behavior.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking into antitrust concerns raised by the DoubleClick deal, but has not indicated if privacy issues will be part of the inquiry.

Hoping to placate its critics, Google has pledged to begin erasing the information about users’ search requests within 18 to 24 months.

The company says it stockpiles data to help its search engine better understand its users so it can deliver more relevant results and advertisements.

As Google becomes more knowledgeable about the people relying on its search engine and other free services, management hopes to develop more tools that recommend activities and other pursuits that might appeal to individual users.

Privacy International is particularly troubled by Google’s ability to match data gathered by its search engine with information collected from other services such as e-mail, instant messaging and maps.

“Under the microscope, it turns out that Google is doing much more with our data than we ever imagined,” Davies said.

Privacy International, which was founded in 1990, said it reached its preliminary findings after spending the past six months reviewing Internet privacy practices with the help of about 30 professors, mostly in the United States and United Kingdom. The group plans to update the report in September.

Seven of the Internet companies and Web sites included in Privacy International’s analysis received the second lowest grade of “substantial and comprehensive privacy threats.” This group included: Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, Apple Inc., Facebook.com, Hi5.com, Reunion.com, Microsoft’s Windows Live Space and Yahoo.

None of the companies or sites received Privacy International’s top grade, but five rated as “generally privacy-aware.” They were: BBC, eBay Inc., Last.fm, LiveJournal.com, and Wikipedia.com.

“If all competitors can reach a given constituency easily, then the situation is accessible. When the situation is accessible, try to establish a strong position first. This gives you an advantageous position.”

Donald G. Krause, The Art of War For Executives

When Mr. Krause translated Sun Tzu’s Art of War into business language he really defined why we need to analyze our relationships with our customers and prospects.

For several years, those of us who do business on the net have been told that we need to acquire a web analytics package. At first there were only a few to consider. Now there are more than 100! They are all pretty good at giving us “data”. The problem is what to do with that data. It is not enough to just know where our visitors came from, how they got to our site, how long they stayed and where they went. We need to know WHY they came and how to establish a conversation with them. I recently visited a site because I was looking for a special gift for someone. I gave much more information than I was comfortable giving and received a canned response that said that they would get in touch with me within 24 hours. I have still not heard from them. I went to another site and expressed my intentions the same way. Within three minutes a “real” person called me. Guess who got the business.

I am not saying that you must call everyone that visits your site. I am saying that you need to acknowledge their visit with some kind of almost personalized response.  Getting to the prospect first can make all the difference in the world.