inside analytics

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.

WebTrends Widget

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:48:12 PDT

I've updated my WebTrends widget to use the latest WebTrends ML2 web services, and give it a more ML2'ish look and feel. It's a very simple widget, which is another way of saying, I'm looking forward to other folks copying it and making it much more powerful (I have a long list of to-do's, so if you're interested in collaborating with me on improving it...please drop me a line!).

Any WebTrends On Demand customer can use this widget to view data for their account.

The basics:

Install Yahoo! Widgets if you haven't already
Download the widget
Run the widget, entering in various widget preferences: your username, password, account name (WebTrends On Demand account name), profile ID and which time frame you want.
That's it!

The new ML2 web services utilize SOAP to allow customers and partners to upload or download data. The upload capabilities are incredibly powerful for organizations who want to augment data collected (upload product data, or campaign information, or external visitor attributes, or ?!). I'm utilizing our data exchange service to query reporting data for this particular widget.

If you're interested in more of the guts of this widget, feel free to email me directly. As always, I don't speak for WebTrends...nor is this a WebTrends supported project...it's really just a tool to help folks think about how to use the data, and think of other ways to visualize data creatively. Enjoy!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, widget

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One View Of Widget Stats

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:44:14 PDT

Interesting "widget" stats from the smart folks over at Lijit. Their approach is to crawl blogs and look for "any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript". Most of those widgets are analytics tools, along with ad providers, and other social networking tools.

The information is a great commentary on our industry...look at the list of analytics providers. Does anyone else see our industry as a page torn from The Innovators Delimma? Where are the usual suspects you think of when you think of web analytics? Instead what you see are small, scrappy, smart solutions that are moving core analytics to a commodity service.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Behind Screen #3

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 07:51:53 PDT

The NYTimes has an article today discussing how content providers are plowing ahead with big plans for mobile devices.  The very smart folks at ESPN are at the forefront of this industry, as they've figured out how to deliver the right content, at the right time, to their customers.  They see the mobile "screen" as a critical delivery tool:

“People talk about it being the third screen,” says John Zehr, senior vice president for digital video and mobile products at ESPN. “I talk about it being the first screen because it’s the closest to you.”

The article notes that they are leveraging data derived from one screen (computer) to better understand what types of content to push to another screen (mobile):

"For its part, ESPN is not holding back. It already tracks what computer users read on its Web site to determine what like-minded sports fans want to view on their phones, and is pursuing a patent to protect the technologies underlying its multiscreen effort."

And reading on, it's clear that they aren't just looking to match up the right content to the right group of viewers.  They are also working hard to deliver highly relevant, visitor-specific content to their visitors:

"The goal is to monitor individuals’ interests on the Web site and then
use the information to match cellphone content to their tastes. If
someone is watching a football game on ESPN.com
and has to hit the road, Mr. Zehr says, chances are that they would
like the game to appear on their cellphone 20 minutes later."

Now that's targeting.

Some nuggets of data from the article:

9+M people visit the ESPN cellphone web sites each month
64% of 18-24 year-olds watch TV with their cellphones almost always nearby
44% of all cellphone owners use data services
>75% of 18-26 year-old cellphone owners use data services

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Flash Tracking (and good music too!)

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:16:41 PDT

The creative folks over at Coke continue to innovate with their web properties. They are very heavy into Flash, and as usual, have some very fun marketing programs in place (check out the Virtual Thirst campaign which has been using MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Second Life to reach out...wow!).

They have a music player featuring "fresh new music" with some great tunes. The Flash-based player (which undocks from the site so you can continue listening if you leave their site) is instrumented to send analytics data for various activities (start, pause, next song, song rating, etc.). Very smart use of analytics.

Disclosure: Coke uses WebTrends for analytics...but I haven't been a part of their implementation...I just stumbled on their site while looking for something else!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, flash

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Open Web Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 08:40:24 PDT

I just came across this wiki, and blog, documenting "Open Web Analytics". The site bills itself as the "open source web analytics framework". The content is a bit fresh (read: some of it is clearly in development), but it looks like there could be some good useful stuff in the works.

Is anyone using this tool?

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Non-Profit Year 2 - New and Improved Analytics too

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Wed, 23 May 2007 08:42:03 PDT

Last week we put the finishing touches on our updated online "store" for parents to buy school supplies for their child(ren) through Schoolhouse Supplies. This year we added 5 more Portland Elementary schools to the program. We made a few important modifications to our site to accommodate the additional schools, plus we're now offering a method for parents to donate directly to Schoolhouse Supplies if they'd like.

As I've noted previously, we are taking advantage of some great technology to pull this together. We're using .NET on the front-end, with credit cards processed directly through API's setup by AuctionPay, then each order is stored (as a closed opportunity, with account and contact records added) in Salesforce.com. Of course, Analytics and Marketing Warehouse data brought to you by WebTrends. All of these tools are provided free to our non-profit...many thanks to these companies!

We also made a few analytics changes this year. We updated our collection of WebTrends data to include:

Capturing form information
Capturing button selections to give us a better feel for usage of some of the features
We changed around our tracking of scenario steps for more streamlined reporting in the WebTrends Warehouse
Capturing the Salesforce Contact ID value we create for each customer when we add the customer into Salesforce, and collecting it

That last item is particularly slick. After a successful credit card authorization, we insert records into Salesforce, then query back out the new Contact ID and place it in a meta variable for our WebTrends javascript to pick up on the confirmation page. Now we can easily pull our WebTrends Marketing Warehouse data and Salesforce data together for some slick reporting. Cool!

More to come on this as the orders start coming in!

(side note - many thanks to Nate, Anu, Mike and Jeff for their volunteer hours on this!)

Filed in: analytics, salesforce.com, nonprofit, web+analytics

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Converted

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 08:41:25 PDT

Nothing to do with analytics...I bought a Mac (MacBook) this weekend. I've never used a Mac before. What a great experience. I turned it on, answered a couple of questions and I was connected and on my way. The kids love it...and I do as well.

I'm trying to figure out if I should get a .mac account, or just use Yahoo or Google for everything. Anyone have any preferences?

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Attention Metric from Compete

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:48:21 PDT

Compete has just launched a new Attention metric, defined as "The total time spent on a site as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users". They now have daily updates, measuring the "velocity" of change in attention as well. It's an interesting view of overall traffic, and the tools provided by Compete are pretty cool.

The WAA has a research committee focused on measuring "new media", providing useful methodology and best practices that is also worth checking out if you're interested in more specifics on this topic.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Video Advertising

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:41:25 PDT

Picked up this info from MarketingVOX. This is pretty cool advertising built into a video. Check out this Kohl's ad, and look for the rectangle overlays on the video. Clicking on one of them pulls up the product you're viewing on the Kohl's site.

Think of all of the placement advertising possibilities!

The analytics behind the scenes are interesting as well. MSN looks to be tracking whether you mouseover the product (the rectangle). Nothing is sent to Kohl's, so they must be relying on MSN for in-video analytics for now. When you click on an item and visit Kohl's directly, the referrer is the MSN video site, but they don't look to be sending the specifics about the ad placement (for example, the same item shows up in different scenes...I'm sure the folks at Kohl's want to know which scene had the highest conversion).

Cool stuff. Congrats to Kohl's and MSN for putting this together.

Filed in: advertising, analytics, web+analytics

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More Thoughts On Page Views

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 06:38:43 PST

Steve Rubel continued the discussion of the replacement of the Page View as the metric of choice in our industry. He suggests that Events, Unique Visitors and Time Spent are likely candidates for replacement metrics (with Events and Time Spent as the two likely leaders).

The article is worth a read...as are the comments.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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RSS for Salesforce.com

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 09:02:25 PST

I've been following Charlie's development of the Spanning Salesforce tool for awhile now. He visited Portland last year and a few of us got together with him to talk RSS geek talk. Charlie has a very compelling story. Using RSS to follow salesforce data more closely. Check it out if you haven't already.

Today, NewsGator and Spanning Salesforce announced a partnership. Great news...congrats to both teams. Wider consistent adoption of RSS across the enterprise is an important concept, and this is a good example of an important marriage to help that adoption.

And in unrelated, but very interesting news, last week NewsGator announced their On Demand service for RSS. Very smart.

Filed in: rss, salesforce.com

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Engagement and Machine Tags

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:58:18 PST

Note the 8th item on Fred's list of things learned from Flickr:

8) Engagement metrics like comments, favorites, views, can and should be used to drive discovery (the most interesting algorithm)

I'd love to hear more about "discovery" as an engagement metric. Perhaps EricP can mull this one over a bit.

The other item on his list that is very intriguing to me is #10:

10) Machine tagging (autotagging) is the next big thing in web 2.0

Machine tags sound like a very interesting next step in tagging, and a smart extension to the tagging process. More good consumer generated content that seems quite ripe for analytics tools to leverage to better understand visitors. Great stuff.

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Tagged - 5 Things

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:47:49 PST

EricP tagged me over the holidays to share 5 things about me that you may not know. Although I hate chain letters, I appreciate Eric very much, so here goes...

1) I have 4 amazing children who are already way smarter than me. I've kept a journal of funny things they have said over their short lives which has turned out to be a wonderful collection of endearing moments.
2) I'm an alum of UCSC (Economics), the home of the mighty Banana Slugs (tshirt anyone?).
3) I started out as a computer science major. One night (or rather, early morning), I looked around the dark, fuggy computer lab where I was working on a program (to automate a traffic light I believe), and realized that I definitely did not want to spend the rest of my life around computer geeks. So, here I am...a computer geek.
4) I've written, recorded and performed songs live...not well mind you...but I enjoy it! (no modesty there...I'm really not very good...but I do enjoy watching live music a great deal and am still to this day a fan-club-card-carrying Plimsouls fan).
5) I've written a children's story for my kids that I'd like to make into a book someday.

Analytics Tools In The News

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 21:33:09 PST

A couple of newsy items in our analytics space:

1) Martin pointed me to the news that WidgetBox has released an analytics tool for WidgetBox customers. This is a smart idea, and very helpful for those using WidgetBox. From their post on why analytics matter:

With our Syndication Metrics, you, the widget developer, can assess the popularity and effectiveness of your widgets at a very fine level of granularity. We think it¹s like Google Analytics but for widgets. Now, you can track the spread of your widgets across the Internet and identify your biggest users are as well as most influential. You can also figure out the external triggers driving subscriptions, and make adjustments to maximize your widget’s exposure. You can identify which sites are driving the most traffic through your widget and forge strategic relationships. For the first time, the fog will lift and you’ll clearly be able to see which of your widget efforts are truly working.

2) The fine folks over at Performancing have sold off their analytics tool to PayPerPost. I really like the Performancing analytics tool. They were the first to put out a simple RSS feed of analytics data that was easy to use. Here's how my data looks in an RSS feed if you're interested.

I'll be interested to see what happens with this. PayPerPost definitely needs analytics data to provide to their customers, so it makes sense they'd pull something together.

Performancing keeps their ad network and PFF (performancing for firefox), which are terrific assets. PFF is now ScribeFire, the ad network will be renamed soon.

Update: The deal is off...wow, what a turnaround...Nick notes that they can no longer run the metrics tool and that the code will be given to open source. Best of luck to the Performancing team!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, performancing

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SEM and Analytics Example

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 07:31:44 PST

This is an interesting example of how important it is to understand your analytics data to make sense of unusual activity. From the PepperjamBlog:

"One of our clients spends about $2,500 per day on Yahoo Search Marketing. In this particular instance, the client is opted into the Yahoo Content Network and spends about 20% of their daily budget or $500 per day in content. One of our senior SEM’s was reviewing daily click activity and noticed that the account, which the previous day was funded with $10K was offline and the entire available balance depleted. After further investigation we found that two particular keywords within the content network accounted for almost the entire $10K previous day deposit in less than 12 hours (rough estimate of time)."

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, search

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Microsoft's New Homepage - and AJAX Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (EricB) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 07:26:00 PST

After a lot of very hard work by many folks up in Redmond, Microsoft has released their new homepage design. From their FAQ:

"On December 14 we introduced a new home page for Microsoft.com. The new page incorporates months of research, testing, customer feedback, and refinements. We hope the new page makes it easier to find what you’re looking for on Microsoft.com, and that you find new items of interest along the way."

The new site is very sophisticated, as is the push for analytics behind the scenes. If you like to see how sites are leveraging analytics to track AJAX navigation, use your favorite HTTP debugger (Fiddler is still my fav - thanks Eric L) and see the analytics data sent to the Microsoft team for analysis (via m.webtrends.com). Specifically note how the AJAX menu (reached through the menu in the upper right hand part of the homepage) tracks each "event" (clicks mostly in this case) inside the menu, including which "view" (upper right) you choose.

Also note how each AJAX event in the menu references navigation structure ("ngn" parameters), and utilizes an event handler parameter WT.dl to define the type of event. These are a couple of examples of methods for tracking more sophisticated Web 2.0 events to provide rich analytics on the backend.

Congratulations to the team at Microsoft!

Thanks William...nice work!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, microsoft, webtrends

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