Deep Analytics

Adobe Flash. Is it the ultimate weapon of site destruction?

2010-12-15T23:06:00.003+01:00

Years after years I find, during my SEO consultancies, web sites with extensive Flash navigation structures. No wonder the website owners are complaining about poor search engine ranking, low usability and high bounce rates.

Like everything Adobe Flash can be used in a harmless way, but in the wrong hands it can have devastating effects. Let’s see why.

Adobe Flash and SEO

At present there is no effective way to optimize Flash for search engines. The main problem is not that search engines cannot index Flash content; the real problem is that search engine spiders cannot identify the content structure. While in regular HTML you can structure keywords in a hierarchical way using semantic mark-up, in Flash this is quite difficult. Additionally it is difficult for search engines to determine what is visible and what is invisible to the end user. Since this could give way to “flash content spam”, search engines take the safe approach to give extremely low priority to flash indexed content.

To make things worse many designers make the mistake to bury text into images, making the indexing task from difficult to impossible. Maybe the worst possible error from designers is to bury links into Flash objects (the spider will follow the links conservatively). A Flash website navigation bar is the best way to prevent search engine from indexing your web site completely. Make no mistakes spiders will be able to follow links in Flash object, but the weight given to these links will be very low.

Flash is poorly used by designers

To make a website look ‘creative’ designers often embed animations and slideshows in many parts of the site, often reducing the usability and most importantly drawing user attention away from calls to action. No wonder one of the best ways to optimize a landing page is to remove useless flash animations.

The Flash intro horror show

Even though the practice is disappearing little by little, you still find a lot of websites with a completely unnecessary Flash intro that takes several seconds to load. No wonder the bounce rate of these pages is terribly high as users hit the back button rather than looking for the “skip intro” link (if it is there).

Is Flash a CPU hog?

Or better said “Multimedia is a CPU hog”. Multimedia and animations are always heavy on CPUs. In this Flash doesn’t particularly help. As in December 2010, in a world dominated by multi-core 64-bit processors, the official Flash player is still running in 32-bit. There is a new 64-bit version on the horizon that, we hope, will improve things.

No need to say that navigating Flash heavy websites is the best way to drain the battery of any mobile devices. Many designers in this are particularly guilty, as they take no steps to improve Flash objects efficiency.

On this ground Apple banned Flash from iOS (there are probably other reasons that have more to do with rivalry between Apple and Adobe).

Can Flash and SEO tolerate each other?

The answer is for sure yes. By embedding small contained flash objects within the HTML code and by using few precautions it will be possible to avoid most negative effects of Flash. You have to make sure to offer to search engines spiders an alternative object or link that it will be possible to index. Most of the time it will be just a matter of designing a functional web page and as a last step pasting the Flash object into the HTML code. Arguably you could even build a Flash navigation bar, as long as behind you place HTML navigation indexable by spiders.

Review of "The SEO Business Guide" from SitePoint

2010-12-05T23:34:00.001+01:00

After more than 7 month of inactivity due to heavy workload I am restarting my blog.

Last month Sitepoint released “The SEO business Guide”.

SitePoint

For those who do not know SitePoint, it’s a company specialized in publishing guides and courses revolving around web design, web programming, web marketing and many other aspects of online business. The quality of their products makes them a rather authoritative source if you are planning to get any form of education in these fields.

The Book market related to SEO

The SEO book market is crowded with a massive quantity of beginner level books repeating the same platitudes (often out-dated) about search engine optimization. There are few advanced-level SEO books on the market but these are quite a rarity as the topic is moving very quickly. An advanced-level book can get out of date in less than a year.

This SitePoint guide stand out from anything on the market because a large parte of the content is focused on setting up an SEO consultancy business. This is quite invaluable if you feel that your know how on SEO is high but you are afraid to make the plunge and start a business around it.

The book structure

The book is structured around 9 chapters and two appendixes.

Chapter 1. - Search 101: This is a basic introduction or refresher on general principles of SEO

Chapter 2.- Best-practice SEO: This chapter outlines the basic processes for building searchable content, create back links and improving your ranking.

Chapter 3. - Advanced Tactics: More on tools for keyword analysis and for maximizing your SEO results.

Chapter 4. - Enterprise SEO: Here are special suggestions for large sites, multilingual sites, branding and geo-targeting;

Chapter 5. - Paid Search: How to make Pay Per Click work synergistically with your SEO strategy

Chapter 6. - Local Search: Extending your SEO strategy to the local search marketplace;

Chapter 7. - Starting an SEO Business: This is the largest chapter of the guide. It focuses on starting the SEO business, the pricing strategies and how to find clients;

Chapter 8. - Leveraging Technology and Staff: How to automate the repetitive parts of the SEO process, and expanding the business;

Chapter 9. - Value-Added Services: Additional products and services that you can add to your portfolio.

Appendix A – Online Resources: Blog, guides, newsletters and other Resources for the most up to date information on SEO

Appendix B – Documents: This chapter is a list of templates for contracts, service agreements, client questionnaires and confidentiality agreements. All these documents are in soft format in the CD included with the guide.

The two last appendixes are extremely valuable. In particular appendix B is saving you days of hard work (and probably lawyers fees).

Is this book for you?

This book is for you if you are serious about SEO and you like the idea of starting your own business. You will find that the content is really unique and valuable.

This book is not for you if you just want a to do checklist in order to improve your ranking but you don’t have a lot of time or energy to dedicate to the task.

The guide cost $197 with free shipping worldwide. By purchasing the book you will have access to $150 of discounts on the SEO tools recommended in the guide. The book can be ordered directly from the SitePoint website.
In conclusion this guide is a must have if you are planning to set up your own SEO business.

Clicktale and UserFly Reviews: Gets your hands dirty on usability and customer experience testing

2010-04-20T16:30:00.013+02:00

Have you ever wanted to see how your website users are consuming and interacting with your content? Have you ever wanted to understand why a landing page is not converting? Have you ever wanted to check the usability of a page or of your whole website?

If (obviously) one of the answers to the previous questions is YES then ClickTale and UserFly are two tools that you should absolutely consider. This two tools by no mean can replace a proper usability study with guided tours and users interviews, but can for sure help you to iron out most of the day to day usability problems you might have.

Both ClickTale and UserFly offer a palette of different price plans, including basic free plans. The free plans while limited compared to the paying plans are perfectly suitable for small web sites. In other words you have no excuses not to try these two excellent products.

What are ClickTale and UserFly?

In their basic form both products enables the site administrator to have a video playback of the user session on the site. Both work with a SaaS (Software as a Service) model, exactly like many other Web Analytics tools. Like with Google Analytics, Sitecatalyst and many other tools you will have to place snippets of JavaScript code in the pages you want to test.

While UserFly is specialised in showing you recorded sessions, ClickTale offers a number of additional features like heat maps, both for clicks and for mouse movement (in general mouse movement is a proxy for where the attention of the visitor is) and other reports that you could get out any web analytics package, like demographics, most engaging pages and so on. The fact that this reporting is integrated in the service is nevertheless very good.

ClickTale

Without going in detail (you can register for a free plan if you want to try). Clicktale looks like the most polished product out of the two. What is really impressive is that it enables you to aggregate the behaviour of all visitors through heat maps. The mouse move and mouse click heat maps are brilliant for getting insights about your site. You can also setup alerts (like when a customer drops out on a purchase process) on particular events, but more important you can setup filters that enable to classify and sort the massive amount of data that you might collect. For example you might want to study why people are abandoning your conversion funnel and focus your study only on the critical recordings (or aggregate them in a heat map).

The plans are somehow quite expensive and probably out of reach of small non-profit websites and as you can see plans ranges from 99US$/month to 790US$/month. The free plan offers limited but nevertheless useful features. For example the recordings are limited to only the first two pages and the heat maps are limited only to the most popular pages.

UserFly

Userfly offers the recording and playback capabilities only but for a much more affordable fee ranging from 10US$/month to 200US$/month. The free plan is limited to 10 captures a month, but unlike ClickTale, you can view the complete sessions. The playback is very smooth and very accurate.

Limitations

Both products have limitations, in particular with AJAX and pages with complex Javascript functionalities. As you might imagine JavaScript based tools have problems in coexisting with asynchronous JavaScript and you better avoid these tools altogether on your Ajax pages.

Both tools also somehow increase the page load time. I couldn’t make reliable measurement, but if load time is a concern, you might want to test thoroughly before a final deployment.

Conclusions

These two tools are so useful and can help you gather so many insights that it would be criminal not to try them. The free subscriptions are limited but still very useful for small websites.

Piwik – an open source web analytics tool

2010-03-02T23:12:00.002+01:00

Piwik is a project that has been gaining a lot of momentum during the last year. The objective of this project is to offer an open source valuable alternative to Google Analytics. It is supported by a very active community of developers that are issuing releases at a frantic pace. At the time of writing we are at release 0.5.4 but release 1.0 is already forecasted sometime in the second half of 2010.

What is Piwik?

Piwik is a click stream web analytics tool. It is relying on PHP and MySql, exactly like many other open source project like Joomla and Wordpress. Exactly like Wordpress you will install the application on your web server in a matter of minutes. Like Google Analytics, Piwik track pages with JavaScrip tags that you place in your web pages.

The Javascript tags can be installed manually on your pages, or alternatively if you are using a CMS (content management system, Joomla and Wordpress are good examples) you can install the tags in your site via a module or a plug-in, making the whole process extremely quick and user friendly.

The application architecture is quite interesting. I see Piwik like a data-gathering platform on which you can add features and functionalities by adding plug-ins (a bit like you add functionalities to Firefox by installing plug-ins). If you need a feature that is not offered by the standard plug-ins available and you are able to write PHP applications you might want to develop your own plug-ins.

What are the advantages of Piwik over GA?

1 With Piwik you are in total control of your data

The data is stored in a MySql database residing on your server and will never fall into the hands of a third party. If you read closely the Google analytics terms of service you will find things that many companies might find disturbing like:

6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service. Google will not share information associated with You or your Site with any third parties unless Google (i) has Your consent; (ii) concludes that it is required by law or has a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public; or (iii) provides such information in certain limited circumstances to third parties to carry out tasks on Google's behalf (e.g., billing or data storage) with strict restrictions that prevent the data from being used or shared except as directed by Google . When this is done, it is subject to agreements that oblige those parties to process such information only on Google's instructions and in compliance with this Agreement and appropriate confidentiality and security measures.

In practice this clause state that Google has the right to use your analytics data. This is fine for many small companies or individuals, but for large companies or companies where analytics data is highly confidential this clause will be a show stopper for Google Analytics.

2 Piwik is real time

With Piwik, analytics data is available on the spot. Once a visitor finishes loading a page (i.e. the JavaScript tag is executed) the data is already available for reports. With Google Analytics you have to wait for several hours at best (sometime for more than 24 hours) before you can see changes in your reports.

3 You can develop new features

Like mentioned before, if you are a developer or if your organization has PHP developers, you can extend the tool functionalities yourself. The framework is done for easy development and you will be surprised how easy is to develop plug-ins.

4 Exporting data features

You can export all your statistics with a set of open APIs that enables the user to extract end export data in many different and advanced ways.

Disadvantages of Piwik

1 Lacks of ecommerce and advanced segmentation features

Piwik is still a tool in its infancy and lacks several advanced features, like advanced segmentations and funnel analysis. This doesn’t mean that these features won’t be present in the future but if you need ecommerce features NOW, this won’t be the tool for you.

2 Size of databases and load on servers

I couldn’t really make reliable measurement so far, but I have the feeling that if you receive a medium to high number of daily visits (more than 5000 visits per day for example), this might have an impact on your web server performances. The database could potentially grow very large, even thought you could place the database on another server (different than your web server).

Conclusions

Comparing the two products is quite difficult especially because Piwik and Google Analytics approach the web site analysis in a very different way. At this moment Piwik is not a replacement for Google Analytics, especially if you are relying a lot on AdWords campaigns (due to the tight AdWords/Google Analytics integration) and if you are dealing with ecommerce. While it is a promising product (and I am sure that in time it will become a fierce competitor for GA) it lacks at present sophisticated visitor segmentation features (or plug-ins). Even though it is possible to develop your own plug-ins many GA like features are not available off the shelf.

I noticed a systematic difference in the measured number of visits, Piwik figures being between 5% and 7% higher than GA. This is normal for different tools, therefore if you are planning to run Google Analytics and Piwik side by side you will have these kind of discrepancies.

On the whole Piwik needs to mature a little bit more before becoming appealing to most Web Analytics practitioners. I am really eager to see the evolution of this tool and I am sure that we will have pleasant surprises in the near future.

Google Analytics Custom Variables – part 2 – Practical implementation

2010-02-19T12:28:00.018+01:00

As we saw last week the custom variables feature in Google Analytics is revolving around the _setCustomVar() method. Typically you will call _setCustomVar() before a _trackPageview() or a _trackEvent() so that the information get delivered with the GIF request sent by _trackPageview() or _trackEvent().

Here is an example:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
<script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._setCustomVar(1, "pagetype", "productpages" , 3 ); 
pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, "productcategory", "officefurniture" , 3 );
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}<script>   

This is the typical script you will put at the end of the page before the tag. As we can see we defined two variables “pagetype” and “productcategory” and gave them the values “productpage” and “officefurniture” (all at the page-level scope since last argument of setCustomVar is 3).

How can I track results?

The Custom variables data can be integrated in 3 different report types:

The Custom Variables report (in the Visitors section in the main menu)
The “Advanced Segments”
The “Custom Reports”

The Custom Variables report

While it normally takes only few hours for all reports to be updated, the custom variable report takes a bit longer. To my experience this is roughly around 48 hours. The first time you will run the report you will see a “not set” message in the first column. Do not panic, just be patient. Eventually you will be able to see the data.

As you can see in the pictures, if you click on the variable name you will drill down to the different values.

The advanced segments report

The advanced segment report is an incredibly powerful feature. If you have never used it I recommend checking the Google conversion university and have a look to the corresponding “Advanced Segmentation” presentation.

When you create the custom segment you will find new dimensions in the “visitor” section. Basically two sets:

Custom variable key
Custom variable value

Each one numbered from 1 to 5, and corresponding to the variable slot.

As you can imagine you can build extremely powerful visitor segmentations.

The Custom Reports

Exactly like in the advanced segment reports you will find two new dimension types:

Custom variable key
Custom variable value

Each one numbered from 1 to 5, and corresponding to the variable slot. See an example in the previous picture

Next part

Next week we will see the in details the different reports and the differences between the variable scopes in practical measurements.

Google Analytics Custom Variables – part 1 - Introduction

2010-02-07T19:09:00.016+01:00

One of the most underused features of Google Analytics is the “Custom Variables” report, not to be confused with the “User defined” visitor tracking report. Custom variables were made available in Advanced Segments and Custom Reports in December 2009 and are one of the most powerful additions of the last 6 months.

What are custom variables?

Let’s have a practical example. Let’s suppose we have an office supplies online shop that is selling to several typologies of customers let’s say:

Consumers
Home office, small office
Large businesses
Public administrations

At the same time let’s suppose that the products sold online fall into 3 broad classes:

Computer and Printer hardware
Office supplies and stationery
Office furniture

With custom variables we will be able to tag a visitor with a customer type (the first variable) according to different factors like: Registration data (if it’s already a customer), Landing pages, campaigns the visitor is coming from, content he is viewing and so on. Additionally we will be able to tag the visitor with a second variable corresponding to the type of products he is viewing preferentially. The possibilities are endless as we will be able to cross correlate the two dimensions and have a better understanding of our visitors.

What can we use custom variable for?

Additional examples are:

Segmenting visitors
Segmenting customers according to the order history
Segmenting visitors based on the campaigns they see prior converting
Segmenting visitors based on content visited
Segmenting visitors based on landing page
…

…to name a few.

How can we use Custom Variables?

In order to use custom variables we will have to modify the tracking code (the snippet of JavaScript that we paste before the tag) and use the _setCustomVar() method. I will give all the details on how to do this practically in next week post “Google Analytics Custom Variables – part 2”

Variable attributes

The Custom Variables features is powered by a new method: _setCustomVar()
As we will see later we can have up to 5 simultaneous variable tracking. Each variable has 4 attributes.

1 - Variable Scope

Before going deeper into our explanation we have to introduce the Variable scope concept. The scope is the context where we are going to define the variable. It is quite important to understand this.
There are 3 scopes:

1.1 - Page-level

Every type of variable that we can associate to a single page view (or event tracking) can be set at the page level.
Example: In our office supplies shop, suppose that we classify the product pages with a product type (“Computer and Printer hardware”, “Office supplies and stationery”, “Office furniture”). We will then set a variable with 3 possible values that we will associate to each product page. We will be than able to count the page views for each of the product type we have defined.

Pushing the idea further, if we want, we could also create a subtype variable extending our product classification.

1.2 – Session-level

Every type of variable that we can associate to a session. Example: we can number the visits that resulted with purchase and compare it to the visits that didn’t have any purchase attempt. In the session level scope, the variable will be counted at the end of the session and it will take the last value assigned before the end of the session.

1.3 - Visitor-level

Every type of variable that we can associate to a permanent cookie. You would typically use visitor-level variables to distinguish categories of visitors across multiple sessions. For our example you would assign the visitor type (Consumer, Home office small office, Large business or Public administrations) once and then track this value across multiple visits.

2 - Name

This is the string with the variable name. It will appear in the top-level Custom Variables report.

3 - Value

This string contains the value that will be attributed to the variable. Example, you could define the variable “gender” and give as value either “male” or “female”.

4 - Index

This is the placeholder or slot in which we are going to load the variable. Index can be an integer from 1 to 5. A variable should not be used across different slots. Theoretically you will be able to set 5 page level, 5 session level and 5 visitor level variables, for a total of 15 variables. In practice thought there will be interactions between variables making the reuse of variables in the same slot tricky. I will detail these interactions in the next post. My advice is to start using a maximum of 5 different variables only, placing them in different slots. In my next post I will give you few tips on how to use more than 5 variables.

Syntax

Now that we have seen the attributes we can set to the variable let’s see how we can call the function.

_setCustomVar(index, name, value, opt_scope)

Index: Can have integer values from 1 to 5
Name: The name for the custom variable (a string)
Value: The value for the custom variable (a string). Be careful that the sum of the length of Name and the length of Value cannot exceed 64 characters.
Opt_scope: This is he scope for the custom variable. The possible values are 1 (visitor-level), 2 (session-level), or 3 (page-level). When left undefined, the custom variable scope defaults to page-level interaction.

Next week

Next week I will show a practical implementation of the custom variables report and how to alter the tracking code in order to start using this extremely powerful new feature.

Filtering out specific known visitors from Google Analytics traffic

2010-01-31T22:04:00.008+01:00

Many times you want to filter out from your Google Analytics data, traffic from specific users or computers. The typical example is traffic originating from company employees or web designers working on new pages.

Normally you would create a filter excluding specific IP addresses (of your known visitors), or using the __utmv cookie setting a custom variable (in case the visitors you want to exclude have dynamic IP addresses). To set the __utmv cookie we will have to use the _setVar() method. As of December 2009 the setVar method wont be deprecated but the _setCustomVar() method will enrich the toolbox.

This is great news as the _setCustomVar() method offers a far richer way to create custom variables. The new syntax is:

_setCustomVar(index, name, value, opt_scope)

Where:

Int index The slot used for the custom variable. Possible values are 1-5, inclusive.
String name The name for the custom variable.
String value The value for the custom variable.
Int opt_scope The scope used for the custom variable. Possible values are 1 for visitor-level, 2 for sesson-level, and 3 for page-level.

This means that we will be able to define several custom variables and create very sophisticated user classes and filters.

Unfortunately the new variables didn’t make it yet to the filters therefore we will be forced to use the old _setVar() method.

Filtering a specific IP address

This is quite straightforward. Just go to the “Create new filter” page, select “predefined filter”, and set the options like in the figure below, entering the IP address that you want to exclude.

Filtering traffic based on a permanent cookie

The process is a bit more articulated.

Step 1 – Create a hidden page that will set the cookie

Create a static html page in your domain that will contain the following code:

<html>
<head> <title>Google Analytics cookie setting for traffic filtering</title>
</head>
<!-- Note: 'filter_visitor' is the content of the cookie remember this for later -->
<body onLoad="javascript:pageTracker._setVar('filter_visitor');">
<h1>Google Analytics cookie setting</h1> 
<p>Put any HTML code you want here</p>
<!-- Insert regular Google Analytics Tracking Code used on your site here: -->
<script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}</script> 
</body>
</html> 

Of course ‘filter_visitor’ is your custom value and you will be able to set it as you want. You will need to replace UA-XXXXXXX-1 with your proper tracking ID.

Step 2 – Save the page in your server

Name the previous page with a name like GAfilter.html and save it in your web server (of course in the same domain name).

Step 3 – Create the exclude filter

Go to Google Analytics and create a new filter.

Using the settings in the picture. You will have to fill the “filter pattern” field with the value we defined before. In our example filter_visitor.

Step 4 – Set the cookies on the visitor computers you want to filter

Ask all the people you want to exclude to visit the page you created before:

http://www.example.com/GAfilter.html

This will set the custom cookie in their browsers that you will be able later on to filter in your reports. It is a permanent cookie that has a lifetime of exactly two years. Naturally it will be necessary to revisit the page every time the cookies are deleted in the browser.

10 essential books for your Web Analytics culture

2010-01-23T17:09:00.041+01:00

I just launched a book search on Amazon.com with the keywords “Web Analytics”. As of today I receive 1,212 results!!! Just three years ago the same search would have turned less than 150 results.

Web analytics is becoming a hot topic, and as you might imagine authors are churning out books at an amazing speed. No need to say that the quality of all these books is varying widely.

So what are the books that should be on the shelves of every Web Analytics practitioner? I try to read most of the publications that are coming out and I asked many colleagues this same question. The answer (and as well my opinion about it) was almost always the same:

If you are starting web analytics there are many excellent introductory books out there. If you have an intermediate level you will still find interesting information in books.
If you want the latest and bleeding edge information, unfortunately, you won’t find this in books. By the time the book is published, the information is already stale. You will have to read on-line information like blogs and newsletters. Additionally you should join the Web Analytics Association and register to the Web Analytics mailing list on Yahoo Groups.

Here are my top choices.

Reference or essential books

1 - Web Analytics an hour a day

Avinash Kaushik 2007

Avinash Kaushik is a leading authority on Web Analytics. He is the well know author of the Occam’s razor blog. The book describe how to implement a successful Web analytics strategy and show you insights and techniques that will help you develop a customer–centric mindset.

2 - Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Avinash Kaushik 2009

The book provides specific recommendations for creating an actionable strategy, employing tactics for truly listening to your customers, achieving optimal success by leveraging experimentation, applying analytical techniques correctly and solving challenges such as measuring social media and multichannel campaigns. A great book.

3 - Web Analytics Demystified: A Marketer's Guide to Understanding How Your Web Site Affects Your Business

Eric Peterson 2004

Eric Peterson is another leading authority on the subject. The book teaches the fundamentals of web analytics in a storytelling way. Even though the book was published in 2004 the contents are still quite actual.

4 - The big Book of Key Performance indicators

Eric Peterson 2006

This is a great reference manual about KPIs. Each KPI is analysed and detailed on the way to use and the person that should use it. This is quite important, as the CEO needs different figures than the marketer. The book is only available in pdf from the author website.

General analytics strategy

5 - Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions

Jason Burby, Shane Atchison 2007

Even though the book targets more Web Analysts working for large enterprises than Web entrepreneurs, this book is great reading for everyone. It introduces strong business methodologies and frameworks that should be used as often as possible. The chapter about “Monetizing Site Behaviours” is particularly good.

6 - The cult of analytics

Steve Jackson 2009

Fantastic book on how to create an analytic driven culture in your company. It includes different methodologies on how to create and improve KPIs and the REAN model (reach, engage, activate nurture). It teaches how to get detached about the tools and how to focus on insights.

Page optimisation

7 - Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions

Tim Ash 2008

This is an incredibly useful book. Not only it helps you to understand why the landing page is so impacting on the final actions of your visitors but also provides you with excellent guidance for analyzing your current website and determining how to make it easier for the visitor to use and, more importantly, easier for the user to do what you need them to do.

A/B testing and multivariate testing

8 - Always be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer

Bryan Eisenberg, John Quarto-vonTivadar, Brett Crosby, and Lisa T. Davis 2008

A well written insightful and action oriented book about testing. Even though the examples are specifically focused on Google website optimizer, the principles can be applied to any other tool. The book is divided in 3 parts: the Why of testing, the What and the How of testing, and the technical aspects of testing.

Usability

9 - Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics

Thomas Tullis, William Albert 2008

This is by far the best and most comprehensive book I have found about measuring usability. The language is clear and written for a broad analytics audience. Everyone who is confronted with usability aspects (and most Web Analyst will, sooner or later) should read this book.

Google analytics

I was a bit hesitant about citing in the list vendors specific books, but Google Analytics is so widespread (it’s free as well), that any aspiring analytics Ninja should work extensively with it. Also keep in mind that tools evolve quickly and books might get outdated fairly rapidly.

10 - Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

Brian Clifton 2008

This book is a gem. Not only it gives a wide introduction on Google Analytics but it also details several hacks that you can use to customize your data tracking. It has also several chapters dedicated to customizing javascript tags to adapt the tool to your specific needs. The book was written in 2008 and lacks few of the latest features of Google analytics that came out in 2009 (like event tracking). It should be nevertheless on every Google Analytics user desk.

Afterthoughts

Do you have any other books you would like to mention? Any different opinion?
Tell me :-)

BootCamp 3.0 MacBook Pro Sound and microphone problems. Here is a solution.

2010-01-16T21:49:00.012+01:00

Starting with Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, apple has provided BootCamp: a support for installing Microsoft Windows operating systems on all Apple hardware equipped with an Intel processor.

Let’s face it; BootCamp quality has always been quite poor, often with outdated and crude drivers. Apple in these last few years has consistently ignored thousand of loyal customers screaming their lungs out demanding for a decent Windows support on Mac hardware. You just have to see the amount of complaints on the BootCamp Apple forums.

Anyway, the new low has been reached with the release of BootCamp 3.0, corresponding to the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in September 2009. The sound drivers provided are not working with the new line of MacBook Pro (the mid 2009 generation, sporting a CirrusLogic sound chip). Basically the internal microphone is not working and the volume of the loudspeakers is painfully low. To add to the annoyance, the headset connector, that has an integrated optical sound output, is constantly turned on turning the MacBook into an expensive laser pointer. The trouble here is that it is virtually impossible to find generic drivers that will work on the new MacBook Pro.

Almost 5 months later there are no official solutions on sight. Instead there are a couple of well-tested handmade solutions that are working like a charm.

I will assume here that you have a partition with a flavour of Windows and BootCamp 3.0 drivers. Should you use solution 1 or solution 2? Well, it depends. Solution 2 sound drivers are slightly more up to date. With solution 2 you will also get updated drivers for the new Magic Mouse and the track-pad.

If you are new to Windows or you are a bit scared by the length of solution 2, go with solution 1.

Solution 1 (the easy solution, quick and dirty)

Few folks at Sussex County technical School packaged a set of working drivers into an installer.

You will have to:

1) Start in BootCamp with windows

2) Download the file at:

http://www.sussex.tec.nj.us/files/CirrusAudio.10.6.1.zip

3) Unzip the file. You will get

CirrusAudioVista32.exe
CirrusAudioVista64.exe
CirrusAudioXP.exe

The Windows Vista drivers will work perfectly on Windows 7. Even though Windows 7 is not officially supported by Apple. I didn’t test personally the Windows XP drivers, but I have been told that they work fine.

4) Double click on the appropriate exe file (according to your operating system) and complete the installation.

5) Reboot the MacBook Pro and enjoy Windows with sound

Solution 2 (a bit more complicated but with additional rewards)

In November 2009 Apple released BootCamp 2.2. A maintenance release of BootCamp 2 (running on Leopard) with upgraded sound, trackpad and Magic Mouse drivers for laptops.

This sounds great, but installing BootCamp 2.2 over BootCamp 3.0 won’t work very well. We will have to manually unpack BootCamp 2.2 and extract the individual drivers.

1) Start in BootCamp with windows

2) Download the BootCamp 2.2 installation file at: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL967

3) Download and install 7-zip at http://www.7-zip.org/

The BootCamp 2.2 installation file is packaged using 7-zip

4) extract BootCamp_Update_2.2.exe with 7-zip to BootCamp_Update_2.2 on your desktop

5) You will find several files in the folder including:

BootCampUpdate32.msp
BootCampUpdate64.msp

Extract again with 7-zip the appropriate file according to your Windows version (32 or 64 bits)

6) You will find a folder named BootCamp24ToBootCamp223

Inside you will find several files including:

Binary.Cirrus_Audio_Bin - New driver with working audio and microphone for Macs with CirrusLogic chipsets (the new 2009 MacBook Pro)
Binary.MultiTouchMouse_Bin – Magic Mouse drivers
Binary.MultiTP_Bin – Improved multi-touch track pad drivers
Binary.TrackPad_Bin – improved regular touchpad drivers

Unpack again each of the files above with 7-zip, each one to a different directory.

7) In each one of the directories that you just created you will find an installer: DPInst.exe. Run the different installers in older to install the different drivers.

8) Reboot your MacBook in Windows, now with working sound, microphone, MagicMouse (if you have one) and trackpad.

I hope that my explanations were not too confusing. Let me know if you encounter any problems.

Critical review of The UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics

2010-01-08T17:38:00.018+01:00

The UBC Award of Achievement in web analytics is one of the first university courses available in the growing worldwide offer of Web Analytics trainings.

I finished the program in November and after a couple of months of meditation I wanted to share my experience about it. My final score was 97% equivalent to an A+ (I just received my official transcripts).

The University of British Columbia, based in Vancouver, delivers the course 100% online. This means that you can follow the course anywhere on the planet as long as you have an Internet connection.

The course and the way it is delivered has many pros and cons. What you will take out of it depends on your commitment, on your learning style and to a series of factors out of your control that I will detail later.

The program is structured in 4 modules:

Introduction to web analytics
Web Analytics for Site Optimization
Measuring Marketing Campaigns Online
Creating and Managing the Analytical Business Culture

Once you take the first introductory course (a prerequisite to the others) you can take the rest in the order that you like. If you can demonstrate a sufficient experience in web analytics you might get an authorisation to skip the first course.

The course timeline

Each course last 4 weeks, in other words depending how busy is your life you might finish everything in a quarter (allowing a bit of course overlap). My advice is to plan and book early, if possible few months in advance, as the classes tend to fill up very quickly.

How hard are they?

It depends. If your background is not IT, technology or marketing you might struggle a bit. If you are very comfortable with on-line marketing, the course will be a piece of cake. You nevertheless will need to dedicate several hours per week of your time to read the online material and go through a little bit of personal research.

The students

The classes are quite small for an online course: 20 to 23 persons. As you will see later this is detrimental for the learning experience. In the courses where I participated there was a great diversity of backgrounds.

The tutors

The tutors are responsible of answering to student questions in forums, animating discussions and correcting the homeworks. As you might imagine a good tutor can greatly enhance the learning experience. Here UBC should do a bit of quality checks because while one of the tutors was exceptionally good few of the tutors where not properly doing their job. I had the pleasure to work with Jeff Young, in course 2 (for sure the best tutor that I had in the program).

Few of the tutors were practically absent, not answering student questions and giving extremely concise comments in the assignments corrections (I was wondering if they were reading the assignments at all).

The textbooks

The material is overall good even though it shows the signs of age. A lot of it (including references and external links) is from the 2001-2004 period. In Web Analytics terms this is like studying advanced microelectronics with a textbook from the 70s. In other words do not expect to learn about the latest and the greatest methodologies from this course. Rather expect to give yourself a decent foundation on which to build later on.

Even though I have several years of experience with web analytics, I have to say that I learned many things from this course.

Since the course is targeted to a very wide audience, the technical aspects (like data integrity and data collection problems) are brushed up very quickly. Additionally very little is mentioned or explained about the mathematical and statistical know how that should be present in the web analyst background.

There is no emphasis on the web analytics tools. This is very good as you are forced to understand the ins and outs of the analysis rather than pressing a button without knowing the internal computations behind.

The classroom discussions

Each lesson has several forums on which the students can ask questions about the classes and engage in discussions with their pears and the tutors. Unfortunately most of the students couldn’t care less and you find yourself alone (most of my comments being unanswered). In the end the same two or three students (probably a bit more motivated than the rest) are left to discuss among themselves. This would be less of a problem if classes were much bigger, allowing a statistical number of motivated students to animate the discussions. Here UBC should learn from other universities that have a successful distance learning program. As an example I can cite "Warwick Business School Distance learning MBA" where online discussions are an incredible learning tool.

The assignments

There are 3 types of assignments:

Discussion assignments: these are literally a joke. You have to discuss about a set problem or a topic in an online forum. The first student will open the discussion with a comment. The other students will build and comment based on the previous forum posts.

No need to tell that the usual two or three students that are regularly discussing in the forums will open the discussion few days before the deadline. The majority of the students will post their messages in the last few hours (some of them in the last 15 minutes). The quality of the comments goes from insightful to irrelevant, especially because the last few students in the discussion have very little to add left (everything has been probably already said) and are pressed by time.

Projects: These are by far the best assignments and the ones where you can learn the most. You are given a topic, a web site or data to analyse, and you research and crunch the data at will, using all the knowledge you acquired in the course. You have a limit in the number of words you can submit; therefore you have to be concise and straight to the point.

Drop box assignments: these are more simple assignments than projects where you will have to apply a very specific set of chapters from the course material. You will have as well to do some additional research. It’s a very good way to learn.

Conclusion: The good, the bad and the ugly

The good:

At its present price the course is a bargain as each of the 4 courses will cost you 675.00 CAD (Canadian dollars) roughly equivalent to 435€ (Euro) (1740€ in total). You will get a discount if you are a WAA (Web Analytics Association) member lowering the cost of each course to 640.00 CAD (check UBC site for updated prices). Considering how expensive professional courses are nowadays this is for sure a great plus of the program.
The course gives very strong foundation on which to build your knowledge. Nevertheless you will need to complement this course with practical experience and personal research.

The bad:

The course is a bit light on technical and statistical aspects.
Some of the course material is quite old.
Several external links in the course are broken or pointing to paying material.

The Ugly

The learning experience can be affected by inactive tutors or unmotivated students.

Final thoughts

If you are beginning in Web Analytics and you are looking for a way to build a solid background this is the course for you. If instead you are a seasoned professional looking for a certification, there might be better options around. For example the upcoming WAA certification, that will be launched in May 2010. Alternatively you could be interested in tool related certifications like the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) or the many certifications offered by the big vendors (like Omniture or WebTrends to name a few).

Probably the whole program would be greatly improved by making the classes longer and increasing the amount of exercises. Another possible thing would be to let the students analyse traffic on live websites, for example from charities or willing institutions.