However, I am not so convinced that the deal will lead to great success for IBM, or is the start of a coming “revolution” for the web analytics industry… and here’s why.

Whilst the deal makes perfect sense – its a logical and smart with obvious synergies, remember that in 2006 IBM *sold* their commercial web analytics tool, Surfaid, to Coremetrics in the first place (though Coremetrics only used the WebSphere client base and not the technology).

Clearly IBM did not understand the significance of web metrics in 2006 and nothing makes me feel that they do now…

For me, the success of the web metrics industry today is due to the “simplification” that Google Analytics has brought to the table with its 2005 acquisition of Urchin. That has taken web analytics out of the realm of IT and into marketing departments – where it belongs!

The result of this simplification has been the dramatic growth in the number web analytics users – now measured in millions of accounts – rather than tens of thousands, as it was in 2005.

In my view, integrating web analytics with marketing is the future.

Integrating web analytics with IT (the SPSS/IBM route) is the past, and flawed.

There is a precedent for this… IBM is not a marketing company, just as NetIQ are not a marketing company – NetIQ were the previous owner’s of WebTrends. As a security and IT infrastructure management company, NetIQ acquired WebTrends in 2001 and took it from clear market leader to almost out of business in less than 4 years. In fact, their flawed approach was a large part of what has driven the success of alternative vendors – including Google Analytics.

I am all for the rigours of statistical analysis, though within reason. The vast majority of your website traffic is anonymous and random visits. These are impossible to predict due to accuracy limitations of web analytics. Yet, these provide the greatest opportunity for improvement.

Ultimately, I do not feel an IT company, such as IBM, are best placed to move the web analytics industry to the next level.

As always, I would be interested in your thoughts with a comment.

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2010. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coremetrics, future, IBM, marketing, web analytics, web metrics

Superficially that’s all there is to it. If you just wish to view visitors and pageview counts you don’t need an analytics specialist to help you – all you require are basic webmaster skills. However, products such as Google Analytics have 100+ reports so that you can analyse much more than these – in fact, regardless of how much traffic you receive, those can be covered in a handful of reports.

So why do you need so many reports…?

If all you require are traffic volume graphs and a site-wide conversion rate (i.e. the number of transactions divided by the number of visits), then you don’t! But that’s the point. Traffic volumes and site-wide conversion rates tell you very little about the success or not of you website. They are blunt metrics, as Neil Mason recently wrote.

In order to be effective in optimising the performance of your website – be it in how you acquire visitors, or what happens once they are on your site, you need to be able to answer two fundamental questions:

• What is the value of a visitor to my site?
• What is the value of a page on my site?

Being able to answer these two innocuous questions opens the door to the world of insights. That is the role of a web analysis – to provide you with insights so that you can continuously improve.

For example, the value of a visitor allows you to determine which medium/channel provides you with your most valuable visitors. Be it AdWords advertising, organic search, email marketing, social media efforts and so forth. You can then take action on that information such as increase or decrease your activity in those channels to gain more high value visitors or become more efficient in acquiring traffic.

Taking this further, you can drill down into a specific campaign, keyword or even a tweet to access its individual impact on your site’s performance.

The value of a page allows you to identify your best and worse performing pages. Your best performing pages are great targets for A/B and multivariate testing as they can give you the greatest impact. Knowing your poor performing pages allows you to fix errors, improve content or even cull the page in order for you to focus your web efforts more effectively.

Dave Chaffey posted recently on the use of “value”  in web measurement and the 3 key value measures within Google Analytics.

Why is this hard…?

The hard part is going beyond a basic install of your web measurement tool so that you have a more complete picture of visitor activity, that crucially, includes value. This is not rocket science, but it does require product specific expertise and experience. A best practice installation of Google Analytics for example, requires a knowledge of what can be achieved “out of the box” and what requires further thought.

Non-standard Google Analytics implementation items requiring further thought:

• Data Structure
  If you own more than one website domain or subdomain e.g. mysite.com, mysite.co.uk, myproducts.com, store.mysite.com etc. How best to structure the data so that reports are easy to interpret? separate profiles, separate accounts, roll-up reporting…?
• Tracking File Downloads
  e.g. PDF, XLS, MP3, DOC etc. are not tracked by default.
• Tracking Events
  In-page actions that are not a pageview. Many add-to-basket, blog comments/ratings, fill-in forms do not generate a pageview.
• Tracking Flash
  Interactions with product demos, videos etc.
• Defining Goals & Monetising these
  You need this to determine value.
• Tracking E-commerce Transactions
  Often these take place via a third party payment gateway and you will wish to track this as one continuous session.
• Page and Keyword Grouping
  Rather than look at reports on thousands of URLs or thousands of search engine keywords, you can group these along a theme e.g. all pages from section1, all brand search keywords etc.
• Labelling Visitor Types
  Differentiating visitors who are members, subscribers, customers etc. from other anonymous visitors.
• Segmenting Visitors
  Sub-sets of related data e.g. social media visits, different levels of engagement, geographic regions etc.
• Tracking Error Pages
  These are not tracked by default
• Tracking internal site-search
  Sometimes tricky if the visitor’s query term is not contained in the URL. Also tracking zero results (a very important KPI…)

In the book, I devote 26 pages to getting the basic setup right. The above, more advanced implementation considerations are covered in 96 pages – and the other 400 pages on all the other things you should be aware of if Google Analytics is your thing!

My point is, if you wish to go beyond the basics of web measurement, either get a Google Analytics Certified Partner to help you, or, if you prefer to do-it-yourself, read the book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. That way you can stop counting and start analysing!

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Post tags:

A key meaning for measuring success is knowing which visits and conversions are your high value ones. In other words, which visitors are the most profitable to acquire. This can be measured directly if you are a transactional site, or indirectly as new leads/contacts/advocates. That is the principal behind optimisation – focusing your efforts on attracting/converting your most valuable visitors and pages.

Dave Chaffey is a SEO expert, distinguished author, active blogger, Google Analytics professional trainer – and friend! We have been discussing this topic on and off for the best part of year. I therefore asked him to write a guest post on this very subject. It you want to measure success and not failure, read on…

Show me the value! – by Dave Chaffey

We all know and love/hate the Tom Cruise “Show me the the money” rant from Jerry Maguire. For me, “Show me the money” should also be the mantra when creating actionable summaries and dashboards within Google Analytics or other web analytics systems. Or rather “Show me the value” since different types of business can generate value online in different ways.

Why value?
Value is THE measure that our senior colleagues who fund the investment in analytics and digital marketing activities can relate to. They want, need to see the return on this investment and page views and bounce rates just don’t cut it…

Which value?
Ultimately what the CxOs and financial controllers care most about is profit generated by online activities. This is more readily available in some analytics systems if you can import cost data about each transaction, but most will enable you to show revenue if configured right.

Show me the value in Google Analytics

In Google  Analytics, value is best seen in the $Index value and revenue metrics which I’ll describe soon. But you will only see values for these if you have setup Ecommerce tracking or assigned a monetary value to your goals. True value, in the form of profit and margin for your Google AdWords campaigns, can be viewed if you import cost data for Google AdWords.

Comparing traffic source and page performance using their relevant revenue contribution is a big improvement on the non-value related measures like visits, pageviews or conversion rate that are so often reported in dashboard summaries from analytics (notice I don’t mention Absolute Unique Visitors, which as Brian has written previously, should be treated with a pinch of salt).

Once you’re reporting on value you can then start to find the value levers – that is which referring traffic sources, pages and conversion pathways are generating value and which aren’t, so you can take action.

The reason I’m writing this post is that value measures within Google Analytics appear to be hidden to the majority of end-users. I say this because many attendees to my Google Analytics workshop as well as Brian’s bespoke Google Analytics training aren’t familiar with value measures at all, even though they are existing users. This appears to be because to define value requires customisation, which often doesn’t happen (see step 5 in my post on 6 levels of customisation for Google Analytics).

The 3 key value measures within Google Analytics

The three main value measures in Google Analytics (aside from AdWords and AdSense generated value which uses cost data) which are explained in Brian’s book in the KPI section of Chapter 10 (p315) are:

• $Index value (page value)
• Per Visit Goal Value
• Per Visit Value

1. $Index value. This shows the influence of pages in generating value either through Ecommerce transactions or conversion goals with a value assigned.

So it’s available within the Top Content reports. It shows you the influence of particular pages in generating value if they were part of the path to purchase on the site. So you will see that goal value pages or checkout pages always have the highest $Index value, but you can evaluate the relative influence of category or product pages within the journey too.

It’s calculated by summing Ecommerce Revenue + Total Goal Value divided by the number of Unique Pageviews for a given page in a visitor session as explained by this chart:

Chart taken from http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=86205

2. Per Visit Goal Value. If you have a value assigned to your conversion goals this shows you the Total Goal Value for your reports. It’s reported within the Traffic Sources reports for Referring sites, Search Engines and Keywords, so it’s useful for comparing the value generated by other sites and your search campaigns.

It’s a little hidden since you have to select the “Goal Set” tabs within these reports.

3. Per Visit Value. You can see Per Visit Value measures within Traffic sources on the Ecommerce tab if you have Ecommerce tracking enabled.

Because both of these are a little hidden, I’d recommend surfacing them within custom reports which can also show variation in value generated across days or weeks – a handy application of custom reports. You can then compared actual value to target value if you have targets set.

Segmenting value
Finally, think about how you can use the underused Advanced Segments for how value varies between different visitor types. For example, I recently showed a client how their home and search pages were working much better for existing against new customers which enabled us to develop messaging to appeal to new customers and better explain the proposition.

I hope there’s some food for thought here and you’ll be popular when you show your colleagues the money. I’d be interested to hear how you use these value measures also (or perhaps you have others) by added your comments below.

About the author
Dave Chaffey has been involved in digital marketing since it was known as Internet Marketing in the mid 1990s – and this was the name of his first book on the topic published in 2000. He advises companies in all aspects of digital marketing strategy through his training course, consulting and books, but his passion is using web analytics to help companies get more from their web marketing.

He runs Smart Insights – a digital marketing blog, consultancy and soon-to-be software service to help companies get more from their digital marketing using analytics. Many of the articles he writes are advice on using “Google Analytics to improve marketing”. He has also written the popular Econsultancy Best Practice Guides to Managing Digital Channel Strategy, Search Engine Optimisation, Paid Search and Web Design.

© DChaffey for Measuring Success, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: $index, monetize, per visit goal value, per visit value, value, volume

There are a number of sites purchase the Google Analytics ebook from:

• Ereadable
• WHSmiths
• Ellibs
• Wiley (US only)

Discount Code:

If you have the printed version, I have a 25% discount for the PDF ebook. Just send me a picture of you with the book in an interesting location and I will send you the discount code. What’s an interesting location I hear you ask…? I don’t know, a landmark, a great view? Surprise me… Oh, and keep it clean! I would like to add them to the picture gallery of engaged readers

The second addition will be available in French, German and Chinese in the very near future. The first edition also had Korean (via Acorn) and Czech (via Computer Press),  Russian, so expect these to pick up the second edition shortly. Not sure why these specific languages first, but a great deal of interest in those regions. I would be interested to hear from Arabic and Far East readers. Please drop me a line directly (my address is at the bottom of every page).

If you are super cheap(!), you can read the content online at Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=3OmIDmHgLH0C&dq=brian+clifton

Its free (though no copy & paste or no printing available), so please show your thanks with a book review at Amazon, or wherever you wish…

enjoy

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2010. | Permalink | 27 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book, book launch, ebook, launch, PDF

These of course are legitimate questions. However there are a multitude of possible answers – not what you want to hear if you are the end-user trying to interpret your visitor reports! The original accuracy whitepaper (published in Feb 2008) explained all of the possible accuracy considerations I could think of at the time. It was a vendor agnostic accuracy check-list to help the end-user, and those that you report to, get comfortable with the data, its limitations and how to mitigate these.

Two years later and things have moved on. Accordingly I have updated the whitepaper to include all my latest thinking and add new data points from other people battling with accuracy – notably at study conducted by Paul Strupp and Garrett Clark at Sun Microsystems. The basic accuracy issues I originally describe haven’t changed – just augmented for April 2010 and now 19 pages…

If you are an agency with clients asking the same accuracy questions, or an in-house marketer/analyst struggling to reconcile data sources, this accuracy whitepaper will help you move forward. Feel free to distribute to clients/stakeholders. As before the whitepaper is vendor agnostic. That is, the principals and issues discussed are relevant for all on-site web analytics tools.

Download the latest web analytics accuracy whitepaper Read the original post on accuracy (March 2008) If you have further suggestions, or just want to let me know if it was use, please add your comments below. A retweet is always much appreciated

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accuracy, accurate, web analytics, web analytics accuracy, whitepaper