Competition for Google Analytics

Just a quickie post.

I have signed up this week for beta access to 2 new analytics tools.

1. Microsoft's project Gatineau, which you can sign up for here. You'll need an adcenter account to participate, and you must be a US customer....which I sort of am, at a stretch, since the parent company is out of Baltimore...at least the site is hosted in the States

2. A realtime analytics tool reinvigorate's Snoop. Click on the beta test link in the upper right to sign up.

...I'm still waiting for my invites. I am so impatient I can't even wait for GA to update my stats every day, how do they expect me to wait for this?

Anyone put me on to a free, realtime analytics tool?

Measuring RSS Feeds and the Search for Realtime, Free, Opensource Analytics Tools

Once upon a time, I had a team of programmers build me custom analytics tools to answer all of my tracking questions. I wanted to be able to follow site visitors from offsite, through specific banner ads, to onsite registration to attempted download, re-registration, application based activity and related email newsletter and promotion receipt and response, plus attribute the activity to various and potentially competing affiliates who worked with me.

But the tracking universe keeps expanding. Today I want to know how many people are reading my RSS feed. Whether the people who are visiting my site are already subscribed. Are they forwarding the newsletter to other people?

Trying to force-fit this kind of granularity out of google analytics, which is my current tool, is pretty challenging. I want to be able to break it down to the user level and see it in real time. Did person X, from campaign Y ever come back to the website after they signed up? Are people who come from keyword searched more likely to forward articles on to associates?

So, I have been doing lots of online reading about various tools. Anyone know of a free tool that allows me to see reports in real time? One that allows me to slice and dice at will, ideally.

Tracking Return Visits by Registered Users With Google Analytics

As a marketer, I am hungry to reach out and make contact with my site visitors. To understand what drives them. What do they like about the site? How do they use it?

Today´s challenge is setting up my GA tracking so that I can differentiate visits from people who are signed up to receive my newsletter from people who haven't. Sure, unique versus return visitors is a good wide approximation. but I want to know specifically the behaviour patterns of the people who have given me permission to reach out and communicate to them every morning with our newsletters.

I am thinking that I can do this by using the "user defined" visitor report. Basically, this report is designed to allow us to sort site visitors based on the content of their responses in a submitted form.

An example. Let's say you have a form in which site visitors can vote for their favorite Beetle. You have 4 custom segments defined by including the utm_setvar function in your website code - John,, Paul, George and Ringo. Now you can sort your visitors according to their preference in your GA reports.

To read on how to do this: you can check out the following forum posting at Nuhit.com. In this case, they are talking about segmenting visitors by vbulletin variables

I, of course, am not a programmer, so I´ll be passing the job into the capable hands of one of the programmers here on our team :)

In my case, I want to figure out whether I can set up two user defined segments....completed the form or didn't. I am thinking that what has to happen is that the form has to be, essentially, completed with a predefined "notsubscribed" segment....but then I need to figure out how to lump all of the other possible responses into a single category. I am going to talk to my programmers about whether we can set the segments as "contains @" or "does not contain @", because, hey...if there's no @, the form´s no good anyways, right?

I´ll let you know how it works out later in the day or week, depending.

SEO for a Good Cause with Bruce Clay

I was excited to read in my copy of Bruce Clay´s January SEO Newsletter, that the company has organized an SEO Charity Contest. If you're interested, entries are due by February 11, so act fast.

Unfortunately for me, I´m way down in Buenos Aires, and so it would be impractical for me to try to participate, since I can´t attend the events. Maybe next year they´ll include some remote training prizes for participants from further afield.

What a great opportunity for individuals who are anxious to have their cause heard. I can see so many positives:

the contest winner gets an opportunity to benefit from the great course materials and Search Engine Strategies Conference,

the charity gets the help of an individual to promote their cause, PLUS they have a great PR piece to spin out, as a result of winning,

Bruce Clay has the opportunity to raise awareness around a bunch of great causes, among the powerful communicators of the SEO community! Maybe some other pros in the community might find a worthwhile charity or two to adopt and promote in the process.

I´m going to spread the word in my little community to see what kind of causes people would like to see supported. I´d be interested, if anyone feels like sharing, to hear what kinds of causes people think would be ideal for this contest. What great charity do you think could really leverage this kind of opportunity to make a real difference?

Accepting the Inaccuracies of Analytics Data?

Hurol Inan, on his website Hurolinan.com

posts an article entitled

Best Practice KPI Reporting for the Online Channel

In it, he outlines the four factors to improve decision-making

factor number one: The data the reports are based on must be accurate, and free of bias. KPI reports that rely on inaccurate data sets are not only invalid but also dangerous as they may cause the wrong decisions to be made.

While I totally agree with what Hurol Inan has to say on the subject, I have a couple of concerns.

1. While improving accuracy is important, it is, I think, also important to understand the limits of the technology, and the resultant possibility of inacuracies that are virtually unavoidable. This is the natural result of a distributed tracking system that relies on users accepting our tracking cookies, following prescribed paths within expected timelines, and not confusing our tracking systems by returning to a site multiple times through multiple channels. For today, the best we can do is to work towards ensuring that report users understand specifically what the data represents, and that they understand the limitations and potential for error.

2. Accuracy also depends on the company´s definitions and practices. For instance, if you are running multiple ad campaigns, and a user responds to numerous advertisements before making a purchase, or returns through online ads, once already a customer, how do you properly attribute the return on investment for advertising spend? Having clearly defined and published policies on the hierarchy of tracking events is critical both for measuring behaviour, and communicating to stakeholders - both internal staff and external affiliates.

3. In my experience, too often, there is no common understanding of the specific definitions of the data being tracked, particularly among upper management, advisory boards or investor groups. A plan for educating all users on the meanings, definitions, limitations of dashboard reports and KPIs is critical for establishing the practise of trusting and acting on the data, and acheiving upper management support for allowing KPIs to shape strategy.

Dangers of Dashboard Reports

I'm not about to go around telling you that businesses don't need dashboard reports. only that they can provide a false sense of security. a dangerously warm-fuzzy feeling of control.

I have often witnessed cases where team members get so used to seeing similar patterns repeated that they stop really looking at reports. oftentimes these reports hold the key to important operational changes, but the data is so dense that the changes pass undetected until reaching crisis proportions. meanwhile management, secure in the knowledge that they have dashboard reports keeping the pulse of the company's operations, continue their future planning based on flawed assumptions.

Some of the pitfalls I have seen

differences between booked sales and fulfilled sales in evaluating effectiveness of marketing campaigns

failure to properly train all stakeholders in the proper interpretation of data. A team member who has not had the meaning of a report, and its contained data explained thoroughly is apt to assume that the data is completely reliable, needs no interpretation, and is all properly attributed. Anyone who has spent time working with online tracking knows this not to be the case.

data tunnelvision allowing the historical content of dashboard reports to limit your marketing team's imagination in fostering and developing new revenue generation or customer acquisition channels.

upper management or accounting team assuming that historical results are scaleable to any size and that the historical performance patterns will hold steady
failure to consider internal labour costs when evaluating online campaign effectiveness in reports

slowing site operation in preference to internal report generation, data processing and synchronization

delaying report generation beyond usefulness

storing aggregated data and failing to foresee future requirements for reporting calculations

Can Someone fill me in on Starware.com?

I´m always interested when I come across a website that seems to be anomalous. yesterday, doing a little brainstorming for a client, I was on ranking.com, reviewing their list of top sites.

I was perusing the list, the usual suspects, Google, MSN, AOL and so on, and my eye stopped at number 8. starware. I thought to myself, "I´ve never heard of this website," and wondered what kind of a service they must be offering, then I glaned over to the links in, thinking it must be a social networking site with tons of inbound links - something that has acheived success through grass-roots marketing.

But the site has SIGNIFICANTLY fewer inbound links that all of the other sites on the page.

AOL in the number 7 spot reports over 53 million links.

ebay, in the number 9 spot, over 5 million.

starware.com? just over 70 thousand.

So next, I link over to the site, to see if I can find some clue there. OK, it´s a search engine. Must be a brand owned by one of the Internet Behemoths. So, I read a little more on their site, and look at Alexa.com to see how they are ranked (205, with only 115 links in - still pretty impressive, though not top 10).

Next I start thinking about the differences in the reporting from Alexa and Ranking.com. I can think of a couple of possible explainations.

1. ranking.com and starware are affiliated in some way and users of the ranking.com and starware.com toolbars are integrated somehow.

2. starware.com is particularly popular among people who have downloaded the ranking.com toolbar. these are people who are more inclined to download toolbars, newer on the ´Net than alexa users, who are perhaps, more the old guard?

Finally I had a look at the traffic history on Alexa.com. These guys have been around a few years. traffic starts to grow in 2004, ramps up dramatically in ´06, and then roughly doubles over ´07.

I need to close here by saying I'm in Buenos Aires, and so there are also lots of major movie releases, hot new tv shows and stuff that I totally miss down here. Can somebody fill me in?

Thanks.

Lu