I don't know if it's the Yahoo! Searchlight awards that's more funny, or how Webanalyticsbook, with his strikeouts and interesting perceptions that makes me laugh - and that's good for a Friday afternoon.
"….Several agencies presented their campaigns which included Sprint, Special K (Kellogs), Lexus LS and Chase bank. I don’t want to mention
boringdetails here, but in regards of webanalytics, I was astonished how little knowledge these agencies had. The high-profile panelists from Businessweek, Imedia, Adweek and Sterling Market Intelligence asked the advertisers detailed questions about the campaigns and most of the webanalytics related answers were extremly vague."
With the lousy PPC conversion rates many of these sites get …. they probably want to be vague on the analytics.
"….All agencies showed their success stories with impressive Yahoo buzz numbers , but except winner Avenue A/Razorfish (Chase campaign) nobody came up with meaningful webanalytics data. Some agencies got even ‘busted’ when the penalists wanted to know more details about A/B testing, customized landing pages, SEO and optimization methods."
I'm not surprised.
"…After the event I was asking one of the presenter for more information about their tracking methods and I was absolutely shocked when he told me that their PPC bidding tool (with a few million $ budget) wasn’t merged with webanalytics data."
That's more typical than not - Google Analytics makes in easier to connect the dots with AdWords and Google Analytics - but most of the other platforms require re-tagging the PPC URLs so they can be differentiated from organic or campaign results - and while it's not that big a deal - it can be for some.
