SXSW from a Web Analyst Perspective

With the recent announcement from the SXSW Interactive Director to raise prices by 27% for early registration, I thought I would branch out a little bit from my usual posts and talk about what I thought about SXSW Interactive from a web analyst perspective. The reason that the Interactive Director gave for the price increase was the new price is competitive with other pure tech conferences. While SXSW also includes a music and film portions, the majority of the attendance is for the interactive portion and the price increases for music and film were not quite a steep. My personal thought for the price increase is to control the number of people that will attend the conference. There were rumors that SXSW was going to limit registration and while they did not limit registration, by raising the rates it has the same affect and if the same number of people attend as last year then SXSW will just make money. Now the question is, with the price increase or without the price increase, is it worth going to SXSW Interactive.

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What was the percentage of the page that was viewed?

In the years that I have spent in web analytics, one of the questions that I get is we are thinking about redesigning a certain page or creating a marketing promotional page on the site and we how far down the page did the users view of the page. My first answer is to recommend running a test on the page to see which design drives the most success. I usually then get a response back that they do not have a testing tool, the time, or the resources to run a test. After I stop crying from that response, I then say let me see what I can do. After doing a little digging to see what solution that I can find. I came up with a solution that will allow the teams to see how much of the page initially viewed and how much of the page was viewed in total. This solution will take the screen resolution of the users out of the equation to get the most accurate information possible. I then can create a classification file to create different groupings for the report, which include total % of page viewed and scrolling %. After I created the report, I showed the original report to the teams and explained each of the different views. For this report, you are actually going to need two variables (s.props) to take full advantage of the reporting: one to calculate how much of the page was viewed and one to capture the previous page the user viewed.

People, Process, and Technology?

It has been a little while since I wrote my last blog post and I thought it this was an appropriate topic to blog about. Some of you might recall Eric Peterson has done several presentations on this topic. This topic has also recently been mentioned on Twiiter. As I have mentioned from the beginning I am going to write about I am going to write about my personal experiences and this topic was a good topic to write about as I have started my new position. I am going to write about my experience with each of these with my various companies that I have worked. I am going to start with technology, then people, and finally process.

Merging Data from Different Sources

In my Year in Review post I mentioned that I was not going to focus on certain tools and focus more on my experiences that could be applied to different tools. In this post, I am going to cover a little bit of each. I am going to focus more on a specific web analytics tool and how to merge data from different sources to get a more holistic view of the visitor. My experience of merging data from different sources comes mainly from a media site perspective and that is what I am going to focus on. As some of you may know, Omniture allows you to use Data Sources to import information from another source into Omniture. That is one way to get an overall view of the customer. However, I am going to focus on option from Omniture that is not as widely known called ‘Data Feed.’ The data feed is a great option if you want to export your Omniture data into another tool to do more analysis.

Traffic Sources Reporting

I have been back for a little over a week from another great Omniture Summit and my fourth summit. I went over my notes from each of the sessions that I attended and some of the slides of the presentation that I could not attend. I am not going to write a full recap of the summit this year, as there are already a few of them out there that do a great job recapping the summit and some of the sessions. Some of the sessions during the summit covered different ways to track the traffic sources. For those who attended last year’s summit, you might remember the announcement of the Channel Manager plug-in. The Channel Manager plug-in is very similar to the Unified Sources VISTA Rule (USVR). The biggest difference between the two is the Channel Manager plug-in needs help from the consulting group and the Unified Sources VISTA Rule needs help from the Engineering Services group. I am going to write about the Unified Sources VISTA Rule, some of the reports that we had created from the USVR, and some of the decisions that can be made from these reports. When we decided to go with the USVR, the next decision was decided which reports we would like to have set up. We talked to several of our internal clients and then thought about the business and which reports would help the business make better decisions. I worked very closely with the engineering services group to make sure the logic would be exactly what we wanted.

Adoption of Web Analytics in Your Company

In the last seven years that I have spent in web analytics one of the biggest challenges that I have had is getting adoption of web analytics in the company. This can be very challenging for a variety of reasons. Some of the people in the company might not know about, know how to use, or understand web analytics. Some people in the company might not think web analytics can help them. These are just a couple of the reasons why adoption of web analytics in a company might be challenging. This was not any different for the first company that I worked for when I first entered into web analytics. They are a multi-channel retailer and were primarily a catalog company. They are a small company and became very well known through the catalogue. They launched the website as an after-thought. In the beginning, they really did not have any type of tracking on the site. Of course this was way before Google Analytics came around. The only tracking they had were which products were purchased on the web site. I think they might have had something that told them how many visits the site received and the entry and exit pages. Though no one looked at it and all of the decisions about the site were made based on how many products were purchased through the catalogue. When I came on board, I was the second full time employee dedicated to the web site. My main responsibilities were marketing of the site and web analytics. After we picked a web analytics solution, one of the next things that I worked on was to get adoption of web analytics in our company.

Year in Review

It was a year ago this week that I was traveling for the holidays and I made the decision to start this blog while sitting in a hotel room. I knew there were quite a few blogs about web analytics already with various opinions on different topics. When I decided to start this blog I wanted to focus on one thing, sharing my experience in web analytics both good and bad. The experiences that I have shared have been about recent topics and some as far back to when I first started my career in web analytics. I have had a great time writing this blog this past year sharing my experiences. I hope that I was to give you more information about a decision or give you an idea about some things to try. I look forward for the coming year and sharing more experiences with you. Though in the past year, I have focused on certain tools, in the coming year I am planning on sharing experiences about various tools and analysis. In the great time that I have had sharing my experiences, you may have come to my blog and not find the answer you were looking for. I compiled a list of the top search terms that brought users to my blog. I am going to try to give more information and/or links for each of the different search terms.

Web Analytics and Voice of Customer

And the survey says……(this reminded me of watching Family Feud when I was younger). A couple of weeks ago I read a blog post from iPerceptions about how they are going to integrate web analytics with behavioral and attitudinal data. As I kept reading the article, I kept thinking “WOW that is awesome.” Then I got to the Features and Benefits and I was really impressed with the crosstab capabilities of the survey and clickstream data and to look at your analytics and survey KPI’s in one dashboard. After reading the article, I started to think about my other co-presented breakout session at the Omniture 2009 Summit about surveys and VOC strategies. If you can combine clickstream and survey data, create segments based on those on a both sets of data would give you great insights about your customer. When you are thinking about putting a survey on your site you need to think about what type of questions you need to ask. Do you want to ask Idea questions (comments, feedback), Opinion questions (ratings, polls), or Effects questions (site changes, product variations). Before you create surveys, you need to understand your business goals: establish a voice within the community, build trust with your customer base, generate positive brand awareness, encourage loyalty, improve customer perception. There are many different types of surveys that you can put on your site that will help you get into your customers mindset.

Advanced Analytics for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As I mentioned in my Omniture Summit 2009 recap, I was fortunate enough to be a co-presenter for a breakout session – ‘Makin’ Gold Records: Turning your SEO team into Rock stars.’ One of the most difficult things to do is track SEO and to determine how successful the SEO efforts have been. I am not going to talk about tips about how to optimize your site for search engines. There are already quite a few blogs and forums that talk about how to do this. What I am going to talk about are reports and analysis that can be set up to help determine how successful the SEO efforts have been. I am going to borrow from one of the slides in the presentation that really helps with this point, ‘43% of marketers don’t or can’t accurately measure ROI from SEO. To be successful with SEO, you must accurately measure success to drive value and action. In the end, it is not about driving traffic to the site, it is about making money.’ The question now becomes where to begin? To borrow another quote from the presentation, ‘With so much data available…the most important metric is that which helps improve your site.’

Sizing It Up: Measuring and Optimizing Rich Internet Applications

When I started thinking about what I was going to write for my next blog post, I had a couple of topics in mind trying to keep with my original plan for my blog of sharing my experiences in web analytics. Then the news broke that Adobe has agreed to purchase Omniture. Whether this acquasition is going to be good or bad, only time will tell. There has already been enough written on this topic, so I am going to focus this post on another topic. When the news broke of the acquisition, an idea for a post came to me. About a year ago or so, I co-presented a webinar with Omniture for an Adobe online seminar. Little did I know what would transpire a year later. As you can see from the title of the post, the webinar was about measuring and optimizing Rich Internet Applications. I have been very lucky in the last couple of years to have the opportunity to measure and optimize RIA’s and to work for the company that worked with Omniture to develop their flash tracking (ActionSource). Though I am not a developer and have never actually added the ActionSource tracking I work very closely with our flash developers to make sure the tracking that I would like is added to the RIA’s. Though I have tracked many different applications, most of the RIA’s that I going to cover in this post involve flash video, but I think this will give you a good idea of some of the tracking capabilities.