Archive for the 'Web Analytics' Category
February 12, 2008
Quoted in Article on Effective Web Site Measurement
I was quoted in an article published by Microsoft Office Oline titled Deciphering your Web site traffic reports: 5 tips. I was interviewed by Christopher Elliott for the article, who does quite a bit of writing on travel and business issues.
Here is the section with my input, discussing how too much data can often be a bad thing:
Focus on the numbers that really matter. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with data, much of which doesn’t apply to your company. “Identify the top two or three statistics that actually allow you to make decisions about your site,” says C. David Gammel, an online media consultant and president of High Context Consulting in Salisbury, Md. “Ignore all the other data.”
Why disregard this wealth of information? Because poring over all the data will create what Gammel calls “analysis paralysis.” And that can detract you from your goal. His advice is to focus only on the metrics that are relevant to your business. For example, rather than obsessing over page views, look at the clicks to your online store and compare them with sales.
You are far more likely to make progress if you measure completion of specific, value producing goals, than simply trying to increase your overall page views and unique visitors.
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November 5, 2007
Google Analytics Site Search Is Live
I just enabled the site search feature in Google Analytics. If you want to analyze the search queries on your own site (and you should!) and use GA, be sure to log in and activate it in the profile. Here are detailed instructions on how to do so.
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October 19, 2007
When Data Crunches You
My most recent post on the We Have Always Done It That Way blog appears to have made a direct hit on the pitfalls of being too data-oriented: When Data Crunches You. Several comments so far and counting.
My co-authors and I are working on a new edition of the book, which was originally developed via collaboration on the blog. The current edition is available from both Lulu and Amazon if you haven’t read it yet.
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October 2, 2007
Effective Ecommerce with a Login
The screencast I created of the effortless ecommerce process for Coda prompted several questions about how to best incorporate a login to the online sales process. I’m going to address that issue via a normal blog post rather than a video.
Every additional step in an online process usually costs you people who don’t want to go through that extra bit of effort. Depending upon the situation, the abandonment rate can be quite high for each step. Exceptions are when the goal of the process has a very high perceived value by the customer.
The Coda example does not use a login. They have no need for it. All they care about is selling an individual product to you. However, some organizations offer discounts to certain classes of customers (members, rewards program, etc.) and they need some way to identify them in the process. They may also wish to capture data about the individual purchasing a product for later analysis.
Here is the deal: you can incorporate a login to the ecommerce process if it provides sufficient apparent value to the customer to go through the extra steps required. Here are some potential reasons a customer would perceive value in logging in:
- Repeat customers can save time not having to re-enter their data and billing information.
- Certain classes of customer receive a significant discount or savings if they identify themselves to you by logging in.
- They want the product enough to jump through the login hoop. (This is obviously not a good reason for a login, however.)
Look at your process for selling online. Is there any value to your customers to login for each sale? If not, you are going to hurt yourself by placing a login between your customer’s money and your bank account.
What should you do if you have both customers who can benefit from a login and those who won’t? Provide the option to login but do not require it. A number of sites offer this where you can login to retrieve shipping and billing data or go to a simple form for entering it. Providing the option allows your customers to self-select the process that is most appropriate for them.
Your database administrators may be pushing you to implement a login to reduce the occurrence of duplicate records in the database. You must analyze this requirement for the actual value to your organization. Is forcing data maintenance onto your customers the most profitable tactic to take? It very rarely is from a online sales perspective.
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September 24, 2007
Search Engine Optimization Tips Article
I just posted an article to my site on how to improve the placement of your content in natural search engine results. I focus on how to improve your own content and management practices in this article: 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips.
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August 30, 2007
Social Network Fundraising ROI Calculator
Here is a nifty tool: Is It Worth It? An ROI Calculator for Social Network Campaigns:
You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.
This web-based spreadsheet (you edit the variable values right on the page and then click the ‘Update’ button to recalculate) might help you to understand the cost of investing time and effort into social networking compared to what you might realize from it. This tool is designed specifically for fundraising but you could probably use it for membership recruitment as well.
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August 27, 2007
Web Analytics Definitions or A Page View by Any Other Name Is Not Allowed!
The Web Analytics Associations has released an expanded set of 26 standard definitions for measuring web traffic and usage (PDF). This is a useful document for providing consensus definitions of common terms used in the web industry.
However, I find it rather ironic that they released this document only as a PDF. Come on folks! You should know better, being an association of web professionals.
(Via Shawn Zehnder Lea.)
Update: What would I recommend in addition to a PDF? A sub-site on the WAA site for the definitions, providing an index and a separate web page for each definition. Having a page for each definition would allow people to link to them directly as references. This would improve the usability of the content and enhance search engine results for those definitions (ahem).
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August 6, 2007
Podcast: Interview with Jeremiah Owyang on Measuring Social Media
I am working on an article for Associations Now about how to measure social media success. The questions I am exploring: How can you measure success with these tools? How do you know you are creating value with a blog, podcast, wiki, RSS, etc.? What’s beyond the page view?
I interviewed Jeremiah Owyang, about this issue last week. Jeremiah is with PodTech, an online video network. Jeremiah has been writing about social media, and metrics in particular, quite a bit this year. He even started a Facebook group on social media measurement.
In the recording attached to this post we discuss the idea of measuring engagement, subjective vs. objective measures and what the near term future might look like. Jeremiah shares several tips on getting started with measuring social media (follow the link for a write-up of these). Thanks Jeremiah!
Drop me a line if you are using social media at your association and would like to share your experience for the article. You don’t have to have solved the problem (if you have you can write the article!) but I am very interested in talking about the value you think your efforts are providing and issues related to measuring that value.
Update: Jeremiah has posted a few additional comments and links related to what we discussed in the interview.
Interview with Jeremiah Owyang on Measuring Social Media [10:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadPermanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | 3 Comments
July 31, 2007
World Bank 2.0: The BuzzMonitor
I just heard about a new open source application for tracking discussion of specific issues in social media (blogs, tags, podcasts, wikis, etc.) online: The BuzzMonitor. This was developed by the World Bank for their own purposes and then released as an open source application. From the about page:
Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple plaforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.
We were playing with Drupal, a solid, open-source content and community platform for different pilots. Drupal being so flexible and module oriented, we decided to write the specifications for a “super aggregator” that would help us people understand, follow and collaborate around mentions of the organization online.
I asked Pierre Guillaume, who announced it on the Social Media Measurement Group on Facebook, how they are using it internally at the World Bank. His response:
Thanks David. We are rolling it out to communicators across the bank with a guide on how to use tagging, voting, rss feeds etc…there is, not surprisingly, a bit of a learning curve both in terms of “getting” social media and using the tool but some champions are emerging, embedding findings obtained through the buzzmonitor in their regular comm and web reports, adding relevant bloggers to their contacts etc.. We also feature the most recently voted on items on a page available two clicks down from the intranet home page, for all staff to see.
Sounds like a great tool for raising awareness of how issues important to the Bank are evolving online. I recommend listening to the online conversation as a key activity for any organization and this looks like a great tool for assisting in that. I have downloaded the application and will give it a try this week.
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March 15, 2007
Page views are up 10%! So what?
Metrics matter. People often say, “You get what you measure.” Metrics for metrics sake rarely actually contribute to the bottom line, however. When determining your web site metrics, it is better to focus on two or three that actually indicate value being created for the company than on a hundred that mean nothing.
Working really hard to improve the number of pages viewed on your site without understanding how each additional view creates value is asking for trouble. You may be increasing page views by such bogus methods as an automatic page refresh (as the Washington Post does with their home page) or by creating multiple clicks to complete a simple action, all of which frustrates your users. But your metrics look great!
Measure the creation and delivery of value. Ignore everything else.
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