inside analytics

It's a good time to be at Webtrends...

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:13:14 PST

I joined Webtrends in '99. The company had just gone public and we were growing like crazy. Our flagship Webtrends software products (LogAnalyzer, Professional Suite, and Enterprise Suite) were minting money, and we were just starting to get some traction with our new "online" tool called Webtrends Live (later renamed Webtrends OnDemand).

In Q4 of that year we had an internal goal to hire 100 people across the organization. We did just that...while the business was still accelerating. It was a fun time.

Flash forward to 2012. Our SaaS solutions revenue grew over 20% last quarter from the previous year, with earnings up an incredible 418%. And we just announced last week that we're going to be hiring 50 new employees - 35 in engineering alone.

The difference this time? It's not a bubble. At least not for Webtrends. We're making money, we're growing, and instead of sitting back and watching it slowly, organically, grow, we are putting our foot on the accelerator.

Want the inside scoop on what we're up to? Take a look at our job openings. A lot of great opportunities all around the company. Make sure you look at some of the engineering jobs to see what we're putting together: streaming/realtime processing, big time big data, deep data mining research, and incredible (award winning) user experience initiatives.

It's a good time to be at Webtrends. If you want to work on the latest technology, serving some of the smartest marketing brands in the world, now's the time.

Chartbeat Realtime

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:15:37 PDT

Our Webtrends realtime offering is very slick. Sean has done an amazing job putting together Reinvigorate, and I can't wait to extend his functionality deeper into Webtrends products.

Chartbeat offers a great realtime view as well. And I really like how they offer an open, transparent look into the offering via data from the businessinsider.com site. Check out Chartbeat's realtime viz on that site's data.

I really like how they pick up Twitter feed as a data source to help augment the overall view. And whether or not you agree on the definitions, the idea of showing reading and writing as engagements is smart too. Nicely done folks...

Advertising and Analytics Caught in the Cross-hairs

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 08:43:27 PDT

AT&T's move to metered data plans is going to have an interesting long-lasting effect on the Apple ecosystem. Apps that leverage services like advertisers and analytics companies who rely on transferring data to and from devices now have a new ingredient in the mix: reducing bytes transferred.

Those who have been paying attention to this already know what it's all about, but for different reasons. When we were putting together our analytics mobile SDKs at Webtrends, we were hyper-sensitive to many issues: privacy, flexibility, powerful reporting, efficiency, device battery life. It's those last two issues that forced us to be very efficient with the data we're transferring, and to take measures to only send data when it didn't interfere with the user experience in the app, or when the device battery was low.

But now the challenge is different. Mobile device users may not want to have extra services running in the background, eating up their precious bytes. And how do users keep track of this?

App developers will have new requirements of third party services, as they themselves are now having to factor in how much bandwidth their own apps are consuming. From this NYTimes article:

One of the biggest problems, app developers say, is that people are not sure how much bandwidth they are consuming with an app. AT&T customers will be able to track their data use on the company’s Web site and receive alerts when they near their quotas, but many customers are in the dark about how much data a particular app or video uses.
“They’re going to be reluctant now because they’re going to be thinking in the back of their mind that there’s a clock ticking about how long they can play this game,” said Brad Foxhoven, chief marketing officer and a founder of Ogmento, which makes augmented-reality games for the iPhone.

Developers will likely look to Apple to add new functionality to help them clearly articulate how much data is transferred, and how to be as efficient as possible with that data transfer.

State Farm's Impressive Mobile Apps

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:50:27 PST

State Farm has done a great job of leveraging mobile technology recently. They have put together a couple of great iPhone apps that go beyond traditional marketing, and offer an interesting glimpse into how businesses can leverage mobile devices.

Their first app, the Pocket Agent is full of good useful info. The feature I think is the most useful is the one you don't want to ever have to use. If you're in an accident, you need to capture as much information as possible to assist with (among other things) any claims you might need to make. It's good to gather this info right away, and their iPhone app allows you to do this easily. They've even updated the app a couple of weeks ago to add enhancements to their “Submit a Claim” functionality, including:
o Draw the Scene
o Other claimants and vehicles
o Describe the Scene
o Offline access to documenting an accident

Their second app, Steer Cl ear, is more targeted toward educating young drivers - and verifying that they are doing the right things. As they say,

The Steer Clear® Mobile app is part of a comprehensive program that helps young drivers reinforce positive driving behavior and stay aware of hazards on the road.

I find this app to be a very smart move for State Farm. First of all, they are targeting young drivers who are more likely to be mobile-savvy, and therefore might appreciate that they can lower their insurance costs by following the app.

Second, they've built in some great verification tools that allow State Farm to validate whether the driver is actually following through with the trip logs, training and education. Of course, it's not a perfect solution - you can probably figure out how to say you're doing something and not actually do so - but it's a great attempt.

Here's a video showing what they're up to.

HTML5 Storage and Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:59:15 PST

One of the more powerful features in HTML5 is the ability to store data locally via the browser. Of course, browsers have had this functionality for a long time via cookies, but the HTML5 spec extends this concept even further, solving some additional web site use cases, and opening the door for the rapidly emerging mobile world.

Specifications
There are two mechanisms defined in the web storage spec: sessionstorage and localstorage. Sessionstorage allows for session-specific data to be stored, which can be helpful for maintaining state information that you may not want to extend into another visit. This even applies to sessions from the same visitor, within different tabs of the same browser. This is a better solution than cookies for scenarios where you want to keep transactions separate from one another. The spec notes this use case:

"For example, a user could be buying plane tickets in two different windows, using the same site. If the site used cookies to keep track of which ticket the user was buying, then as the user clicked from page to page in both windows, the ticket currently being purchased would "leak" from one window to the other, potentially causing the user to buy two tickets for the same flight without really noticing."

The localstorage mechanism, on the other hand, persists across sessions and visits.

How much storage?
The spec currently suggests a limit of 5MB per origin (domain) for this new storage. This may change as the spec continues to be revised. At 5MB, it's certainly much larger than the limit on cookies today.

Privacy
There's a decent sized section of the spec that speaks to "user tracking". There's clearly a strong concern about how this storage mechanism could be used to build user profiles and potentially track personal information. It looks like the working group developing this spec is taking privacy concerns very seriously, and are building in good safeguards.

Some thoughts
This storage would have been a great mechanism to have many years ago, but I'm not sure we were really ready for it. I think we've learned a lot over the years about privacy, and protecting personally identifiable information, and the time is much better now for such power.

The possibilities with this storage mechanism are fantastic. Google has already been making use of this functionality to help improve its apps. Apple has been a strong supporter of advancing the HTML5 spec in general.

But the rise of mobile computing has really made this mechanism important. Some very smart folks are already figuring out how to leverage localstorage to build apps that behave like a native app (eg, an iPhone or Android app), but are actually running in a browser. Check out Nextstop on your mobile device to see an example of what I mean. By pre-fetching and storing content, the experience becomes extremely rich when moving from view to view. It's quite amazing to experience it.

The Analytics connection
Analytics providers like Webtrends can obviously make use of the localstorage mechanism in creative ways. But the real thought-leadership will come with providing new analysis of usage of the storage functionality so website owners can better optimize their sites. More good opportunities for analytics providers and practitioners!

Jive acquires Filtrbox

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 07:46:15 PST

Jive Software, who makes fabulous collaboration tools for both internal Enterprise use, and external communities announced today that they are acquiring Filtrbox.

TechCrunch notes:

Jive says that Filtrbox’s social media real-time monitoring technologies will be absorbed into Jive’s platform to help businesses and brands harness the power of the real-time web from within Jive’s collaborative software.
...
Jive is wise to boost its offerings as it is going to be competing with Salesforce’s Chatter and other social offerings. But the company is ready for the fight.

RWW notes:

How companies leverage the cloud will determine how they fare in the market. The ability to crunch large amounts of data is vital for understanding the real-time nature of how conversations flow. Jive seems to understand this and appears to be moving more toward a cloud-based strategy.

Initially, Jive will market Filtrbox through its Jive Market Engagement solution along side Radian6. Jive and Radian6 formed a partnership back in September. Here's what Jeremiah Owyang and his colleague, R "Ray" Wang had to say about the partnership.

Radian6 and Filrtrbox are essentially in the same space. it is unclear how the relationship between Jive and Radian6 will be affected by the Filtrbox purchase.

This definitely muddies the waters with Radian6. It'll be interesting to see what happens there.

Not only is this a social monitoring play, but there are analytics implications here as well. An interesting move, and one we'll watch closely! Congrats to my friends over at Jive!

Flurry Makes Another Move - Mobile App Analytics Revenue with comScore

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:33:28 PST

Flurry has just announced a smart deal with comScore... Gagan Biyani over at MobileCrunch has the scoop:

Flurry wins because comScore’s sales force will sell Flurry’s data analytics software, generating an initial revenue stream for Flurry. According to Director of Community Peter Farago, clients will pay comScore to have Flurry’s SDK installed on their applications, and Flurry will make a revenue-share for each client. ComScore is adding reporting and charting software on top of Flurry’s analytics. Flurry is traditionally free for developers, but comScore is going to charge clients to use Flurry because of the additional reporting and charting they add.

This news is getting a lot of attention. As it should. This is a good deal for Flurry who, as a young company trying to make a living in the already crowded Analytics space, have figured out two revenue models already.

I agree with Om Malik though:

The way I see it, it’s only a matter of time before someone like comScore or The Nielsen Co. buys out Flurry and its rivals. It’s becoming increasingly evident that the mobile web and mobile apps are part of new usage behavior that goes beyond today’s plain-vanilla web.

There are plenty of smart folks in the Analytics and #measure space that know full well what is required to make their holistic, powerful solutions work for brands around the world. This is a wise move by both companies to make a big play in this rapidly expanding space. 2010 will be a great year for Analytics in mobile measurement. Bring it on!

HTML5 rel=noreferrer and Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:00:03 PST

Phillip Lenssen over at Blogoscoped notes this interesting HTML5 nugget from Mark Pilgrim's DiveIntoHTML5 site that suggests that there will be a new relation attribute (rel="noreferrer") for links that will force browsers to drop the referrer from the header when selecting links.

This is how Mark describes it in the semantics section of his site:

rel="noreferrer" “indicates that no referrer information is to be leaked when following the link.” No shipping browser currently supports this, but support was recently added to WebKit nightlies, so it will eventually be showing up in Safari, Google Chrome, and other WebKit-based browsers. [rel="noreferrer" test case]

This is an interesting use of rel in HTML, changing the behavior of the browser. Especially a default behavior like this that has been around since the stone age (early stone tablets had a referrer of course...).

The impact to the Analytics community could be quite far-reaching. Referrer information is obviously quite important to a lot of base reporting dimensions. We'll all be interested to see if this specification will actually make it into HTML5.

Mobile App Analytics Consolidation: Flurry and Pinch Media Merge

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:16:43 PST

Flurry and Pinch Media are merging to form a strong Mobile App Analytics alliance. The combined company will keep the Flurry name. From their press release:

"As a combined company, Flurry and Pinch Media analytics services will be running on more than 80% of all iPhone, iPod Touch and Android handsets worldwide."
...

"In the near-term, the company's main priorities will be to seamlessly unify its service and significantly increase the analytics feature-set offered. The company will continue to offer its analytics service free of charge."

They claim to have their application tracking installed (via the apps using their services) on 50 million unique devices, measuring over 1 billion sessions per month. That is impressive indeed.

Dean over at Venture Beat notes that the company will have 20 people on staff, with 8 open positions, and hope to combine their services into one by the end of the next quarter. Regarding the business model, he further writes:

Both companies have launched widely used analytics services for the iPhone and Android phones, but they aren’t profitable yet. To monetize the data, Flurry recently launched AppCircle, a recommendation platform. Developers install it in their games and it analyzes a user’s taste in apps. Then it recommends apps for the user. These recommendations are likely to be highly useful because they’re based on the user’s past purchases. Flurry gets paid through a revenue sharing agreement with the developer.

They both have done a great job building out their products, and defining a new niche analytics industry. They will likely continue to innovate quickly, and work hard to find the right revenue stream. My 2 cents is they should look to expand the recommendation platform into a clever search mechanism. With some 400k apps expected through 2010, developers are going to need to be found, and today it's not easy, and Apple can't be the only winner out there.

Nextstop Nicely Bridges Apps and HTML5

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:46:55 PST

Robert Scoble has shared an interview with Carl and Adrian over at Nextstop. They have put together a slick iPhone app (and Android, etc) based on HTML5. The app looks fantastic.

What's slick about the app is how they've leveraged new browser functionality. They note what they've done via their blog...here's a synopsis of the cool stuff:

The technologies we're using include:

ApplicationCache: We've built our application using Javascript to manage page transitions, so the core HTML, Javascript, and CSS is only loaded once. We're using the HTML5 ApplicationCache to speed startup time on subsequent loads by caching Javascript and CSS so that these resources are cached for subsequent application loads.

Geolocation: We're utilizing Geolocation to get your current physical position in the browser to show nearby content.

localStorage: As you browse the application, we try to prefetch content aggressively so that any time you click, the content needed for the next page has already been downloaded. This is possible because we store all prefetched content locally on the phone using the localStorage object. This also means that as you browse to content you've already seen, no additional network requests are needed because that content has already been stored.

Google maps v3: Google has been working on a new version of the Maps API, specifically optimized for performance on mobile devices. We've found this to be a substantial improvement over Maps 2, and a reasonable alternative for a native maps implementation.

iphone-photo-picker: One of the key capabilities of the iPhone that isn't yet available through the browser is access to the camera and local photo library. To bridge this gap, we've built (and are open sourcing) a small helper application that exposes a urlscheme (photopicker://) that can be called from any web application to invoke the camera or photo library, and then will POST the selected image to a URL you specify.

That last item is very cool. Extending standard functionality of mobile devices into the browser is a huge enabler for everyone. Well done guys.

As Marshall noted yesterday,

Could mobile web apps challenge the dominance of native apps on the iPhone? That's an active debate.

The good news for the analytics world is that the standard tagging tracking methodology for these high-performance mobile web apps is fairly well known. However, there is new work to be done as we figure out what's important to track as new APIs are exposed, and mobile web app owners become more proficient with them.

Apple Shutting Down iTunes Connect During Holidays

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:30:56 PST

File this under "only Apple could get away with this". Apple notes that they are shutting down their iTunes Connect environment from December 23rd - 28th, 2009.

Over 100k apps on their App Store, with many more on the way each week, and they have the nerve to shut down their App developer management and reporting tools - during the busiest App season of the year (for some). Perhaps they could have gotten away with this over the last couple of years, but this seems like the tipping-point year where there are a lot more folks relying on this environment for their livelihood. After all...there are analytics involved here!

Jolie over at RWW notes:

So, once again, during what may be some app developers' biggest sales spike of the entire year, they will not have access to information on sales performance or other metrics, and they won't be able to tweak their marketing materials or create new incentives as the year's biggest gift-giving holiday approaches.

Developers...get everything together so you're not caught flat-footed!

Bit.ly Redefining their Analytics Niche Industry

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:49:51 PST

Make no mistake about it, Bit.ly is an Analytics company. URL shortening is just a means to an end for them (and goo.gl and fb.me), allowing them to capture as many click-throughs as possible. The more URLs they can shorten, the deeper they become within a company's workflow, and the tighter they become with a company's overall analytics solution.

Yesterday, Bit.ly announced their Bit.ly Pro service. This is an obvious smart next step for them as they move toward building a business model. They are now offering a realtime dashboard of great stats, and company-branded, whitelabel URLs.

The whitelabel URL is very smart. This has been around for awhile, but productionizing it is smart to do, and IMHO will be one of the bigger ideas that Brands appreciate (therefore, are willing to pay for).

There's still more to do to flesh out this "Pro" idea more...so many more fun things for all of us to work on!

Mobile Apps and the Open Car

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:27:01 PST

Lyle on GM-Volt reports that the Volt will have a BB and iPhone app. The idea captured in the image here suggests controlling the charging functionality of the Volt via a BB app.

He goes on to say,

GM sources have indicated that there will be applications at least for the iPod [EB: I assume this is iPhone, and iPod Touch] and the Blackberry. These will soon be unveiled along with their potential functions.

What's really interesting is to read down the (many!) comments of the article, with folks chiming in with other ideas about Mobile App / auto integrations. Aside from some snark, and the you-probably-saw-this-coming references to our old friend Kitt, one commenter had 26 different ideas, including:

Be able to set reminders that are triggered by a location so that if you drive within a certain radius of that location, the reminder will play through the Volt sound system via text-to-speech. For example, “Reminder to pick up some batteries at Circuit City”

and

Be able to opt in to receive an in-car notification if you are about to drive past a gas station who’s prices are in the best 10% of the nearest 10 gas stations.

Will the automobile industry figure this out fast enough? Will they build in communications to allow clever integrations? Will someone else come along with clever after-market products that expose the data that's likely already sitting in the computers onboard most cars?

This is going to be fun...

Developing Mobile Apps - Things To Know

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:57:56 PST

VentureBeat blogger Paul Boutin has a great follow up article from Wednesday’s DiscoveryBeat 2009 conference. I wish I could have been there...it sounds like there were some good takeaways.

My favorites from the list below:

the current market is under-measured
You need $0.00 to promote an app company now
It costs $3 to acquire an Apple app customer through advertising

Paul's list of "11 things I didn’t know about app development":

The majority of app developers don’t pay for market research before they design and build their apps. Yet this kind of research is inexpensive and vastly improves the likeliness of creating hits rather than misses.
Apple App Store downloads are growing 20 times faster than iTunes music/video downloads. Even paid apps outrun iTunes growth by a factor of seven.
Social network apps, compared to other types, have shown a relatively low frequency of usage and a low retention rate after 90 days. Games are where it’s at.
Super-analyst Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley says that despite the buzz over anything mobile, the current market is under-measured, and future growth underestimated.
You need $0.00 to promote an app company now. For example, Sibblingz will distribute your game to Facebook, the iPhone, and the Web without charging you anything upfront. They’ll take a cut of revenue as it comes in.
Reach and revenue are nice to have, but retention — getting users to keep launching your app — is the key to success.
90% of social game leader Zynga’s revenue comes from virtual goods sold within games and on social networks, not from advertising.
It costs $3 to acquire an Apple app customer through advertising. That’s more than the customer will spend buying the game. (Notably, no one in the audience disputed this stat.)
Most app discovery comes from viral word of mouth among customers, not from people searching app stores for something to download.
That said, mass marketing still works. RockYou spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a month “buying users” with ads. Zynga spent possibly millions marketing its hit Farmville on Facebook and elsewhere. (Zynga GM Bill Mooney was in the room and didn’t dispute this.)
Big brands like Mountain Dew are often presumed by tech industry workers to damage the credibility of anything they touch. In reality, they can be as powerful as app stores and game networks for popularizing an app. It never hurts to talk to them.

Mobile Apps - Changing the game

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 09:11:07 PST

Apple didn't invent the mobile application. Nor did they invent the concept of a store for applications. But they have changed the game when it comes to how we think a mobile device can be just about anything you want it to be.

NYTimes author Jenna Wortham has a great article today about how Apple has changed the game in the mobile app space. The momentum is amazing, and it's not stopping anytime soon.

The whole article is worth a read...here a are a few nuggets of facts:

Apple has over 100,000 apps in the App Store today (there are 14,000 for the Android, Blackberry has 3,000, Palm has 500 for the Pre webOS platform, Microsoft has 800 in their Marketplace)
Apple receives over 10,000 application submissions each week (that doesn't really jibe with the total number of apps...this may include updates? or are there many apps that don't make it through? or are there many more than 100,000 apps out there today?)
Apple keeps 30 percent of the revenue earned by any App Store program (wow!), the rest is kept by the developer
Apple says it has sold 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches
Analysts estimate that the App Store generates as much as $1B in revenue for Apple and its developers

Mobile App Analytics - 5-fold Growth Ahead?

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:02:16 PST

eMarketer came out with a report earlier this year articulating Mobile Applications: Moving Beyond Apple. One of the big data points they refer to is from Piper Jaffray, who estimate that spending on consumer and business applications will grow 5-fold by 2012. From a $2.8B market this year, into a $13B+ market.

I can see how the consumer side of things will definitely grow, but I don't really get the spending growth on the business side. I do think the growth of the usage of business applications will grow tremendously, but will business pay for it? Or will it just come for free as part of their product consumption? Business will just expect that your app or service or software will run on their mobile devices.

(via BitHeads)

New Twitter Search Functionality and Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 08:47:21 PDT

A couple of notes for the Analytics community regarding Twitter's cool new search interface...

New URL
There's a new search engine referral URL as part of Twitter's new interface. You'll want to update those search engine configurations to be on the lookout for it, and note the additional parameters too. Here's what the referring URL looks like from their new sidebar search:

http://twitter.com/timeline/search?q=searchphrase&source=sidebar&category=search

I see one other category in there for the new "trends" they've added just below the search bar, but in my limited testing, the referring URL didn't always reflect the "trend" selected, which I hope they fix.

I also note that if you've searched for something, that search phrase stays in the URL, even if you go somewhere else on the site (example: I went to my @elbpdx area and clicked on a link in there and the /search?=searchphrase was still present in the referrer...I imagine this is a bug that they'll fix...)

Expect more changes
The URL portends some additional goodies that they must have up their sleeves. What additional "source" items will we be seeing? What else are they going to do with the "category" field? I'm looking forward to seeing more...

Twitter Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:39:57 PST

It looks like Twitter is starting to get serious with how to monetize all of that amazing information they are collecting. According to Kevin Thau, Twitter's Director of Business Development:

"We can measure the tweets," he says. "We're trying to figure out what are the appropriate metrics around engagement and how to convey those."

Jeremy Owyang was also interviewed for that Forbes article, noting when asked about whether there's any money to be made:

"When it comes to enterprises, absolutely," says Jeremiah Owyang, a social computing analyst with Forrester Research (nasdaq: FORR - news - people ). "I just got off a call with a client that's asking about how to engage on Twitter. There's definitely interest."

I think Twitter rocks, and will continue to change how we communicate and share information. I use it to bookmark information now (so sorry delicious...), as well as staying in touch with the evangelists in the social media industry and the analytics industry. And with this new development of measurement coming from Twitter, I imagine we'll all be watching these industries get closer together as we figure out how best to integrate information.

Perhaps it's just a conspiracy?

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:03:31 PST

Perhaps this is just Google messing with us. I searched on "web analytics" and received the hashed up response above, and obviously others have stumbled on this too. How many individuals in our industry (SEO, Web Analytics, SEM) have spent (wasted?) time figuring this out in the past few days? And their only response thus far has been to point us to a blog post from 2006?

It sure seems like they could be a bit more transparent on this.

Search and Best Results Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:26:35 PST

Prefetching content is a clever way to speed up your browsing experience. Simply put, given certain conditions, your browser can prefetch web pages, so when you do visit those pages, they are already in your cache, thus speeding the time to display them in your browser.

Google started prefetching content for Firefox users in March of '05. Note that this doesn't work in IE (although StumbleUpon does), nor even in Chrome (although Chrome does prefetch/pre-resolve DNS information). They don't prefetch for all searches...only those where there's one result that has a high likelyhood of being selected...the "best result".

Here's how Google's search prefetching works. You perform a search, say for "apple". You get back something like these results.

Behind the scenes, google has also added an extra tag to one of the links instructing the browser to prefetch the Apple site (again, only Firefox does it) of http://www.apple.com/

For those who want more details, the tag which generates the prefetch includes: link rel="prefetch"

And to tell you maybe even a little more than you want to know (but highlights an important fact), when the browser does prefetch this information, it doesn't fetch any additional objects referenced on the page. Only the HTML content of the link. (yep...if you're using a javascript tagging solution for your analytics, you are not capturing that prefetch visit...)

Now, how does Google determine what link to prefetch? What if I really wanted info on the actual fruit? Google doesn't divulge how they actually determine when to insert a link, I think it's an interesting metric that is worth investigating. I think of it this way. Google is basically saying, "I have a pretty good idea what you're going to do next, so I'm going to make that next site you're going to visit a little faster for you".

We all pay pretty good money to GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) and others to send search traffic to us. We also spend money on tools to help us better understand what search terms folks use to get to us even when we're not paying GYM and others. And of course, we all track this important information by paying WebTrends and others for excellent tools to make sense of all of our efforts.

However, unless you've made plans to intercept this prefetch information, you are not collecting this important data. Why is it important? Only Google knows how many times your site is returned in search results. You only know:

How many times it was returned in paid results
How many times a visitor clicked through to your site in search results (paid or organic)

What's missing is how many times your site was returned in organic searching (does anyone know how to get absolute search info from GYM?). And what would also be excellent to know is how many times Google thought that the visitor was going to select your site - based on the best result. Again, here's what I'm thinking:

Google thinks a visitor is interested in your site. This tells you:

The visitor searched for something that likely would have led them to you.
Google thought it was relevant enough to even prefetch the content for the visitor.
The visitor may or may not actually make it to your site (why or why not?).
Which search terms were actually deemed relevant enough to make Google think your site was the right destination?

Ok, so how can you capture this information? If you're using web logs, you need to make sure you're capturing request headers so you can pull out a special header that is sent with each request and put it in your logs. The header is: X-Moz: prefetch

If you're using tagging, here's an approach that I put together a couple of years ago so we could watch this traffic over time: intercept the request and generate a request to your Web Analytics vendor data collection environment. I'd be happy to show you how to do this if you're interested.

Now you can track this traffic over time, and per visitor (depending on your WA solution you're using). What are these "best results" that these visitors are searching for? Did they actually select your site? Assuming you want them to visit your site, how might you change things so they do reach you? If they do make it to your site, which paths did they follow? Which scenarios did they fall into?

Questions? Thoughts? Comments?

Google Analytics Event Tracking

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:06:24 PST

Google continues to do a good job of adding additional functionality within their Google Analytics framework. Their Event Tracking is well done (with the usual capacity/scale issues). I do like how well they've laid out the tracking code, and even threw in a couple of extras in there (time tracking and mouseover tracking).

Of course, WebTrends and others have had this functionality for years now, and have much deeper customization options...but I am biased.

A couple of notes on GA's event tracking:

Bounce rates will change. They are treating events as additional "requests", so if you have a single-page visit with an event triggered (automatically or through interaction), it's no longer considered a single-page visit.
There are limits to how many events they will count. This is a free service afterall, but they note that in addition to the other report limits within GA, there is a limit to the number of requests per visit they will include in the reports. Watch how you implement events!

Back at WebTrends...

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:04:42 PST

This past week was my first week back at WebTrends. First, let me say thanks to Alex, Bruce, James, Mike S, Shane, John D, John R, Leo and Barry who all made time for me to bounce ideas around and find the right fit for me. Everyone has made me feel very welcome back.

So, why jump back inside analytics? And why back to WebTrends?

#1: The WebTrends Team
You can't underestimate the power of a strong, smart executive team. I had the privilege of working with an incredibly bright, innovative, forward-thinking management team at Jive, and I can tell you it makes all the difference to have a quality team with whom you can trust, engage, and collaborate.

Alex is building something special here at WebTrends. I had heard it from others, and I can already see it. The team rallies around him, and the exec team isn't wasting any time to make real change within the company.

#2: The Analytics Industry
I like this industry. The technology is dynamic, our customers are creative, and there's a large number of smart people out there solving interesting problems. I see too that the WA blogging world continues to grow, and there's plenty of twittering from a plethora of sources as well. This level of sharing and collaboration is very healthy for us all.

Many thanks to the many voices out there who are keeping us all enlightened, challenged, converted, and otherwise demystified. I'm looking forward to getting ramped back up and connected with you all again.

Focus and Innovate

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:03:57 PDT

A colleague turned me on to the quote below from this article...smart stuff from O'Reilly.

We don't know yet how problems in the overall economy will affect our business. But what we can do now are the things we ought to be doing anyway:
Work on stuff that matters: Assuming that the world does go to hell in a handbasket, what would we still want to be working on? What will people need to know? (Chances are good that they need to know these things in a world where we all continue to muddle along as well.)
Exert visionary leadership in our markets. In tough times, people look for inspiration and vision. The big ideas we care about will still matter, perhaps even more when people are looking for a way forward. (Remember how Web 2.0 gave hope and a story line to an industry struggling its way out of the dotcom bust.)
Be prudent in what we spend money on. Get rid of the "nice to do" things, and focus on the "must do" things to accelerate them.
These are all things we should be doing every day anyway. Sometimes, though, a crisis can provide an unexpected gift, a reminder that nobody promised us tomorrow, so we need to make what we do today count.

Forbes Article on Jive

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:09:21 PDT

How awesome is this. A great article in Forbes magazine on Jive

Upstart Jive Software aims to change the way people work by bringing social networking to the office. It's up against some firm called Microsoft.

Jive Software chief executive David Hersh has a lofty goal: a world where office work is so fulfilling, inspiring and free of trivialities that parodies like Dilbert and The Office cease to exist.

There are loftier goals--ending genocide, famine, cancer--but Hersh's is a good fight, and you can make a lot of money helping companies get themselves out of those endless e-mail chains and pointless meetings of office work. Jive's software uses the Web to do that.

"People live in e-mail and documents no one else can see. We're changing the way companies work," says Hersh.

Jive's newest product, called Clearspace, uses Web collaboration and communication tools such as forums, wikis and blogs to allow people in different offices to work on a short-term project using a single Web calendar, to-do list and discussion rooms. A manager can scroll over names of subalterns and see what they're working on and whether they're in the office, traveling or at home.

Very cool indeed.

Tracking Search Terms in Jive's Clearspace

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:03:20 PDT

Jive's Clearspace application is a very powerful tool for building active, engaged communities. Whether you are using it for collaboration, blogging/publishing content, for discussions, or documentation, you'll want to know what your visitors are searching for on the site so you can make sure the right content is available at the right time.

There are a couple of ways to get a handle on the on-site search traffic. For one, you can simply query the database (if you're running Clearspace on-premise) for search terms used by your visitors (among other things, the search table also includes which userID made the request, along with how many results were returned).

Even easier though is to make sure your analytics tool is setup to correctly interpret a Clearspace search query. A Clearspace query makes a request like this:

Example: http://www.jivesoftware.com/community/search.jspa?

Parameters include:

q = the search term
resultTypes = the types of items inside Clearspace to search
peopleEnabled = true/false - whether to include searches on profiles
dateRange = searching for something in a specific time period
communityID = searching in a specific community
rankBy = sort criteria

Generally speaking, setting up on-site search tracking for most of the web analytics packages is pretty straight forward. For example, to setup Clearspace on-site search tracking for Google Analytics, you'll perform the following steps:

Login to your Google Analytics account and navigate to the "Analytics Settings" for your account.
Edit your profile settings for the profile analyzing Clearspace
Select "Edit" next to your "Main Website Profile Information"
Scroll down to the Site Search section and enter the following information. You can only add 5 categories, and Clearspace has 6 different parameters (above), so you'll have to choose 5 of them (I don't include the CommunityID as most searches are not targeted at a specific community on the sites I've seen)

Save your changes, and that's it. Now just wait for those fabulous search reports to start coming your way so you can continually optimize the site for your visitors.