I believe the video is a great appetizer for how we approach web analytics from a feature point of view - and if you are not yet fully comfortable with YWA, I am most confident this video will shine some light on the product. Enjoy :-)

The above screencast is reduced in size, simply to fit this blog page, but you can click through to the original sized (990*938) screenscast, should you want the full experience. :-)

Yahoo Web Analytics in 30 minutes (VIDEO - HD)

If you made it through the video, and were pleased, you might be happy to hear that we plan to do a number of 3 min. videos focused on insight - not features.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

I suggest, as an alternative, that you try using a Page Revenue Participation metric for your next Conversion Optimization routine, as it might reveal opportunities away from your traditional funnel. When debating this, please note that, I am purely talking about Controlled On site Content, as defined by the Online Business Measurement Quadrant.

The reason for brining this up; I only just returned from Boston, where I attended the Internet Retailer conference, and probably even more exciting the Yahoo! Merchant Summit, which was delivered in conjunction with the show (On that note, the ystoreblog folks did a respectable pre-show interview about YWA 9.5 and my book). Anywho; the merchant owners had some of the most honest analytics questions I’ve heard in a long time. You simply cannot wow these folks with a posh looking four-dimensional bubble chart – they wanted to know exactly HOW we are going to help them make more money!!) – Refreshing!

A small disclaimer; all of the below screen-shots are from Yahoo! Web Analytics, but you have the same metric available in e.g. Omniture Site Catalyst and even though Google Analytics have a different term ($ index) and slightly different calculation, it is the same optimization attitude.

So how do I use a Page Revenue Participation metric for my next Conversion Optimization routine ?

1.

Go find your most popular pages report, which in most tools, means a report that shows a sorted list of all your pages, with the one receiving the most page views on top. By most standards, this report does not provide much insight, unless you derive your revenue from page views (such as advertising) - fair enough, then this might not be a bad proxy for $money.

2.

Customize this particular report in a way, so that you get your tools revenue participation metric appended to it. In Yahoo! Web Analytics the Revenue Participation metric resides under the sales group under metrics, when using the Custom Report wizard.

3.

The below figure, shows a standard most popular pages report, which have had the revenue participation metric added to it. This is almost per default, and with out much fingering, a better choice than just looking at raw page view numbers.

4.

Fingering or not! I am a big fan of visualizing data and the below screen shot is essentially just an advert for data visualization (but also, potentially, a  honest report export, that will create better value than a non colored bar chart). The below bar chart was extended to 100 bars and had its bars colored by the revenue participation metric. This alone brings instant insight, as we can spot easily spot “small green bars” – or more precisely, low page view volume combined with high revenue participation (a.k.a. important pages). We could of course expand this with more rows of data or just sift through the bars a hundred at a time.

5.

What I really like for you to do, is to change the sorting from page views to revenue participation. This changes the picture completely and it is the essence of my suggestion for you trying out a Page Revenue Participation metric for your next Conversion Optimization routine. This should in a best case scenario bring forth a set of pages, that you might not see as active drivers for conversion today.

The last X steps in your funnels, which are required for people to check out, will of course always be on top, and if you are anal (like me), I suggest you go filter them away, so you only have pure content in this report. Especially if you have to communicate this beyond yourself or your close team.

The below shows a astonishing set of facts:

• The “About us” Page Touched 23% of revenue in < 1% of visits
• Site Search participates in about 50% of all my revenue.

Knowing these two facts (which will be completely different from site to site) I hope one would set out to work on the “About us” pages AND closely look at those internal site search result pages. For these folks, their business clearly depend on it.

6.

As a closing comment; not that the upper commentary need further input, it is obvious that neither “About us” or “Search” is part of your traditional funnel analysis as below – and as such we sometimes forget to look outside our funnel.

Doing a better “About us” page, in this example, even though it is not part of the funnel, is likely to widen the funnel – and if that is not exciting I don’t know what it.

This is not the first time I talked about revenue participation per say and if you are still listening, the post about how you can Use Web Analytics to determine the width of your Internal Search Query box might be worth a read.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

What is the current state of web analytics tools and their usage today? - and to what extent should we expect today to provide us comfort for the future.

What is the current state of web analytics tools and their usage today? - and to what extent should we expect today to provide us comfort for the future.

That is a grand questions and I am not suggesting that I hold all the answers. I do however believe that this is something we, the Web Analytics software vendors, need to ask ourselves on behalf of the entire community from time to time.

I suggest and advocate excellence on today’s current 3 steps of Web Analytics usage:

Today

1. Collect Data
2. Report on Data
3. Insight from Data

I don’t think any of these primary tasks have been solved to the complete satisfaction of our users yet, and I am confident in speaking on behalf of all web analytics software vendors on this. Something as basic as collecting data, is a huge challenge, especially if you think of every one of the Online Business Measurement Quadrants being important to your online endeavors. Reporting on data is far from being solved as well, and providing people a login and password to the analytics interface, is in most cases more harmful than good. Finally, I don’t think we can honestly say that we get all the insight we expect from our data just yet. However; I do believe that all of these point are well understood and that we are making great progress.

That said; we must look towards tomorrow and apply new (or evolutionary) thinking to what we do today. I personally advocate the next two steps clustered around the following:

Future

4. Recommendation
5. Automation

Don’t get to hung up on the words themselves, that’s not the important part. When I talk about recommendation, I want you to envision us, the analytics vendors (and this might not be your traditional vendor), to apply our own modeling on your data, coming up with recommendations, for what you should do next. When I talk about Automation, I believe that you should be able to have your analytics technology (or API like offspring) act upon recommendations without your direct interference.

This is all part of moving you towards the true data driven organization, where we input the objective and let data speak for how we get there - which is where I supposed you are headed? We do have players that do some parts of the above, but not to the degree that I can confidently say that we started these steps.

I am the International Keynote at the Web Analytics Congress in Amsterdam on 28th May 2009. Where I will present and debate the above, which is something I am really looking forward to. I’ll be using the below set of slides to get to my point:

..So if you happen to be in Europe>Amsterdam, please drop by and say hello, and perhaps get the one hour version of the above slide set, which without me, as you can see, doesn’t say much.

AND finally; what are your step 4 and 5?   - I’m sure we can’t all agree on this. :-)

Cheers
dennis (@dennismortensen)

n.b.
If this subject is of your interest, I strongly suggest that you go read: http://www.nettakeaway.com/tp/article/377/what-web-analytics-is-missing

I did an interview over at Web Analytics World, which includes some decent commentary about the book and who it is intended for.

A few metrics for people as nerdy as I am. I announced the agreement with Wiley on Sunday July 6 2008, started writing the book in the fall of 2008 and spent about 5 months and 370 hours writing it, before turning it over to Wiley recently.

Another fun trivia is; that my good friend Avinash (from GOOGLE) wrote the foreword. (Thanks Mate!)

You can go preview the book on Amazon, and also on Google Book Search. AND should you fall in love, this is where you can go buy the book:

• YWA book at Wiley.com
• YWA book at Amazon.com
• YWA book at Barnes&Noble.com
• YWA book at Borders

A bit of information on the three parts of the book:
(..and yes, I look a tad too serious on that picture)

My philosophy is that you should focus on three different but equally important tasks; A) Collecting Data, B) Reporting on Data  and C) Deriving insight from Data. Dependant ones vantage point, one or more of the chapters will be in focus. I have divided the book into three parts to reflect these broad tasks.

Part 1, “Advanced Web Analytics Installation,” consists of Chapters 1 through 5. The focus is on data collection. True competitive advantage in web marketing comes from collecting the right data, but also, and no less important, from configuring your web analytics tool in such a way that you can derive insight from the data. Part 1 features detailed code examples that webmasters or developers can apply directly. Marketing people and executives will learn the opportunities they can demand from this tool. I also show you how to add reporting dimensions to the predefined report structures for fantastic filtering and segmentation opportunities.

Part 2, “Utilizing an Enterprise Web Analytics Platform,” encompasses Chapters 6 through 10, where we focus on reports. Creating reports is an easy feat, but remember that reports are never better than the data you collect. You need an exceedingly good understanding of how to work with your data. Part 2 is less technical than the first part. In it I’ll teach you to use your reporting toolbox to provide targeted answers to specific questions, such as “How much revenue did we make from first-time organic search visitors from Canada last week?” For this and many other questions you’ll encounter there is no standard report, but you will know how to get this answer and hundreds of others when you’re through with this section.

Part 3, “Actionable Insights,” encompasses Chapters 11 through 13 and focuses on how to take action on your data to optimize your web property. Having gone through the effort of implementing the data collection and reporting strategies in Parts 1 and 2, you will have gained enough insight to start an optimization process. Part 3 introduces you to optimization using a set of actionable insights. This is merely an appetizer, and the handful of optimizations I present are not, by any means, the only ones you can pursue. But the ideas and attitude behind them can most definitely be copied and carry you down other optimization avenues. Think of this section as an idea catalog. One of the most important questions I tackle in this section is paid search optimization. Always keep your eyes on the money, eh?

I am truly grateful for the really nice endorsements I received from my industry peers, here is Eric and Bryan:

“In Yahoo Web Analytics Dennis Mortensen manages to do the impossible by adding real value to our knowledge of web analytics in an already crowded market. His clear language and excellent examples make this book required reading for any web analytics practitioner interested in extending their use of freely-available tools. Dennis is one of the best and brightest in the web analytics industry and Yahoo Web Analytics reinforces that with every page.”

Eric Peterson,
Eric T. Peterson, author, Web Analytics Demystified

“As the individual who drove the initial development of Yahoo!’s Web Analytics tool, Dennis managed to conquer mind-numbingly complex issues by presenting them in a simple and useful way. It’s no wonder that he did it again with his Yahoo! Web Analytics book.”

Bryan Eisenberg,
NY Times Bestselling author of Call to Action & Always Be Testing and cofounder of FutureNow Inc.

See you in San Jose for Emetrics and especially Web Analytics Wednesday tonight.

Cheers :-)
@dennismortensen

• New Demographic Dimensions
• New Psychographic Dimensions
• New Charting Capabilities
• New Path Analysis
• New Negative-Segmentation opportunities
• New version 5 tracking code (I describe the upgrade in my Yahoo! Web Analytics book)
• ..and 30 other smaller updates like e.g. native PDF export, use up to 50 actions (goals), introduction of 38 custom fields - and purplefication of the tool, well, you probably don’t care too much about the latter. :-)

The really exciting fact is that, the Demographics Data is not just presented in pretty reports, but much more importantly, as information that you use to filter other reports with. (Note: You might remember this type of sampled data from Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics - link to Ian’s launch post)

The dimensions are Age and Gender, which have the following properties:

• Age (0-17,  18-24,   25-34,  35-54  and  55+)
• Gender (Female,  Male)

The Psychographic Dimensions, which is called Interest Groups within Yahoo! Web Analytics, hold similar characteristics as Demographics, in the sense that you can filter and segment on this data.

The Interests are categorized as follows:

• Automotive
• Consumer Packaged Goods
• Entertainment
• Finance
• Health Pharma
• Life Stages
• Miscellaneous
• Politics
• Retail
• Small Business and B2B
• Sports
• Technology
• Telecommunications
• Travel

Please note that the data in reports, based on these two new exciting dimensions, are based on Yahoo! Visitor Interest data and may not be available for all your website visitors. YWA generate the output based on a sample of your visitors with their behavioral data, and YWA will only display the numbers meeting a certain confidence level.

This confidence level reflects how confident YWA are that the sample accurately reflects the makeup of your site visitors. You can actually reduce this confidence level to see more data, where you of course have to understand that by lowering the confidence level you are viewing numbers that one should be less confident are accurate for your actual site.

We also upgraded, as you can see from the screenshots below, the actual charting and visualization area of each individual report. This included opportunity to change the default visualization for the data, the opportunity to apply other data dimensions (such as coloring a bar chart based on a metric), visualize multiple metrics at the same time, visualize the true long tail using e.g. 500 data points, Introducing Bubble Charts, introducing the opportunity to use both trend charts and bar charts at the same time, having report filters and sorting reflected in the actual visualization etc.

Well, enough talk!

One note before you go down and have a look at the screenshots; with this release YWA is opening up for managed Yahoo Search Marketing Accounts, so go CALL your account manager to get access - Don’t mind the data below, the screenshots was done in a staging environment and this post is not about the insights you can get with the new features, I’ll get to that in a later posts. I just want you to go have a look at some of the new features and preferable get excited as a marketer.

Imagine YWA being able to tell you, as a travel sector marketer, that those successful individuals who bought the trip to London in June where primarily interested in Politics, Female and between 35-54 years old. Sexy eh!?

Cheers :-)
@dennismortensen

Link to last post, when we rebranded, which includes pictures of the more general feature-set: Indextools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics

Appendix  -  (Yahoo! Web Analytics 9.5 Screenshots)

.

The (2009) current 8 enterprise analytics players according to Forrester are:

• Omniture
• Coremetrics
• Webtrends
• Unica
• Nedstat
• Xiti
• Google
• Yahoo

Let me include the 2007 status, so you have an understanding of who left and who entered. The new report, which is headed by John Lovett, will arrive (if on schedule) in July 2009. I for one am super excited to see the output of the report and I strongly suggest you go find it when published.

The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q3 2007
Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of eight top Web analytics products against 127 criteria. Coremetrics came out as a Leader, with a product suite that balances power, usability, and strong customer service for firms that want a partner, not just a vendor — especially in retail, travel, financial services, and media. Our analysis revealed that Omniture, Unica, Visual Sciences Visual Site, and WebTrends are also Leaders in the market by virtue of their powerful, complex platforms for enterprises with specialized data needs and a dedicated Web analytics team. Visual Sciences HBX is a Strong Performer, with one of the best user interfaces we saw and the option to overcome feature limitations by adding HBX Visual Workstation, a version of Visual Sciences’ advanced data analysis tool for HBX clients. Both ClickTracks and Google Analytics are Contenders, offering streamlined reporting, some of the industry’s best data visualizations, and a few analysis tools at a low price — a good choice for small to midsized businesses, departments within large enterprises, and anyone just getting started with Web analytics.

Cheers :-)
@dennismortensen

Today, just a simple note, for those who didn’t spot it yet, that the Web Analytics space have had bit of a shift in Japan.

• Yahoo! Web Analytics launched in Japan
• Digital Forest acquired by NTT Com

I think this is great news and I am generally happy to see any market and its individual actors move towards data driven decision models. Even though I completely agree, that it is always about the people, we have seen again and again, that having the right tools available can kick-start the process.

I am in particularly happy, as I spent time in Tokyo speaking and presenting, then IndexTools, now Yahoo! Web Analytics, to the fine folks a Yahoo! Japan. Furthermore, I actually participated in a round table debate at Emetrics with the head of Digital Forest a few years back, so all the best to them. This is all good news.

I am unaware of the actual Google Analytics penetration in Japan (please enlighten me), which might be very different from the otherwise dominant position they have elsewhere in the world. As in Japan, the story is very much different, Yahoo! remain the top search engine, according to the latest comScore data, and are even growing faster. Fascinating, isn’t it?

And then there was TWO! Eric ;-)

Cheers
dennis :-)

I am walking up to the Hilton now, so If you are in town for Search Engines Strategies New York 2009, do come by the Yahoo! booth and say hi! - I’ll be around most of Tuesday and Wednesday.. And I am of course super eager to talk about anything to do with Analytics and online marketing.

I’ll be presenting YWA at the Yahoo! Agency day on Thursday, including some sneak peeks of  the upcoming version. So if you are a SEM agency and have not signed up, go have a chat with your account Manager.

I also noticed that Wiley advertised my new analytics book in the SES programme, so perhaps you can go pre-order it. AND THATS something we would want, right!? eh :-)

Throw me an email, twitter message or reply to this post if I am not around.

Cheers
dennis.

Before answering that; I want to insure that we all agree that free web analytics as a concept doesn’t really exist, the currency simply changed from USD to DATA. So you might not get an invoice from Google or Yahoo, but you most certainly pay by sending your data their way. I am not saying this is bad, I actually think it is an absolutely fair exchange. (I know I am biased)

It is also known and accepted that one cannot really be a player in the online advertising market today without access to rich visitor data. Visitor data, that we typically see enhanced with extremely valuable conversion data, when coming as part of a web analytics deployment.

Finally and not uninteresting is of course the actual value of the web analytics application itself, and thus the relationship between advertiser and media owner. It is believed that people who deploy some sort of campaign control mechanism, such as a web analytics solution, are likely to spend more on online advertising. Not only that, it is also important that the media owner, such as Google or Yahoo, gets the opportunity to present their own conversion stories. It seems silly if I advertised in the Wall Street Journal and had the New York Times tell me whether it was successful or not. Just like it seems silly that Yahoo! would let Google own the conversion story.

Why do you think Google Analytics provides “Last Click Campaign Attribution“ and Yahoo! Web Analytics provides multiple models including “Original Source Campaign Attribution”? - Because last click favors Search and Google owns search and thus present a positive picture of their channel, Original Source on the other hand favors Display and Yahoo! owns Display and thus present a positive picture of their channel - same data, two different stories.

Knowing the above two facts about Data and Application, I am very confident in saying that the FREE Web Analytics Market is very much alive and kicking. And if I am rude, I might just conclude that Microsoft decided that they don’t need to present the conversion story (they don’t own any of the two major channels) and that they can get their data from somewhere else, such as Internet Explorer, Messenger and Toolbars etc.

How does this impact Yahoo! Web Analytics? Well, this is my personal blog, so in my personal opinion it doesn’t change anything at all. We definitely plan to continue our innovation around Analytics. Next step is the upcoming launch of a new version!

Let me know if you disagree or if I am being to simplistic in my attitude.

AND see you at SES in New York, where you will find my in or around the Yahoo booth throughout the week. I might even be able to show you some of the sexy new YWA features.  :-)

Find the original message sent out to Microsoft adCenter Analytics users below (I was one of them):

Cheers
Dennis :-)

Dear Dennis,

The Microsoft adCenter AnalyticsBeta team is announcing the end of the adCenter Analytics beta program. The program has been closed, but Analytics will remain available to you through December 31, 2009. Please note that all hosted services, data collection, and technical support will end at that time. If you would like to save your historical data, please use the export feature to download your reports before December 31, 2009.

The Analytics team wants to sincerely thank you for your participation and your contributions to the program. Our objectives at the outset were to serve the needs of small and midsize business customers, as well as evolve the Microsoft strategy to encompass web analytics.

The beta program was a success in every respect. The insights you’ve contributed through your use of the tool and your feedback have helped us immeasurably in shaping Microsoft’s future in web analytics. Your feedback has helped us confidently determine that we can serve advertisers and publishers best by offering a tailored solution that meets more specialized needs.

You can rely on our continuing e-mail support through December 31, 2009. We recommend that you use the coming months to evaluate your web analytics needs and begin searching for an alternative web analytics solution. Click here for a list of companies that offer comparable analytics solutions.

For additional information, visit the adCenter Analytics blog and its award winning content. The blog will be renamed “Insights and Analysis” and will remain focused on advertiser ROI and optimization.

Again, thank you for your participation. We appreciate your contribution.

Sincerely,
The Microsoft adCenter Analytics Team

What most people don’t know, is that all new customer accounts, especially the thousands and thousands of Yahoo! Store Customers, were setup within Yahoo! data centers and provisioned accordingly (so they are experiencing a much faster system). BUT all legacy IndexTools partners and clients were left in our Budapest data centers and we have not really increased capacity since the acquisition in May 2008. However; partners and direct clients have kept adding accounts every single day since then, which of course isn’t really fair to anybody, as the system only gets slower and slower.

I am therefore really happy to say that we are finally ready to migrate all legacy clients and partners to Yahoo! Data Centers and thus making the final step away from our previous infrastructure.

This is a process that starts over the next few weeks and will be executed during the coming months. You will not only be moved to faster data centers, but even more exciting, you will soon get the opportunity to use the updated version 5 of the tracking code. A tracking code which all NEW accounts use. IndexTools legacy clients are on Version 4.

A shameless self promotion, and only because I spent 5 months on it;  is a note of me actually describing both Version 4 and Version 5 in my upcoming (April 2009) Yahoo! Web Analytics book. Making the transition from one to the other for our lovable IndexTools clients a whole lot easier.

Here’s an example that explains the constraints as well as the freedom of the PENDING_SALE action value and shows the difference between version 4 and version 5 of the code:

Version 4
var ACTION=’PENDING_SALE’;
var _S_SKU=’DM112899; DM113834’;
var _S_UNITS=’2;1’;
var _S_AMOUNTS=’100.00;50.00’;
var ORDERID=’10099803’;
var AMOUNT=‘USD150.00‘

Version 5
YWATracker.setAction(“PENDING_SALE“);
YWATracker.setSKU(“DM112899; DM113834“);
YWATracker.setUnits(“2;1“);
YWATracker.setAmounts(“100.00;50.00“);
YWATracker.setOrderId(“10099803“);
YWATracker.setAmount(“USD150.00“);

So all good NEWS! And before you comment on WHEN this will be opening up. :-) I promise to post a bit more about what our strategy is, who we will be opening this up to soon, what we plan to do about consultancies and finally the upcoming version 9.5 upgrade (which is SUPER sexy from a data point of view).

Stay tuned… and my apologies for the fact that this and the next coming posts will be focused on Yahoo! Web Analytics. I promise to state this in the title so you can easily skip it, if this is not for you.

Find the original message which we sent out yesterday below.

Cheers
dennis

We hope this e-mail finds you well. In our effort to keep you informed we wanted to touch base with you as we get ready to take the last big step in our successful integration with Yahoo!

As we informed you towards the end of last year, we will be bringing our new European (located in Switzerland) data center online in Q1/Q2 2009. We plan to move all existing Y! Web Analytics clients (formerly IndexTools clients) from the Budapest located data center and this process will be taking place over the next few months.

This move will involve a number of significant changes and will require some action on your side.

The following points are a high level overview of what you can expect to occur in the coming months:

• The migration process will commence at the beginning of March and will involve two phases. In the first phase we will be migrating all customer accounts to the new data center – this process is expected to be completed by the middle of April, 2009 at which point you’ll be able to access your migrated account (located in the new data center). During phase two, you will be required to make some changes on your site/client’s sites to take full advantage of the new system – this phase is scheduled to be completed by the middle of June, 2009.
• During the migration process support will continue to be provided as normal and our primary support channel will remain as support(@)indextools.com. Business critical issues will be addressed as a matter of priority and all other issues will be responded to within 72 hours. However, bug fixes will be released to the new data center only and these will become available to existing customers when the new data center is up and running and migration of all accounts has been completed.
• It should be noted that we will have to suspend the provisioning of new accounts and projects to ensure that synchronization of the two data centers can be performed correctly. Once the synchronization has been completed we will provide further information on account & project provisioning.

We appreciate you will have further questions regarding this. Please can we ask for your patience while we complete a comprehensive guide which will provide you with detailed information on what will be happening, when it will happen and what action you will need to take. This communication will be sent to you towards the middle of March when the migration process gets under way.

There is no action for you to take at this time. We will ensure that you have all required information within the coming weeks and that you have ample time to take the necessary course of action.

We would like to thank you again for your cooperation and look forward to continuing to serve your web analytics requirements through our new and improved data centers!

Sincerely,
Your Partners at Yahoo! Web Analytics