Half-Geek

geeked out omniture style - the verdict.....

Whoaaaa....what a day - Im geeked out Omniture style. I write this post from Wellington airport waiting for my flight home from Omniture training (thanks for the free wireless Wellington airport- genius!). Today's training was the advanced version and definitely a step up from yesterdays basic-how-the-interface-works type stuff.

Topics such as multivariate testing and segmentation were examples of today's focus. This web analytics software can do pretty much anything that any online marketer would ever need, so long as the software is implemented correctly. I actually cannot stress this enough.....implementation of Omniture will be the make or break process for companies who choose to take up their offering.

To get value from such a web analytics tool, one must first know what one wants to measure. While this sounds like a simple question to answer, for many New Zealand businesses it is not simple at all. New Zealands blue chip organizations are still developing their understanding of what their websites should be producing.

So, if you own a webiste where there is no clear path(s) to a desirable conversion(s) or action(s), the value of software such as Omniture rapidly diminishes.

However, in a a sort of bizarre turn of fortune, the Omniture training is actually effective in opening the minds of these organizations. It quickly becomes clear that they should be measuring conversions on their website. But what conversions? All of a sudden the benefit of online marketing becomes clear. And their latter mentioned fortune lies in the fact that they can configure,develop and design their new conversion orientated website around this new web analytics software. Web development the way it should be done.....

I also discovered (ashamedly) that Omniture acquired one of my favourite multivariate testing businesses, Offermatica last year. The technology that they acquired as part of this takeover has been integrated into a plugin offering in the suite of Omniture analytics software. I have to say I am excited by the prospect of being able to use this tool.

I would not go as far as to say that I was sold on Omniture, but it definitely is a comprehensive tool and I am impressed by the quality of training. It strikes me as an enterprise level tool, the type of software that requires additional investment in human resources to manage.

Overall verdict - I need a larger sample ;-)

omniture sitecatalyst

I am down in Wellington today on the first of a two day training course on Onmiture's SiteCatalyst. SiteCatalyst is the foundational web analytics software offering from Omniture. The software has been purchased at an enterprise level by one of our more major clients in the financial sector.

Today's training was very much focused on the user interface. I suppose some would call it Omniture bootcamp. I have had quite a bit of experience with Clicktracks in the past so most of the stuff I learnt today was not new, just the stuff an experienced online marketer would expect, only in Omniture style.

The most interesting aspect of todays training for me was the trainer, Jason. Jason has traveled down from the Omniture head office in Utah USA to conduct our training course. His approach to web analytics was re-freshing for me. To coin a kiwi phrase, "he knew his shit". Fond memories of my trips to SEO conferences in the USA came flooding back. This was the last time I heard the likes of this chap.

True website analysts are few and far between down here in New Zealand so I was happy to listen to Jason talk about how website analysis was about measuring objectives that help you meet your business goals. He talked about how the difference between tactical and strategic use of web analytics software and how crucial it is to actually be strategic. Sounds so simple yet very few businesses know how to achieve this status.

My favourite moment of the day had to be when a person from my clients marketing team (also attending the training) asked,"How do we measure the success of putting our TV advertisements on our website?", to which Jason promptly replied, "Why would you want to put your TV ads on your website, are they like really funny or something?"

Enough said really....

competing on analytics

I am not a huge reader of fiction books, however, I do take quite in interest in any business book that falls into a category that is relevant to my favourite areas of online marketing and strategy for a web 2.0 business. So, when I discovered Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, I was keen to swap the macbook for a bookmark momentarily.

I often mention my belief that an analytical mind is crucial to the success of any web 2.0 business strategy here on half-geek. The thing is that many marketers and business people who are now planning online business strategies of the future have no understanding of the real power that can be exerted over your competition when your strategy enables a genuine analytical advantage using proprietary technology.

This book is not going to tell you how to create the analytical advantage you will require to be the best. It will, however, leave you with a sound base-level of motivation to ensure that your new online business strategy includes a strong emphasis on analytical capabilities. The book will help you identify the level of analytical capability that currently exists in your business and what might be the most logical steps towards running an organization that is truly competing on analytics.

This book is not devoted purely to the online industry. In fact, the authors give examples of a number of key businesses that have been successful in implementing analytical capabilities that have allowed them to dominate their competitors. Not surprisingly, one of the businesses that is mentioned rather frequently is none other than the big G- Google.

Being a huge Yankees fan, I particularly enjoy the reference that is made to the advancements that were made by the Baseball industry in the area of business analytics. With this in mind, I'm off to order Moneyball.

multivariate testing

What is multivariate testing and what does it involve? If you plan to use your analytical creativity to drive a metrics driven marketing strategy, you are going to need to know the answer to this question.

Multivariate testing is all about optimization. It's all about implementing a structured testing process to determine the optimal way to achieve an objective. When considered in the context of Online Marketing, multivariate testing can be applied to any number of your marketing tactics, however, Google Adwords and Landing page creative are the most popular tactics for multivariate testing at the moment.

Taking Google adwords as an example, multivariate testing can be implemented to determine optimal ad creative. The process involves creating multiple 'recipes' of ad creative and testing their performance against a control group.

Not surprisingly, there are already a number of organizations that have proprietary multivariate testing software that you can invest in and implement. Offermatica and Memetrics are two leading providers in this area. I was fortunate to be see a presentation from Offermatica's Jonathan Mendez in Chicago last year. He really opened my eyes to the benefit of multivariate testing, particularly in the Adwords space where I was investing a lot of budget at the time (50K + per month).

Unfortunately, well for marketing geeks like me anyway, most New Zealand websites do not really generate high enough numbers (of any sort) to justify investment in multivariate testing software. This is not to say that you need high numbers to do basic multivariate testing. Every New Zealand website that plans to be profitable should at least master the art of the simplest form of multivariate testing, the A/B split test.

If you already have a Google account and are actively investing in adwords, you should definitely check out Google Optimizer, a beta landing page multivariate testing tool from Google. It's free and you can always rely on Google to provide excellent training and help. A great starting point for those that are new to multivariate testing.

If you are interested in progressing a bit faster, or have already got some experience in basic A/B split testing you may be interested in this list of Key Terms for data Driven Marketers. A list of definitions for the golden words of the analytically creative marketer.....

The future of marketing is upon us, and (Sorry Kevin) its not about lovemarks- it's all about facts and numbers.

metrics driven marketing strategy

Some of you may have read my post about analytical creativity and how I feel that this attribute will be crucial to online marketers of the future.

Building on the idea that online marketers of the future will be driven by strategies that are built on the foundations of business based metrics, I wanted to share a presentation by Dave McClure. His blog 500hats is one that I read most days as of late.

He actually presented this slide-show to his facebook class at Stanford university in the USA (yep they have a facebook class, how cool is that)

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crackbook fuels productivity analysis

When facebook really started to get noticed here in the land of the long white cloud there was a lot of discussion about workplace productivity (or lack thereof) as a result of employees spending too much time on the new social network. In response to this semi-outcry, I penned a post called social networking is better than smoking.

Then today I wake up and conduct my standard daily browse of the NZ herald online to find an interesting article written by Jo McCarroll entitled "I am addicted to crackbook". For starters I am amused by the nickname given to facebook by the individual who is the initial topic of this story. First it was the 'crackberry' and now we have arrived in the age of 'crackbook'- funny stuff.

The most interesting aspect of this article for me were the following statistics that were sourced from Australia:

"Australian internet filtering specialist SurfControl has estimated if one worker spends just an hour a day on Facebook, it could cost their bosses US$6200 ($7933) a year. By that rough formula, Australia's 800,000 businesses could be losing $5 billion a year."

My interest in this information from Australia does not relate to the numbers themselves, but more the fact that there are actually numbers for these corporates to crunch. Do you see where I am coming from?

My point is that the large corporations had better take a knee and thank the computer gods that they finally have some data to work with in determining actual employee productivity. My post about the fact that smokers were surely costing businesses more in terms of productivity losses was, in all honesty, speculation. I would be willing to take a gamble that my speculation was accurate though. But still, I was guessing.

No more need for intuitive decision making about employee productivity, so long as your employees do their time wasting online. If I were in charge of a large company I would make a crackbook facebook account a standard requirement of employee induction......mwaaaahahahahaha

webeather analytics

No that's not a typo in the headline, just bear with me for a moment and read on if you will.....

Have you ever noticed how your website traffic from local visitors goes down when you are enjoying fantastic weather? People don't want to sit inside and play on the computer when the sun is shining. Thats why I reckon we need webeather analytics.

I have had first hand experience with a number of websites that experience significant downturns in sales due to weather conditions (or so we believed- hence my idea for a more analytical approach). The best example was a mountain bike parts sales website. When the weather here in Auckland New Zealand was crap their sales were awesome, when the weather was great sales went down. Weathers bad: buy new parts, weathers good: go out and use new parts, it seemed to be that simple.

Some may say that this is a seasonal issue that i am talking about, however, I disagree. You can still have good mountain biking weather in the winter when weather is traditionally bad. So it's not an issue that can be effectively resolved using a seasonal segmentation approach.

It may sound crazy, however, with all the weather analysis data that can be obtained online, surely a mash-up of a reputable web analytics offering could be built whereby current and past weather data is incorporated into your standard web analytics data........

What do you guys think?

google analytics updates for web 2.0

Today it has been announced that some significant features will be added to Google Analytics in an effort by Google to further re-enforce their position in the web analytics space. The impact of the free Google Analytics service on the web metrics software industry has been significant with a lot of industry professionals now struggling to justify investing in more expensive alternatives such as (my personal favorite) Click Tracks.

Since acquiring Urchin and renaming their software, Google has made one significant upgrade to the Google Analytics interface which has been widely applauded. These latest additional features are more targeted at providing solutions to websites that fall into the 'web 2.0' category.

Whilst 2.0 technology such as Ajax is becoming more widespread on the web, it has been quite difficult for businesses to integrate it with simple web analytics software. The new Google Analytics features address this issue:

"We'll begin a limited beta test of the new Google Analytics Event Tracking capability. These new reports are designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics. In order to provide a way for you to define and track a wide variety of applications and interactions, there will be a new tracking module called ga.js. Using ga.js on your site instead of urchin.js means you can continue to take advantage of the latest advanced tracking enhancements (such as Event Tracking) as we release them"

On top of these new 2.0 features, Google Analytics plans to run an invite only beta test of a new server side version of their web metrics software. This is an excellent move by Google to address the one existing weakness of the Google Analytics offering for larger organisations who would like to benefit from the service.

compare web analytics software

Earlier this year in May, I posted about Stone Temple Consulting and their cool project which involved analyzing the most popular web analytics software packages simultaneously.

The thing with web analytics software is that no solution provider can guarantee 100% accuracy with your data and results. The data you get from your chosen piece of software is merely a guide. Thats not to say that you should not trust the data- web analytics is an essential ingredient in your quest for online success.

The point here is that by sticking with one piece of analytics software, you can generate important and consistent trends. They may be 10% wrong in reality, however, so long as they are consistent you can make educated decisions.I always have 2 analytics solution running on a website. This is done purely as a contingency or backup plan.

Stone Temple Consulting's web analytics comparison which began back in May has recently been completed. It is quite 'heavy' and more well suited to online professionals who are extremely interested in the performance of one piece of analytics software against another in a controlled environment.

Geeky I know- but very interesting!

Value your data- everyone else does

I spend every work day talking about websites and how to make them perform optimally. I am basically happy to talk about any website strategy. As a result of this I get quite a number of calls each month from various people asking for advice on website performance issues.

After quite a few years of doing this there is one thing that just AMAZES me- the disrespect people have for the data that their website generates. It's simply incredible.

Over the years that I sold traditional printed advertising I was constantly confronted with questions about how the advertising I was trying to sell would perform. The answer was always "there is no answer". Now the same people are asking the same question about their online advertising and they seem to assume that the answer is the same.

It's disturbing to think of the money that people are throwing away given their lack of knowledge around why online marketing and website's are so powerfully cost effective. Without this knowledge, websites actually have the potential to be even less cost effective than traditional marketing in the long run.