I was pretty impressed with Eric Peterson’s last post on Web Analytics is Recession Proof?

Peterson made a good argument that we have to work harder to show value with the tools we have - even if we have to do it on our own time, and even if we’re not directly asked for it (see below):

“…My advice to to step-up and find the real value in your data, even if you have to conduct the analysis on your own in the wee hours. It’s not as if you can just stop generating reports (tempting as that may sound) but if you’re a good analyst, taking the time to figure out where the real opportunities to increase revenue are is the work you want to be doing anyway. Taking the initiative to make data-powered recommendations and presenting them is a good way to demonstrate your skills and commitment to the business (but don’t stop doing the job you’re being paid to do!)”

Interestingly, Eric has made a determination that

” …. Despite the conventional wisdom that dictates that brilliant analysts are safe when times are tough, I am getting more and more calls from brilliant analysts who are being laid off or being offered severance packages to walk away.”

“…. What if the folks you work for who profess a great love for data-driven decision making are really HIPPOs in their heart and when the real bloodletting begins are just as likely to look for savings in areas that can be easily cut (human resources, for example) as opposed to those that would require breaking contracts?”

Well, I’ve been doing this all along - almost any report can be made better.   Eric also quotes Dave Rhee, who is one of the moderators of the Web Analytics Association Web Analytics Message Board in saying…

“…My friend W. David Rhee just published a great response about the relationship between web analytics, sales, and marketing in a down economy.  To paraphrase Dave, if the bosses begin to panic, you don’t want to be in a situation where you appear to be an expendable marketing cost that can be cut.  It is far better to be focusing your analytical efforts on how the organization can be increasing profits, even if you have to fight to spend more time conducting analysis and less time generating reports.”

I want to add to this by seconding Dave’s point, let’s get our employers the amunation to make more money in this challanging envirnment rather than cutting costs.

In fact, I’m not really sure anything ought to be cut back in this “challanging economic enviornment” as much as it needs to be restructured.  In fact, there’s a strong argument to spend more .,.. but on the right things that implemented in the right way.

Anyway, there’s a lot more in Web Analytics is Recession Proof? than I covered, so it’s worth a close read.

Have to admit, I’ve had not the best weekend - I guess the world is not in the best shape, either, judging from Jeff Jarvis’s post on ‘A fundamental reboot’ which is a rare glimpse in the goings on of the Global Elite - that regularly meets at Davos, Daubi, and various places to discuss the future of the world and how they can “modulate” it (perhaps, controlling it’s direction).

It’s the kind of meeting we rarely get invited to, and I’m glad Jeff Jarvis does get invited - so we can know what the Global Elite are thinking, and now openly admitting, at least, among themselves.

Here’s the view, by the way, from Jeff Jarvis’s hotel room in Dubai. Ha, ha, ha … looks like another world …. too bad they don’t do their “economic planning” in the real world… go to some “exotic” retreat to do it.

According to  Jeff Jarvis,  some of the members admitted (at the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils meeting in Dubai) they messed up, big time on the state of the World Economy and it’s growth was “unsustainable”. Jarvis disagrees, but then again, he’s in Daubi, and part of the group, so, in a way, you’d not expect  him to fault the group that is hosting him:

” …Now some may say — as someone from OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) did here — that WEF, or its members, have been more a part of the problem than the solution. I don’t know about that. At least we can say that WEF has not been equipped to act quickly enough to forestall those crisis in food and credit. So it seems that this meeting is an attempt to respond to that, to set agendas more than spot them.”

It was also said, the WEF knows they’re all “in it” together and they are beginning to talk about Global Government but calling it Global Governance :

“…The need for global governance (not global government, they were careful to point out).”

“…The governance group argued that world trade works because of global governance but finance is broken because it does not. They said that this will require some relinquishment of sovereignty.”

All I can say, is ha, ha, ha … the are beginning to talk World Government - and look, given how the world financial system is collapsing  - it may end up being neccessary - even though these are the same groups that, essentially, brought it about - and they’re kinda of … admitting it.

“… The outlook for the global economy is the worst that many of us have seen in our lives,” she said. “There is no country, there is no industry that will be completely immune…. The current crisis is rooted in global macroeconomic imbalances. We are in this together.” This, she said, was “a problem of risk management. No one did a good job.” There was excessive risk taking and leverage. In that, she included not only the industry and governments but media and households. “It has undermined the perceived advantage of open capital markets and at the extreme has even questioned the value of capitalism today.”

Well … now the Global Elite are saying it’s all our faults (… in media and households) though, I would think, the greatest fault ought to be on the leaders of the various countries - that set behavior, by their example - which is why American’s voted Democratic this time.

“…Mobility. The governance group said that problems cross borders without passports but we expect solutions to move with passports. The economic development group urged a “global system of global migration” but admitted that with unemployment soaring, it’s not the time to push this; they suggested instead working it out quietly (that’s not very transparent).”

Ok, they are thinking about how to slowly control who goes and works,  where  - but I was struck by a few of the solutions being proposed:

“…Transparency of information is not enough. There needs to be more synthesis and analysis in the aggregate.” (And, no, I don’t know what that means.)

“…..Freedom of speech. Too little was said about that except whispers about taking on the topic in a nation that does not value and protect speech.  At least someone from the entertainment group — yes, frivolous entertainment — said that freedom of speech is essential so people will be able to tell their stories and understand each other better. Amen. I wish that had come as a strong statement from the internet and media groups as well. Show biz shamed us.

But going back to “…Transparency of information is not enough. There needs to be more synthesis and analysis in the aggregate.” really speaks to Analytics, and possibly, Web Analytics, depending on how sites are tagged.

I wrote about Change.Gov on Friday, it’s being tagged and tracked  by Google Analytics, according to dylanlewis.

And I thought “….“man,would I love to do segmentation analysis on Change.gov ongoing. A dream job!”   But what if we expanded that - and started to really create views of the data that come from various countries - and institutional sites - with the idea of finding wisdom out of it.

I guess, that’s my birthday wish - and a good one - it’s not about control - it about insight.

The Global Elite blew it - they know it - but the problem is - much of what they want to put in place to fix the World Economy, is actually going to be painful - you’ve got to wonder if the World Government can be good if they don’t actually look at data - if they don’t see what’s going on - and they they create the mess we’re in.

So, again, my birthday wish - that I get a chance to do something in this area - to learning how to take all this data we’re collecting, and use it for wisdom and better and fairer governance.

Now that Barack Obama is President Elect of the United States, he and Vice President Elect, Joe Biden, set up CHANGE.GOV to allow for a 2 way communication between our newly elected governent and us.

And CHANGE.GOV has Google Analytics tracking codes, meaning all this “data” on site activity and interests will be available for analysis and insight using Google Analytics Segmentation, Custom Reporting and Motion Charting.

Combined with other sets of data, the 44th President, and his Administration, will have the best feedback and insight of any leader, perhaps ever.

Especially if the New Administration hires the right kind of Web Analysts that can take that data and provide Wisdom from it.

It’s tempting to think what kinds of insights will come out of melding Qualtative Data, taken from questions on the site, with Web Data, Census Data, GeoDemographics Data, Audience Panel data, not employed for personal profit - but for Public Good.

A Dream Job …. hmm.

Last week, while I was at Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Alexandra, VA, Avinash Kaushik presented the new features of Google Analytics, see Google Analytics Enhancements - Avanish Kaushik (which I have hardly played with yet) and it’s just one more nail in vender oriented Web Analytics - the answer is no one “owns” the data anymore - or, should I say ….. Google owns it all…. ha, ha, ha.

Read about it in The Google Analytics update: Thoughts and Implications by Eric T. Peterson in Web Analytics Demystified blog.

Here’s a portion of Eric’s post where he talks about the motion chart, above, and what it means to the high end vendors who will find it harder and harder to get new contracts or keep the one’s they have.

Google Analytics, adding missing functionality like segmentation, customization, and data export functionality given the associated costs and the fact that Google Analytics already dominates the web analytics landscape with an over 65% marketshare across all sites with tag-based analytics deployed.”

Except it appears that nobody told Google this. Or, if they did, Google didn’t listen.

Now don’t get me wrong, the new features are not totally perfect.  The segmentation feature which is receiving the most hype within the web analytics community is not true visitor-level segmentation but rather session-based segmentation which severely limits an experienced practitioner’s ability to drill-down into the data. But I suppose this is a perfect example of “you get what you pay for” and since we’re not paying having multidimensional session-level segmentation that can be immediately applied to all historical data is pretty sweet.

On the upside, I was actually pretty surprised about Motion Charts which to me seemed like a tchotchky but after playing with it for just a little bit I’m inclined to agree with Yahoo’s Dennis Mortensen that Motion Charts have potential. I especially like the “Link to Chart” option that seems to allow us to share the visualizations we create with other Google Analytics users.

Here’s a Motion Chart that I’m rather enjoying the use of: Keywords by goal conversion rate by bounce rate sized by Percent New Visits colored uniquely with trails turned on.

But here’s my point - regardless of weather Google is being “Good” or “Evil”,  or of what it’s ultimately going to do with all this data - the issue is this …. if Omniture, Coremetrics and WebTrends don’t add enough value to the data, they’ll become obsolete, I’d say - within 3 years.

Yes, Google now has signaled they have the High End Vendors of Web Analytics in their sight.

But aren’t we just talking about no one “owning the data” anymore?   After all, isn’t everything going into the “Cloud” pretty soon?   Who really owns anything, anymore?

The value of what we offer is the life we bring to it - not the acquisition of the data, not even the presentation of it - but the “intelligence” we produce from it.

So here’s how I see it.

Water.  Bottled Water.  And yes, some people like Anil Dash think Bottled Water is a scam -  but really, it water (data) is really …. free … then it’s how it’s presented that we’re paying for …. attributes of Branding that we value.

Except, Branding is related to “demonstrative value” - so ….. it’s not the data, itself, that we should be paying for (hell, Google is giving it all away to us for free … why should we go and pay a ton of money to big vendors … even companies like ComScore … which I personally feel should not be charging separately for each view of the data, when it’s the same data we’re looking at, that we already bought - same thing for the Web Analytics Vendors.

Pretty much, the age of vendors like WebTrends, Omniture, Coremetrics, is slowly setting - or should I say … quickly setting, much like the age of Elves in the Lord of the Rings - (towards the age of Man?).

Getting back to what Eric T. Peterson is saying (saw him last week at Emetrics, by the way, along with Avinash):

Especially in this uncertain economy, if I have to choose between spending between $20K to $50K on an entry-level SiteCatalyst/Coremetrics/WebTrends/Unica/Nedstat deployment or spending nothing to explore the use of segmentation, report customization, and Motion Charts while waiting for someone like DataLinks to port their application to the Google Analytics APIs so you can spend $995 to build totally customized key performance indicator reports in Excel … well, as a small business owner the choice is pretty clear.

WebTrends recent announcement about moving increasingly into BI, essentially as middleware between web data and traditional business analysis applications, is typical of the response I expect we’re going to see from the for-fee vendors. Some type of move up-market to continue to justify the expense of data collection, which will further limit opportunities for growth since I expect the end-user market to continue to mature at a much slower pace than the available technology set.

I mean, why pay for data collection and storage if Google and Yahoo are going to give it away? Especially in the context of those APIs and the low-cost applications we’ll inevitably see, I suspect the management teams at Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Unica, and Nedstat are looking suspiciously at their Q4 and Q1 2009 projections for SMB sales and global expansion trying to figure out exactly how much free web analytics will ultimately impact the business.

Eric ends his post by re-saying all he said, but in bullet points - and here’s the parts that most struck me:

“…I still don’t think Google Analytics is appropriate for advanced practitioners, at least not as a system of record, but the number of truly advanced practitioners working out there today is still relatively small;

• I think the Data Export APIs are the most exciting aspect of this announcement and I’m looking forward to all the cool, new applications that will inevitably spring up based on these APIs;
• I think that Google has sucked the wind out of Yahoo’s sails, whether they intended to or not, but I still don’t think that Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics are directly competitive;
• I think the vendor folks most impacted by this announcement are the teams responsible for SMB sales, the expansion into Europe and Asia, and anyone selling web analytics solutions at a sub-$50K price point;
• I expect the for-fee vendors to respond to Google Analytics not by picking on the features (remember: voters don’t like negative campaigning!) but rather by working to more aggressively take their existing suites and platforms up-market;
• I don’t expect this announcement to be a death blow to anyone. Rather it serves as yet another reinforcement of the inevitable commoditization of the web analytics data collection market and a wake-up call to any company with a ten-year plan to continue to make money counting page views.

So … that means in a couple of years, the big three (WebTrends, Coremetrics and Omniture ……) … bye … they ‘re going to have a really hard time.

But again, if they’re charging for features that … have become like “water” then why should we drink their water when we can get the same features, almost, for free?

I think I need to spend a few days really playing with Google Analytics now … I have no excuse …. I asked Avinish and the Google Analytics team for these improvements and they have delivered.

Now, it’s time for me to do the same.

It’s cold and chilly in NYC tonight; much of the day it rained and drizzled and I felt I was on the top of a 39 floor mountain looking down into the rainy fog, below, from my midtown office space.

Today was interesting for a number of reasons including a few good posts on Google Analytics new visualization features and a nice review of motion charts by Dennis in VisualRevenue, where he said that charting more than 3 dimensions requires more complex charting, and that such charting is much more than eye candy.

I also saw that NuConomy, whose CEO I interviewed here, last May, just entered into a public beta today, and NuConomy has some pretty unique visualizations.

And then I did some work, on my own, using Comscore Local Market reporting for a select group of DMA’s and websites, and overlayed unique visitors by DMA with internal data on job postings (by employers) and Resumes posted (by Job Seekers).

I saw some very interesting patterns once I overlayed the data, visualizing data in a way making sense to me.

It is all about traffic, but my visualization showed some DMA’s with less than expected visitors and resumes posted.

It got me thinking on how I may never have noticed the relationships between data points had I not had a hunch about it. I even figured out an “effectiveness metric” base on what percentage of traffic applied for a job during a session.

And it all comes back to visualization, which is why I’m an artist.

For me, it’s all about seeing relationships between data, and I was exhilirated as I had time to think this through.

Actually, there’s one more thing I’m adding (12 hours later) and I thought about it last week - in an organization, even a small one, but certainly in most large ones, there’s a lot of information lying around that only the people who use it regularly know about.   That’s a big challenge for a Web Analysts - because we create meaning in our work, largly by overlaying information.

But a lot of times ….. too often ….. we don’t have the right information (and even if we have it - it’s not in the right form or from the right source).    Therefore, I think it’s a top priority to create a map of every tool and every bit of information that exists in a company and who owns it (and uses it).   It starts with an audit - but it should be a database that you can search on, and it will will tell you the owner and users.

I’ve seen versions of tools at IBM that have some of this - but they were not created for the purposes I am talking about - it was more done for accountability, and only covered certain kinds of ownership - what I’m talking about is a map of all the knowledge in the organization - and who has it and uses it.

And I don’t see that anywhere.

Avinash Kaushik announced new enhancements to Google Analytics including customized segmentation and customized reporting - a blow to counter Yahoo Analytics.

I saw some pretty interesting scatter graphs and advanced reporting that Avanish feels will result in the death of standard reporting.

We wanted to bring something very complex and make it simple.

And finally, Google Analytics now has a custom API. In fact, adSense is also part of Google Analytics reports.

I noticed some changes in Google Analytics late last night, but had not explored any if the enhancements Avinash mentioned.

Btw, as a subnote to this post, I just found out that I won’t be attending LeWeb3 08 in Paris this December. I guess they have become ultra exclusive, of late. Too bad.

Was not really sure I would attend, but LeWeb has decided to cast themselves as a “premium” conference even though, essentially, it’s more if a networking event, that just happens to be in Paris.

I walked into Justin Cultroni teaching Google Conversion University and he’s fantastic as an instructor and extremely knowledgeable on analytics and Google Analytics, in particular.

I walked in to the Goals, Funnels, Ecommerence and Site Search and I got a few points cleared up I didn’t know about, including how to set up goals properly, using head matching, issues with session ids, how to set up site search and the way funnels work (a clearly defined process).

My sense is that much of the work of web analytics is to match up the way a business works with the way a particular data analytics platform needs to have the data structured. In a way, web analysts are the “glue” that ties together Marketing, IT, and the analytics collection platforms.

True, analysts provide insight into the data collected, and that is mainly the way I look at Web Analytics, but the other side of the house is that Web Analytics is the glue for matching up the different parts of your organization, in a way that is often overlooked.

I also sat in on Justin as he covered Website Optimzer, Webmaster Tools, Ad Planner, which was pretty farm good.

Google Ad Planner can be used as competitive intelligence tool much as AdCenter is.

The data comes from the behavior of the top 3000 sites, according to someone in the room that works for Google and in Google Ad Planner.

You have to sign up for the beta,you don’t have to even run a campaign with it, or you can figure out what ads to run and for whom.

Again, forgive my spelling and grammer, I am typing this on the IPhone.

Well… I told ya so in Google Entering In Game Advertising? …. almost two years ago the sale of AdScape to Google was announced (Google AdScape - Gooble buys AdScape for 24 Million) - and, that once Google bought AdScape, they’d eventually run AdWords and AdSense in our online games, the one’s our kids play and sometimes, the one’s we play.   Mashable has a post on it too, One More Place You’ll Find Google: Games

I don’t know that’s a bad thing - I mean, it was inevitable - but it also highlights that saturation of our attention - where can we go now where we’re not going to be “sold” to, or “advertised” at?  Church (ops, I don’t think they’re totally free of ads, either).  However, running Ads in Games has it’s own unique set of challenges that don’t have parallels in other forms of advertising media:

“… Casual games publishers can display video, image and text ads in their online offerings. They can also define placements “such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over,” according to the AdSense blog.

AdWords team members will help market in-game ad space to relevant advertisers — but publishers can use ad filters to yank ads they find inappropriate.

Getting the Ad to work with the Games they’re shown in, so as not to be totally a detractor, will be interesting - I can see how it can be done - but I’m wondering what a typical conversation of a Google Sales Rep selling these In Game Units are going to sound like.  Oh well, I’m sure we’ll hear that, soon enough.

Anyway - here’s what Google AdSense for Games looks like and here’s the writeup in MarketingVox about the launch of Google AdSense for Games.

And here’s a movie where the Ads appear, at :50 seconds in.

BTW, soon enough, you’ll see the reports on In Game Ads in Google Analytics, just like Radio and TV Ads are showing up, another prediction of mine from early 2007 - I was just about two years early.

Incidentally, it’s interesting that 3D Worlds wasn’t added, Code4Software’s  Ad-Soft offering is the closest thing to what Google is offering, but for Virtual Worlds.

Better to be early ….  than late, especially on predictions.

It’s been eagerly awaited for several months now, and I admit, I knew something was about to be announced on Monday night when I spoke with Dennis Mortensen while at SMX East, here in New York. I wasn’t quite sure what was going to be announced, but I had my suspecions, and this was it.  According to Dennis, in his VisualRevenue Blog -  IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Yea! Now lets get on and take a look at what Yahoo! Analytics is going to be offering, under the covers, so to speak.  So what is Yahoo! Analytics offering that I think is useful or new above what anyone else is offering, at the price (free):

Real Time Segmentation - not offered by any other free platform - up till now you had to pay a lot to get the ability to segment data - and that’s what makes Analytics powerful.  Today, it’s almost a must have,  if your going to try to answer any serious marketing question - to be able to segment the data.

There’s also a Live Cost Analysis report that may be able to be morphed into something else - and appears to offer a capability Google Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics main competitor, doesn’t yet offer (see below):

Right now, I don’t think Google gives you any “non-Google” campaign data - up till now, maybe they didn’t need to.  I bet that decision is being reconsidered now.

Merchandise Reporting - Dennis mentioned, and I’ve known this for a while, that Yahoo! Analytics, be default, supports Yahoo! Store, Yahoo! Developers (Y!OS) and Yahoo! Head Advertisers (Microsites).  Yahoo! had the Yahoo! Stores for a while, and while they were often awful to optimize for SEO/SEM, they were often a great place to create an online store (if you didn’t get too ensnared with the Yahoo! Store template limitations) - but you could not get any kind of decent Analytics from the Yahoo! Store, last I heard - and now you can.   Google can’t compete here, because it doesn’t have stores  - that’s one place Google never went.

Getting the Analytics down to the SKU level - that comes out of the box now - you have a Yahoo! Store, you get the full support of Yahoo! Analytics.  Impressive.

Scenario Analysis - Many higher end platforms have Scenario Analysis - Google Analytics doesn’t have it - but you can set up something similar with Goals, still, this looks better than what GA offers.

Path Analysis - you can continue to drill down, just as you can in CoreMetrics - Google Analytics does not support this functionality today.

The Email Alerts (Marketing Workflow Management) are well beyond what Google offers today, though Coremetrics, for example, does provide this, as I recall, when I worked with it.   You can monitor events and send an email out when a threshold is reached.

You can read more about Yahoo! Analytics on VisualRevenue

IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics

Was quoted by Valeria Maltoni on How to Measure Attention recently; it’s interesting how and idea grows, takes flight, and evolves.

As I sat in at a DoubleClick vendor session today at SMX East about Spotlight tags and how they could be used to track cross channel conversons (and have been, for the last 10 years, or so) I keyed into Valeria’s response to a reader where she writes:

“…Google tracks a lot of movement online. It would be fascinating to see how and if the information converges between Analytics for blogs, DoubleClick for ads, gmail, maps, and all sorts of other products they have. I had a demo of the maps capabilities at a recent conference and was blown away at the interactivity one can build in 3D.”

Google, via DoubleClick would be able to tell that an visitor who came to a site (cars.com) and did a site search and then came back again and did another, more detailed search, for example, according to Valeria, the person would have engaged with the site:

“….if the same searcher came to Cars.com and put in the search “new sedans” then later, came back and put in the query “reviews of new silver sedans” that searcher is engaged, she is definitely paying attention with an action in mind.”

I suspect, and I may be wrong here, that DoubleClick handles what happens to a visitor till they arrive at the landing page (in this case, the site search page) and then, site analytics, such as Google Analytics, tracks past this point to the final destination pages on the site.  If so, there may be a missing link between what DoubleClick picks up and what Google Analytics sees - and if we had that gap bridged, we’d be able to do, for sure, what Valeria suggests.

Getting back to the physical representation of “attention”, there’s only on platform that actually shows it much the way I suggested, only it does it for sites, not keywords (hey, that’s an idea, maybe Compete.com should adapt the idea they apply to sites and make it work for keyword phases).

Compete.com considers the measure of attention as  “….all the time we collectively spend online and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on a given site.“   But what if we changed that definition to “…all the time visitors collectively spent on a website and then determined how much time was spent on a given keyword phrase“. Then we might have something.  Unfortunately, we can’t do it via visitor yet - but Google Analytics, were it to use the DoubleClick data, depending on how the data from DoubleClick is used, could track individuals coming to my site, searching and then searching again.   I’ll do the next best thing and talk about site behavior as a whole.

So…let me try it - just playing around - my site, www.webmetricsguru.com had 5,964 visits last month (September 08) at an average visit length of 45 seconds per visit.  Taking 5964 * 45 = 268360 seconds were spent on my site, in total, by all visitors in September.

Taking the keyword “Radian6″ as my start point with 15 visits last month and an average visit length to my site of 31 seconds = 15 *31 = 465 seconds.

So, what percentage of all the time spent on my site last month was spent on the keyword “Radian6″?  (465/268360 = 0.173%)

So, if we wanted to calculate “attention” for a keyword phase (which is part of what Valeria is talking about) we’d take that same formula and apply it to that same keyword, but in August, July, June, May, and then make a chart, for example, and see if the slope of that attention is up, or not.

August = (188/92870 = 0.202%)

September = (465/268360 = 0.173%)

There wasn’t much activity in August and July and June haven’t been tracked this way, so according to this example, the attention might be going down for that term.

Also, even at this level, Google Analytics does not show you other keywords used as a result of “radian6″, though it seems that data ought to be pull able.

So… we can’t actually go all the way with this example Valeria Maltoni came up with because we’d need additional tracking.