I hope everyone has a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I probably won't post much until the New Year! See you all then!

Earlier this week Ask was testing a new search interface dubbed Ask X. The most insightful review I found was on Marina Garrison's Blog Search Tank.

Marina is the Research Manager at Enquiro Search Solutions, she holds an MBA and has been in the Search Marketing Industry for over 3 years.

The left column is now devoted to navigational options including keyphrase, results types and options to narrow and expand your results with related keyphrases. Some of these options were available on the original results but were moved from the right to the left side making them more visible. The lists are restricted to just a few suggestions of alternate keyphrases but longer lists are available as pop-up boxes if you click “More”.

Read the rest here...

The NBA (National Basketball Association) is a little off topic from my regular posts however it's something that really interests me so I thought I would share (I incorporated some Technorati stats to help add some focus).

There have been 2 very hot topics of late:

1) The New York Knicks vs. Denver Nuggets brawl which happened a few days ago. At the end of it 7 players were suspended almost 50 games. With Superstar Carmello Anthony going for 15 games and forfeiting $650,000 in salary.

2) Allen Iverson (one of the premier players in the league) getting traded to the Denver Nuggets.

I thought I'd check on Technorati to see how much Buzz was being generated by these 2 stories and from the graphs below it looks like these topics are fairly hot right now.







As a side note here are my thoughts on the Allen Iverson Trade: Adding Iverson is a great addition for Denver but I am not sure how much he will be able to share the ball with the rest of his teammates. Iverson has always been to known to be a prolific scorer and shot taker but fellow superstar Carmello Anthony also likes to shoot a lot - so something has to give. Adding Iverson makes Denver a stronger/quicker team but if he doesn't get along with everyone he could also destroy the team.

Earlier this month it was announced that Google will be no longer giving out keys to its SOAP based Search API.

This has some developers worried and it has me a little worried to because we have developed some cool little proprietary apps using the SOAP API. I am wondering if they are eventually going to shut off access it completely, causing many developers to re-code their apps using the Google Ajax API.

Martin Lamonica' s article at CNet News had some interesting thoughts:

Perhaps Google is trying to influence technical debates--it also has developed GData, another data access API. But ultimately Google is likely favoring the Google Ajax Search API for business reasons--that is, they expect to see more better Web applications and more traffic through that method

.

Here are some interesting articles/posts I have read this week:

- Avinash Kuashik interviewed Mike Moran of IBM
- Jason Barby goes into detail about Omniture's latest offering: Genesis.
- According to the latest numbers from WebSideStory, Firefox’s share has risen from 9.84% in mid-October to 10.7% currently.
- Chris Diede over at SmartBiz does a nice overview of Google Analytics.

Powered by WebTrends Inc. True Optimization technology, the on-demand solution is designed to automatically determine which combinations of networks, keywords, positions, creative and landing pages perform best and allocate advertising to the top-performing combinations across major search networks, including Google, MSN and Yahoo - http://www.websitehostdirectory.com/article1024.html

Enquiro's Gord Hotchkiss "tagged" me in this game of blog tag which allows bloggers/industry professionals to share 5 facts about them not known to everyone else. Here is Gord's List.

Here are my top 5:

1) I am/was a fairly decent athlete - In high school I was named athlete of the year in back to back years and also made it to provincials (equivalent to state championships) for triple jump. Now I play competitive volleyball 3 times a week.

2) I was born in Nawanshahr, India. It's a city located in the state of Punjab about 7 hours North of New Delhi. I moved to Canada when I was 4.5

3) During Christmas season I really don't mind the busy shopping malls and long lines (as long as there is Christmas music playing)

4) Although I have lived in Canada most of my life and in the city of Revelstoke for 6 years (where they get enormous amounts of snow), I very much dislike the snow, winter and even skiing.

5) I really enjoy movies but a few movies which I can watch over and over include: Groundhog Day, Crimson Tide and Hook.


I tag: John Marshall, Matt Jacobs, Matt Belkin, and Bill Tancer.

Last week's series on Identifying and Solving Client Pains was concluded with Eric Peterson. I'd like to continue with that same topic this week with Akin Arikan.

Akin Arikan is Sr. Segment Manager (Internet Marketing) at Unica Corporation.

Here are Akin's thoughts...

It always drives me crazy when traditional marketers question the accuracy of web metrics while pouring a gazillion marketing dollars into TV, print, and outdoor advertisements where they use panels or focus groups to calculate ROI. Ahmm, ... doesn't that seem a bit schizophrenic? But one area where traditional marketers do catch their Internet colleagues red handed is the measurement of the effects between the online and offline. Or more precisely, the typical ignorance thereof.

You are not alone if it seems ironic to you that we use complex algorithms to optimize how many cents exactly we will spend on online advertisements or search keywords, yet we use the online results as our sole input. Meanwhile, studies conducted by Comscore and earlier by Dieringer Research Group show that (depending on the industry) 60% or more of the purchases resulting from Internet activity may actually happen offline rather than online. Trying to optimize your online investments without taking the offline results into account is a bit like trying to sail across the ocean orienting yourself by the position of the moon instead of using your compass or GPS.

That's nice Akin. So how do we go about it then, wise guy? I separate techniques into two groups, namely 1.) those that aim to measure effects on a 1:1 basis, i.e. for each individual customer, and 2.) those that don't go down to the 1:1 level but measure aggregate effects. I recommend you start with 2.) first before you go down to level 1.) even though you you will find the biggest rewards there.

For ROI assessment at the aggregate level there are multiple techniques that you will have heard about at conferences such as SES. For example you can inject unique 800 telephone numbers into your web site when visitors click through from particular advertisements. Anyone who calls can be attributed back to that advertisement. But what if you are buying many paid keywords, would you need an 800 number for each? No, there are companies that offer clever tricks for making it unnecessary to have a different number for each keyword. But how about store sales? You can offer online coupons that people will apply offline. You can offer "buy online, pick up in store". You can offer online product configurations that people can print and bring to the store if they represent a sufficiently high value to them. If nothing else works, you could experiment by shutting down your online advertising in a particular region to measure how offline activity will go down with it.

The proposed techniques help with estimating the effects of online to offline, but are not precise enough for 1:1 marketing. For example, if you wanted to e-mail a discount promotion to someone who browsed but did not complete a hotel reservation online, then wouldn't it be vital to first make sure that this person has not completed a reservation by phone for full price yet? Here you can use techniques that have been applied by your colleagues in direct marketing for many years. Namely, as long as you can identify the customer on each channel you can reconcile their interactions on the back-end. For example, take a hotel web site. You cannot know who an anonymous visitor to your hotel web site is. But if I go to Extended Stay Dot Com for the umpteenth time to make a new reservation, more likely than not, they know exactly who has been browsing because I have completed reservations on their site recently and my cookie allows them to identify me. Likewise, when I call and make that reservation via the phone I identify myself with my name, even my credit card. So they could put 1 and 1 together to know that I just browsed the web site but should not be sent a discount offer because I have meanwhile completed a reservation by phone. This kind of cross-channel response attribution has been common practices in direct marketing for many years. If you want to spare yourself having to reinvent the technology from scratch take a look at software suites such as Unica's Affinium suite for Internet Marketing (http://www.unica.com/) that already comprises many multi-channel capabilities in this regard.

While surfing the web today I noticed that Google had slightly modified its results page (something similar to what they have tested in the past). I checked with some other people at the office and noticed they were still getting the regular results page. At first I thought it was a data center related thing but that wasn't the case. I figured my computer was simply given a special cookie which allowed me to see the different results page. The data center I was using was: 72.14.253.99

Below are some screen shots (click to see full view). Big differences include the different searches down the left side. No page number or amount of results along the top (rather only along the bottom and left justified). This made for an even cleaner layout.

If you missed Marshall Sponder and Gary Angel yesterday, please read their posts here. Last but not least we have Eric Peterson wrapping up this week.

Eric T. Peterson is the Vice President of Strategic Services at Visual Sciences, the author of Web Analytics Demystified, and the founder of the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo! Groups.

Here are Eric's thoughts ...

In my experience, the vast majority of problems and pains are associated with unclear or ill-defined processes for the actual "doing" of web analytics. Companies that are really invested in driving success through web data analysis quickly discover that even the most carefully considered investment in technology and people can go to waste if the organization does not have a clear plan to take advantage of the investment.

The snake-oil salesmen in our community selfishly continue to advance the "all companies need is one big win" message, one designed to support the short-term goals of their sales people, not the long-term needs of their customers. Yes, companies need to demonstrate that web analytics technology can make them more successful, but they need to generate those successes in a systematic and repeatable way.

The best way to solve this problem? Invest in understanding your companies Web Analytics Business Process! Don't just assume that web analytics will get done! Take the time to discuss, diagram and document the process of "doing" web analytics in your company. Some wise man once said that "Knowing is half the battle" and it couldn't be more true in web analytics --- too often people don't know what can be measured, what can be known, or what can be done!

As more and more companies examine their Web Analytics Business Process, often they express shock at how poorly-considered and under-utilized their investment in web analytics has been. And as these failings are documented and corrected, these same companies widely report greater usage, greater understanding, and greater overall value being derived from the investment they've already made.

But don't take my word for it ... go buy Megan Burns latest Forrester report Leaders Take A Strategic Approach to Web Analytics (November 29, 2006). From her report summary: "To date, many companies have approached Web measurement from the data up ... But [Forrester] clients tell us this approach isn't working -- and they're ready to try something new." Fortunately, the "something new" that companies need to try is actually something old -- process. Good old fashioned attention to business process, as opposed to waiting for some kind of magic or miracle to occur, does wonders.


Look for Akin Arikan from Unica Corporation on Monday.

Yesterday's posts by Justin Cutroni and Jason Van Orden dealt with Analytics as a Business Process and the Measurement of Podcasting metrics. Today we have Marshall Sponder and Gary Angel.

Marshall Sponder is the author of the Blog: WebMetricsGuru.com which is part of the "Know More Media" Team.

Marshall's Thoughts...

I have different types of issues depending on the complexity of my clients' environment.

For a few of my SEO/SEM clients it's getting them on board for analytics and tracking properly. One client of mine is publishing marketing material pretty soon and I want to have tracking code placed on the published works so we can track response and cross channel conversions.

Taking it to the next level, another client is a large News Video site wanting to increase their SEO presence but their template design and redirects interfere with getting their online videos indexed properly and before the right audience. I instituted changes that are helping their videos be indexed - but we need to know more - which videos are being clicked on and how often they're being downloaded. Much of their pages is Flash based - and difficult to measure with Web Analytics - and getting the right tracking solution in place is a struggle and has been put off till next year.

And at IBM, I currently work with the US Homepage promotions to measure traffic, promotions, conversions, engagement and branding effectiveness. On a Enterprise level - template standardization and tagging are vital - and I'm often talking to stakeholders on getting their pages tagged for Coremetrics or IBM Surfaid (we're in the process of transition from Surfaid to Coremetrics) - again - it's a struggle.

At the Enterprise level - tagging standards are really, really important. I have found events that are only partly tracked - mostly it's due to analytics limitations, not tagging URLs properly or not setting the analytics to track the right variables or all of them.

Finally, on a level beyond small and large companies - there is the effectiveness of a site / page and the promotions sending traffic to it. I've often been frustrated at not being kept in the loop about promotions running that drive traffic to a site - the site/page appears effective - but the targeted traffic is really being driven and you need to know that in order to determine how effective your site/page is.

---

Gary Angel is the president and chief technology officer of SEMPhonic

Gary's Thoughts...

To be honest, when Manoj asked me to contribute a few thoughts on common pain points that our clients share and how they might be tackled, I figured it would a slam dunk. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like doctor diagnosing Evel Knievel – it would be easier to list what doesn’t hurt than what does!

But as painful as implementation, rollout and reporting tend to be, I think the biggest pain point arrives when an organization has finished an implementation, is satisfied that what they are measuring is something like reality and all the hullabaloo around training and reporting has settled down. And then comes the moment when the implementation team has to sit back and say to themselves – what now?

That moment transforms what should be a satisfying sense of accomplishment into a scary look into the abyss. We find that for a lot of clients, getting started on real analysis is by far the hardest step – so here’s how we tend to guide clients about where and how to dive into serious analytics.

Start with where the money is on your site – for most people that means analyzing the sales process pages and the conversion process. A formal analysis here will almost always yield some dividend. And never, ever finish an analysis that doesn’t have actual suggested changes for testing. If your analysis doesn’t have data-driven changes for testing, then you didn’t do it right.

For many sites, an analysis of Internal Search as a router/convincer is a good next step. Search is a vital site component and will nearly always provide many optimization opportunities. Follow that up with an analysis of routing and navigation. Then look at cross-sell opportunities. While you’re doing all that, setup some longitudinal studies of 1st Visitors, 1st Purchasers and regular customers – after you’ve cycled through five or six months of other studies you’ll have enough data to tackle these.

By the time you’re done with all this, measurement will probably seem like a normal part of your business – and all those tests will be there for the measuring. That’s the way things should be - and you won’t have to worry so much about that scary abyss!

Yesterday's post on client pains Avinash Kaushik talked about having too many data sources to choose from and Anil Batra addressed the Accuracy of data and Acting on the findings. Continuing the "Identifying & Solving Client Pains" series is Jason Van Orden and Justin Cutroni.

Jason Van Orden is a consultant, author and speaker on podcasting and social media.

Jason's Thoughts...

How do you measure the size of a podcast’s audience? Whether you’re a content publisher or an advertiser, this is usually the primary metric to track. As a publisher it helps you gauge the success of your show. It allows you to know if you’re connecting with a growing audience. As an advertiser it tells you the reach you’re campaign will have if you sponsor the podcast.

Ideally you want to know how many people actually listen to the content after downloading it. The trouble is that the technology and standards do not yet provide for measuring this. However, a podcaster can still closely estimate the reach of his content by tracking the download and bandwidth stats for his media file.

Simply tracking the number of hits a podcast file receives provides an inflated measurement of audience size because many browsers and aggregators produce several hits for a single download. It’s important to filter out hits by unique individual. This is usually done by removing duplicate IP addresses from the logs. If possible, you also need to filter out hits from known directory bots. Services such as FeedBurner.com and Libsyn.com have developed this sort of download tracking for podcasts.

An alternate method is to measure the amount of data transfer (bandwidth) of a file from the server over a given period of time. By dividing this number by the size of the file, you get an estimate of the number of times the file was downloaded. For example, a 10 MB file that receives 300 GB of data transfer over a month results in a calculation of 30,000 downloads for that month (300 GB/10 MB). This is a measurement of complete downloads since any partial downloads are averaged out in the division.

It should be noted that, while these numbers provide a quantitative measurement of the reach of a podcast, the value of a social medium such as podcasting is in the targeted nature of the audience and the direct, two-way relationship a podcaster has with them. Download and bandwidth numbers should be measured and used in light of this.

---

Justin Cutroni is Google Analytics Authorized Consultant working for EpikOne

Justin's thougts...

Our biggest challenge with clients is not about data quality, specific metrics or how we report analysis. Almost every client has questions about these topics and we usually resolve any issues with a brief conversation. The real challenge is helping our clients change the way they do business. Many of our clients think that web analytics is a one or two month project. We stress that web analytics is a business process that should be used to drive growth.

Our goal is not only to 'do' web analytics for our clients, but also help the client integrate the web analytics process for the long term. Ultimately it's about helping our clients change the way they make decisions for their online channel.

So, how do we help clients overcome this problem? We divide our engagements into two phases, a 'doing' phase and a 'teaching' phase.

During the doing phase we actually do web analytics for the client. This could be measuring the effectiveness of SEO, SEM, email optimization, etc. We analyze data, come up with a hypothesis, test the hypothesis and make recommendations based on the results. Pretty standard analytics stuff. After 'doing' web analytics for a few months we usually have a good understanding of the client's online business process. We take what we've learned and start to formulate a plan to help the client integrate the web analytics process into their organization. There are some clients that have no desire change. They are more than happy to outsource analytics and we're more than happy to help them with that :) But others are eager to bring web analytics in house and build internal resources that can provide online business insight to those who need it.


Very interesting stuff guys. Jason, thanks for teaching me something new and Justin I couldn't agree more that Web Analytics is a business process and not a few month project.

Avinash Kaushik and Anil Batra kick off Part 1 of this multipart series post regarding the most common client pains (in terms of Web Analytics) and how to best solve them. Each Analyst will be sharing pains and solutions from their own experiences.

Avinash Kaushik is the Director of Web Research & Analytics at Intuit Inc.

Here are Avinash's thoughts...

Here is a common problem: Choice, what to choose and how to choose? We have so many data sources at our disposal:

* Clickstream
* Outcomes (orders, leads, resolution rates...)
* Surveys, usability, card sorts
* A/B - MVT testing results
* Competitive analysis Google Trends, MSN adCenter Labs
* Our own opinions
* What works for others

So in a constantly changing ecosystem like the web, where change changes at a rapid pace, what do you choose and how do you go about making that choice and how do you know it is the right choice?

Our solution is:

1) Apply the "tough love" methodology to figure out what the business is trying to solve for and then define the "Critical Few".

2) Then try to figure out what the website Customers are coming for and what are their "Critical Few".

3) Based on that create a custom pallet of Metrics that pull from the options available to paint the right picture.

4) Two things are, as much as possible :), not negotiable: Doing testing and experimentation (do the best we can based on what the website is and the website owner) and some way of listening to customers (like using the ForeSee ACSI survey or we are now trying the iPerceptions one on Intuit Canada).

I think if we do #4 well then it will make it easier to choose what we should choose because we will be listening to our customers and solving for them.

---

Anil Batra is the Senior Analytics Manager at ZAAZ. Anil has worked with several fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Business Objects, Dowjones, ESPN.

Here are Anil's thoughts...

1. Accuracy of the Data - The tools are purchased and set up without understanding the goals of the business. Since the goals of the business/site are not properly understood they start measuring and reporting on what ever out of the box reports the tool can provide. In most of the cases tool is capturing information the should not be captured and skipping information that should be captured (improper tagging and other issues). To avoid this issue our approach is to start with understanding goals and then make recommendation for the and configure the tools.

2. Acting on the findings - One of the major issues is acting on the finding. Once we make recommendation many customers face a challenge taking an actions. Why? Because of organizational structure. IT, who is responsible for making the changes to pages, reports elsewhere. Marketing can ask for changes but won't get them because IT has other priorities.

How should this be fixed:
1. Change in organizational structure
2. Help the whole organization know the impact of these changes, show the impact these changes will have on the bottom line.


Thanks Avinash and Anil! Be sure to check out Part 2 tomorrow with two more Industry experts.

Microsoft has launched a cool new way to search. It features an attractive woman named Ms. Dewey and through seamless audio/video interactivity, she does the searches for you.

Check it out!

Starting Tuesday I am going to begin a multi part series in which expert Web Analytics Analysts from the industry will explain the "pains" they hear most about from their own clients. The expert Analysts will also explain how to tackle these pains by reveling their own strategies on how to deal with them. I will also be taking part in this series.

This should be very interesting so stay tuned until Tuesday! Any Analysts that want to take part please email me: mjasra@gmail.com

Analysts already taking part are:

- Eric Peterson
- Marshall Sponder
- Gary Angel
- Avinash Kaushik
- Anil Batra
- Justin Cutroni
- Jason Van Orden
- Robbin Steif
- Akin Arikan
- Manoj Jasra (me!)

Lately I've seen SEM and Web Analytics grow even closer together with WebTrends Inc. purchasing SEO firm ClickShift and WebSideStory partnering with SEMDirector.

So it was a perfect time for Avenue A | Razorfish to release a report tying those same 2 concepts together titled "Actionable Analytics"

This report demystifies the world of web analytics by answering 14 questions every marketer should ask to apply analytics for better business results. We provide several break-through ideas in the report, such as how to use analytics to find the right mix of advertising dollars for direct reponse and brand marketing campaigns.

Download a free version of the study here.

Yesterday Web Analytics giant, WebTrends Inc. announced the purchase of online marketing company ClickShift. This move should be very beneficial for WebTrends because they will be able to leverage ClickShift's expertise in online marketing. WebTrends will also be able to offer products and services which are part of a total online marketing solution. I find it very interesting that this move is so close to WebSideStory's partnership with SEMDirector. I wonder if Omniture will follow suit.

"As WebTrends evaluated its strategic options to offer our customers a leading online marketing optimization solution, it quickly became clear that marketers have many unmet needs in this area," said Greg Drew, CEO and president, WebTrends. "With ClickShift, we've found a perfect blend of deep online advertising expertise and innovative technology that solves fundamental challenges facing marketers. We're extremely pleased to welcome such a talented team to the WebTrends family."

   

According to Information Week MySpace shut down hundreds of profiles over the weekend that were infected by a worm that directed victims to a phishing site.

People logged into MySpace could have their profiles infected by simply visiting an infected profile. The malicious code was able to find visitors' profiles through cookies in the victims' browsers, said Dan Hubbard, VP for security research at Websense. Besides changing links, the worm also embedded the infected video in victims' profiles.

Personally, I am not surprised. Hackers are always trying to take down the biggest sites. According to HitWise, I believe MySpace was the top site on the internet last month.

Read the full story here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196601356&subSection=Breaking+News

Of course, Google Analytics has a role to play as well. There are several reports under Content Optimisation -> Web Design Parameters that can tell you what technologies and connection speeds your users have, thereby allowing your web designers to build the site that is best for your market. Configuring tracking on your transaction process and adding this to your reports as a funnel can also highlight any bottlenecks in your purchasing process (Content Optimisation -> Goals & Funnel Process) that are driving customers away.

A great user experience is mandatory in order to compete in the online market today because with so many people on high speed connections, a fast loading site is not a "nice to have" anymore it's a necessity. If a user abandons your site because of slow load times it's as if they have walked up to the front of the store and just before they got to the doors, they turned around and left. This equates to a very poor and short-lived user experience. So make sure you analyze your server load times, debug your code thoroughly, test and re-test.

Source: http://www.ga-experts.co.uk/contact.php

I watched a very interesting webinar this morning focused on Social Networking put on by HitWise's LeeAnn Prescot. Her presentation was geared towards the topics of Social Networking, Photo Hosting and Video. Here are some of the key takeaways (Note all information is based on US Traffic):

Social Networking

- The Top 20 Social networking sites account for 1 of every 20 Internet visits
- MySpace has an 82% Share of these Top 20 Social Network Sites
- MySpace is the leader in Social Networking and has had a growth of rate of 50% from Mar-Sept 2006

Here are the Top 5 Social Networking Sites (with their percentage of share and average visit duration)

1) MySpace - 82% - 30:22
2) FaceBook - 7.24% - 8:17
3) Xanga - 1.86% - 12:00
4) Yahoo 360 - 1.21% - 11:42
5) Black Planet - 1.12% - 20:19

- The Average Social Networking user belongs to at least 3 networking sites
- Upcoming Social Networking sites include: iMeem, FaceBox, 43 Things, Multiply and Vox
- Categorical sites such as Music, Ticketing, Apparel, Video Games and Auctions are receiving the most benefit from MySpace in terms of upstream traffic.

Photo Hosting

- PhotoBucket is the top photo hosting site and has an 8X greater share than 2nd place ImageShack
- The average user session is > 10 min
- Photo sites received 30% of their upstream traffic from MySpace

- Flickr's visits are up 49% from Mar-Sept 2006
- 35% of traffic is from Search (majority of it is non branded traffic)
- Flickr actually has a much older demographic than PhotoBucket

Video

- YouTube has grown 500% this year
- According to HitWise, YouTube is the 17th most popular site last week
- YouTube has a greater share in online video than MySpace's Video, Google Video, Yahoo Video and MetaCafe
- MetaCafe has grown 133% in the last year
- 3.6% of YouTube's downstream traffic goes to television sites such as Cartoons, News, Sports and Music

Check out the HitWise Blog at: http://www.ilovedata.com