On The Trail

You get a fancy new laptop and the very first piece of software you install is “Tonka Firefighter”. You know you’re a geek when the second piece of software is Firefox….
Guess I’m a geek dad.

Eric Peterson is reporting that the Atlas report that came out last week is going to be revised. The original report showed that although people said they deleted their cookies regularly they actually did not, implying that they were either lying to please the surveyor or they didn’t understand the question. The restated results show [...]

I just finished watching the archived version of Jupiter’s recent webinar titled How to Drive Business Success with Web Analytics: Best Practices and Proven Strategies. Eric Peterson of Jupiter Research and Matt Belkin of Omniture were the presenters.

A new report is mixing up the cookie deletion question even more:

Atlas: Cookie Deletion Figures Exaggerated Wildly by Self-Reported Data

Cookie Death Small Potatos, More Product of Spyware Measures

A company is marketing a work around to the problem of people deleting cookies. Is it a solution or just a way to make people even more distrustful of data gathering on the web?
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Eric Peterson from Jupiter Research comments on this article in the SF Examiner. The article talks about how online tax preparation sites like TurboTax or H&R Block are using third party tools (in this case Omniture and WebTrends) to track how folks are using their sites. The main focus is on how these tools could [...]

Yahoo names Usama Fayyad as CDO.
That’s Chief Data Officer to you and I.

http://www.coffeesunanalytics.com/web-analytics/37/ — Interesting stuff. Particularly the observation that dial up users have a lower average order size. I guess I’d expect that…

With all this talk of cookies wouldn’t it be nice to actually see one?
It’s pretty easy to see the cookies that are set on your machine. If you’d like to see them (and you use Windows XP or 2000 and Internet Explorer) go to C:\documents and settings\YOURNAME\Cookies (where YOURNAME is your login name). [...]

So we’ve established that cookies are important and many people delete them. What should an online marketer do about it? Well, first lets talk a little about kinds of cookies. I’ll try to be non-technical here:
1. First Party Cookies. Cookies can only be “seen” by the site [...]