I was at this event (though Eric for got to mention it in the post) Web Analytics Wednesday San Francisco Metrics and KPIs which Eric Peterson posted on Web Analytics Demystfied- and had no idea the WAW drew as many people as it did or cost as much as it did.

I didn't end up staying that long - but it was fun hanging out with everyone - it was a very crowded Web Analytics Wednesday (which was actually on a Tuesday) and I thought, overall, the WAW's have been getting better in terms of both content and attendance.

I also found Emetrics Marketing Optimization summit very intense and packed with information and meeting this week - and now it's time to take a break and get ready for the next one (meeting, that is). 

By the way, I've been invited to attend the Social Media Roundtable in Toronto on May 20th - and I'm going to try to attend (Pro PR’s Joe Thornley on the Toronto Social Media Scene, Measurement).

Here's a video that explains what the Roundtable is … and why it would be valuable to attend.

I've been San Francisco since last Sunday and my days are full - it's hard to post anything because I'm spending most of my time talking to other people attending Emetrics.

However, I hosted a dinner last night for the Social Media Committee that I direct at the Web Analytics Association - only a few members were present (have over 70 members); but, we had a great time - he's some footage from the dinner:

I meant to post this earlier - just incase some of my readers are in San Francisco next weekend (and attending Emetrics Summit is not actually required for all of what's listed below) - here's some information you might want to keep track of.

I'll be on the 4:30PM - 6:00PM Panel, by the way:

WAA Panel: Web Analytics vs. Audience Measurement & the WAA's Raucous Caucus Reception

 

Dear WAA Members:

Looking for a rowdy good time of extraordinary measure?

Join fellow members and web analytics professionals from around the world for the Panel Discussion, followed by WAA’s fun-filled Raucous Caucus and Networking Reception. Learn more about:

• Panel Discussion: The Role of the Web Marketer and Analyst versus How We Use Online Advertising Tools and Audience Measurement Data
• WAA’s vision for the future and the exciting opportunities coming in the year ahead
• How you can benefit more from your WAA membership
• Opportunities to get involved and make an impact in this dynamic industry

When: Sunday, May 4
(Immediately following the WAA Base Camp and the evening prior to the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit)

Where: Palace Hotel, Gold Ballroom
2 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA

Time 4:30 - 6:00 pm, WAA Panel: Web Analytics vs. Audience Measurement
6:00 - 7:30 pm, Raucous Caucus Reception

I had dinner with Gary Angel, his wife and daughters before returning to NYC Friday morning, and Gary also drove me to airport - and we discussed Emetrics on the way over to catch my plane. 

I left Gary with a thought about a problem I'm seeing with large sites that replicate their structure across several countries - what I've found is that countries like China, Japan, Korea, India, have very different needs, from a task based navigation standpoint, than G9 (US and Europe, mostly). I wanted to know how Gary would solve that problem (if it's a problem at all).  The large savings in replicating task based navigation may be cut down by the lack of applicability to the local country audience and their needs.  If anyone can figure out the right approach to this problem, Gary Angel can.   And then I got on the my Jet Blue flight back to NYC and slept the whole way - but it took me till tonight to recover fully from the activity this week generated - which engaged all my energy on many levels.

Gary wrote up his own impression of Emetrics here.

Referring to the combining of Functionalism (Gary came up with this system) and Persuasion Architecture (Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg) Gary had this to say:

"….I’d love to see the two approaches seriously combined – with Functionalism providing a measurement overlay and the Persuasion Architecture providing a creative overlay on the same site. It seems to me that combining the two would be deeply interesting and truly state of the art in the world of web analytics and marketing!"

I was impressed with Functionalism and having seen Persuasion Architecture over at Future Now offices in Brooklyn, recently, I think they could both be merged.

Earlier this week Gary blogged on Emetrics while it was still going on:

"..What’s the biggest news out of eMetrics? Is it the new version of Google Analytics or the fact that Eric Peterson is striking out on his own and setting up a strategic web analytics consultancy? For once, I’ll agree with Avinash’s 90/10 rule and pick the people side of the equation."

But here's the gem - the thing I relate most to:

"…Frankly, I prefer to keep our focus on being the best in world at deep-dive analysis. What makes a great analyst isn’t what makes a great process consultant."

Gary Angel brought up a point that was frank and bold about Peterson's announcement:

"..Honestly, when I heard the news from Eric, my biggest reaction was "Damn – why don’t you come work with us!" Sadly, I couldn’t talk him into it. I wish he had, and I hope we get a chance to work together going forward! Because while companies need expertise like ours, I’m realistic enough to know that they sometimes need other things as well. Frankly, I prefer to keep our focus on being the best in world at deep-dive analysis. What makes a great analyst isn’t what makes a great process consultant.

So is Eric competition to Semphonic? In a way he certainly is. But this is a big space with lots of room and lots of different needs and not anybody who’s really all that big. I think Eric has been and will be good for this space. Making it easier for companies to understand and use the value that only companies like Semphonic can deliver will help, not harm us. Does a rising tide really raise every boat? I suppose it might make it too rough for some. But if we do our job well, then I think having Eric driving businesses to be more serious and more committed to web analytics process will be all to the good. "

It's an open question how many analysts can go out and be independent consultants - like Avinash just did.  However, Avinash, while he did strike out on his own - has an office in the GooglePlex (wish he invited me over there to take a look).  I think Eric Peterson, because of his name, writings and industry connections, will be sought after.  But I'm not so sure that this path is right for everyone in the field.  Avinash and Eric are very well known, that's partly why it works … at least, that's my opinion.

Finally, Gary blogged about the Google Analytics announcement - the interface update was kinda expected, and needed:

"…Not that Google’s release isn’t pretty big news. If Google was any other vendor, a release like this wouldn’t cause a ripple. But it’s Google and it’s free. And the growing threat of free software at the lower end of the market puts enormous pressure on the mid-range solutions and at least some pressure on the high-end solutions. Till now, I really wouldn’t have recommended GA to any company that actually wanted web analytics (as opposed to traffic reporting – in fact, I wouldn’t have recommended it even if you wanted convenient traffic reporting). The tool was basically unusable for serious work. Has that changed? To be honest, I don’t really know. Once we get a chance to work with it a bit I’ll have a better opinion. They certainly addressed some of the biggest weaknesses in the product – which can only be bad news for all the other vendors. Unless somebody can really trump GA in terms of usability, it’s beginning to look like there are only two options for vendors – play at the high end of the market or die."

I don't think it's changed, Gary.  Google Analytics is a great, free tool, but for serious work on large sites, it doesn't cut it and probably never will.  The main limitation of GA is the inability to compare more than one thing to another - whereas higher end analytics does give you the ability to make custom segmentation.

However, 99% of sites don't need custom segmentation - and that's the audience Google Analytics is for.  

I suppose it does not hurt to bring up Eric Peterson's study again, and say that many companies, who are not process oriented, will fall on free tools and end up with ad-hoc reports that don't really move the business forward … and very often, what these companies will use is Google Analytics - because it's free and it's powerful - if you don't need custom segmentation.

At the end of the day, Google Analytics is best used in conjunction with more powerful analytics platforms - and I have heard this - which are based to costs per pageview - Google Analytics can cut down the cost for ownership by collecting some metrics that are not dependant on segmentation which is a win-win for everyone.

This is my first post to synthesize the information I listened to or read about at Emetrics Summit, earlier this week in San Francisco:

I sat in on Alex Langshur's session - Measuring ROI when you don't sell on May 7th, and noticed a lot of the analysis was based on datamining site search query logs (which I've done at IBM and for my own clients, outside IBM). The presentation is not online yet but there's other case studies on Langshur's site.

For example - Analyzing Intent (aka alignment of intent) is Search Analytics where you can compare keywords by category over time to see what went up / down, as well as seasonal variations.  

However, Rich Wiggins and Lou Rosenfeld presented Listening to the Search Box: Search Analytics in a Nutshell, pretty much at the same time Langshur was presenting (in another suite). and the content of both presentations overlapped, judging from the copies I have in the Emetrics Presentation Handbook.  Rosenfeld noted, and I have noted the same in my own experience, that:

• ~45% of search referral (from Search Engines) are variants of a company's name.  This is certainly true of Branded businesses, like the Architects I have dealt with, including the one Architect client I still have, www.Mascord.com.
• There's a lot of Long Tail data in local search queries

Rosenfeld suggested that you data-mine search query logs and map much of your long tail data to popular pages in your site that you think go with the query.  The problem with that … you need special tools to do it as the massive amount of long tail data makes doing this manually way too tedious for humans to do (and be sane for long) - I'm talking about massive amounts of queries where there are only one or two searches internally on that phase - and it's unique - meaning only one person executed that search.

Both presentations mirror what I heard at Search Engine Strategies last month, in NYC, where I spoke with someone who data-mines Search Query Logs to determine intent of Searchers and if the content of a site matches what people are searching for - and if not, changing or improving content in specific ways to increase customer satisfaction.

As Rosenfeld pointed out - there's often little time and few useful tools to parse Search Query Logs in order to generate reports - and that the work of analysis is both hard and often boring (because the right tools have not been developed - I firmly believe that).

My takeaway from both sessions (even though I only attended one of them - I have the material from both and familiarity with the subject) is that Site Search query logs don't get the attention they deserve in any of the organizations I have worked with and most companies don't realistically know what to do with the information - even if they were able to data-mine it, segment it, and match up the relevant pages.

I'd even go so far as to suggest vendor solutions that learn and match up the right pages (or create content on the fly out of XML data) over trying to manually determine what the right content on your site is for a query that was unique and executed one time for someone's specific need at the Long Tail.

In other words, for a large site, I think you'd need an automated tool with some human oversight - but doing it manually is almost unthinkable - based on the sheer volume of data that needs to be analyzed and remapped to the right pages.

I'm having some feedback from the last Emetrics Summit in San Francisco that I just returned from.  I was really resting today as I flew all night and needed to rest and process the information.  Here's one of the first nuggets of information and feedback - but I'm sure that I'll have many more over the next week or two.

OK, I attended Wednesday's  Ask The Guru Breakfast and asked a question about tracking multichannel marketing and the feedback I got was to stick with what we could measure; some of the things I want to track are not yet track able.  

True, but that's changing even as I write this - so maybe we'll be able to track across marketing channels - including offline channels, like billboards, more and more.  According to AzCentral.com:

 "…..Roel Vertegaal's Xuuk eyebox2 is a $999 portable device with a camera that monitors eye movements and automatically detects when you are looking at it from up to about 35 feet away. Until now, Vertegaal says, such eye-trackers have been ineffective beyond 2 feet, required people to remain stationary and cost more than $25,000.

"It can track interest for your advertisers so you can actually have a business model where you sell the ad by the eyeball," said Vertegaal, a professor at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.

The eyebox2 comes as ads increasingly appear on plasma display panels in shopping malls, restaurants and other public places. Although Internet ads can be measured by the number of hits on a Web site, it is much harder to assess the ads on plasma screens.

Vertegaal, who has been working on the technology since 1994, says advertisers can now accurately measure how much attention something receives, whether on a plasma panel, a billboard, or as the result of its placement on a supermarket shelf.

Whether a viewer actually makes a purchase is another matter.

Vertegaal said the eyebox2 is being used by advertisers in Britain, but not in the United States yet."

Well, here's the question I asked at the Guru Breakfast:

   Last Year, I posed a challenge to the Web Analytics Community  how can I measure the effect of marketing on the conversion rate of people attending movies.  Here's a brief description of one movie I saw and how I got convinced to go buy a ticket and watch the movie.

"… I see the trailer (of the movie) twice - but otherwise unaffected.  Then I see a billboard sign several days later and become aware of the movie.  I also see the banner ad on my laptop several times - and now I may actually see the movie simply as an example of the effect of Multi Channel Marketing. " 

How much weight should be given to each event that leads to the conversion - and would the conversion have happened if I had not been exposed to all the events I mentioned in my blog post?  Would the order of the events have made any difference?

Using Xuuk eyebox2 it may now be possible to count eyeballs on a sign.   While I don't think it would work with me seeing a billboard while in a speeding car or bus several feet away - Xuuk eyebox2 could work in a lot of other situations.

What I think is missing is creating a "session" that caries over several incidents of seeing marketing across different channels and attributing it to the same individual (seeing the ads); right now there's no easy way to do that.    Still, more and more is possible and it's not too much to say that in 5 or 10 years (maybe less), we'll be able to measure a campaign well across several channels, even one's like billboards, that we have not been able to do much with (maybe, just estimate number of eyeballs); the Xuuk eyebox2 can count eyeballs.

It will be interesting to ask my question again, in a year or two, and see what kind of reply I get back.  On Wednesday, none of the Gurus even wanted to go there, answer my question - maybe that won't be as true the next time I ask it.

Just to show you how packed with influentials - while I was at the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco was this week, I mentioned to someone, in passing, about webmetricsguru.com's rankings in Google for Spiderman 3, and the woman at Sony Pictures, Rachel Scotto, who does the Web Analytics for Sony Pictures, overheard me and asked me about the details. 

Yesterday, my blog was ranked #11 for "spiderman 3" on Google, out of 89,500,000 pages with that term in it; today it's at #19 but rankings will vary from time of day as the index size varies.

 SpiderMan 3 - May 8

There was a lot of coverage on SpiderMan 3 at Know More Media - it was actually my idea to do this over a year ago - have some of Know More Media's authors … www.webmetricsguru.com/2007/05/spiderman_3.html - 73k -

If you read the blog post (above) you'll get an idea of what I was thinking about in doing the post - and it seemed to work.   I've had this concept for the last 18 months but had not fully tested it.

Like I said, who needs SEO when you have the power of blog network and you know what to do with it.