Posted by Marshall on February 01, 2007 |
Link It
Thanks to Google Alerts - I feel plugged in when my name appears somewhere on the Web - almost as quickly as it happens, I know about it.
Anyway, perhaps in response to Eric T. Peterson's question of "what ever happened to Avinash's List" of the Top 10 Web Analytics blogs for each month, Avinash produced one of his lists for January 2007 and Webmetricsguru.com is number 3 on the list.
Avinash seems to be using Technorati Rank as the way to distinguish the ranking of each blog in the list. Don't have much more to say about it; glad Avinash Kaushik is continuing (because he's the only one I know who's doing this).
Posted by Marshall on January 08, 2007 |
Link It
Avinash wrote a really good post on how to use / implement JavaScript tags and one of the things that stuck me was this:
"……In many web analytics implementations on the web you’ll see the tag right at top or in the header or before the <body> tag. This is sub optimal. Your javascript tag should go as close to the </body> tag as possible. The simple reason for this is that the tag should be the last thing to load on the page. In case your analytics server is slow in responding, or has simply died (less likely), then at least the webpage and the content will load quickly. "
That's interesting - in one implementation that I'm involved with, we're thinking of putting the JavaScript tags in the header / Masthead. It's not my idea….BTW. Makes sense though - you don't want to slow down a page loading because the web analytics server is down - that's a really good point.
Also, Avinash talks about Flash Tracking (one of my favorite subjects)
"…Tracking rich web experiences requires a lot of deliberate planning and implementation up front before anything gets released to ensure that via you web analytics tool or via a custom solution you are able to track some semblance of success. ."
I can tell you personally, tracking Flash is difficult to do … especially in a publishing environment (which is where it's often needed the most); and where work is being done on the page right up to the time of publishing.
More often than not, the people working on the web page and on the copy are totally different than the Web Analyst (which is good because if we were building pages we'd have no time for analysis).
Posted by Marshall on January 04, 2007 |
Link It
Avinash Kaushik asked me for a list of free tools I like a couple of months back for a blog post on Occam's Razor and I pretty much gave him the list I published at Big Green Blog recently.
The post went live tonight and I read it - it's FANTASTIC - and I'm enjoying reading how Avanish uses those tools. I use all those tools often - Avanish did a better job explaining the Microsoft AdLab tools for Demographic Prediction could be used than I have.
I'm glad Avanish is writing a book on Web Analytics - it's going to be quite entertaining - I hope he puts some of this stuff in the new book. The point of his post on Five Free “Advanced” Web Analytics Examples: Look Outside, Think Different. which I'm sure is going to get DIGGED - use other tools (free one's in this case) beyond your site analytics to gather insight.
One thing I'd add to Kaushik's description of Google AdWords Keyword Expansion, near the end of the post - I use the somewhat differently. Google's Keyword Research tool is one of the best semantic analysis extraction tools and it's free. Put in a URL and the tool will tell you what it thinks the page or site is about - it will also give you the other data Avinash talks about in the post.
Often, I've used the keyword data from this tool in Competitive Analysis - comparing the keyword phrases of sites that are competing to find a common set of keywords that I can run a ranking report against - and thereby decide which competitor is doing better for those keywords.
It's a great post , I think it's one of his best, and I'm glad Avinash got around to posting it now.
