On The Trail

Today’s ClickZ article by Shane Atchinson (Branding Versus Direct Response: Sound Familiar?) was thought provoking. He asks why web analysts currently focus so much on the direct response metrics instead of focusing on long term customer relationships and branding. The answer (as I’m sure he knows) is simple: it is easy to measure direct response [...]

Well, I’m just back from Vegas. I’ve never been there before and I had a ton of fun. [[image:paris.jpg:Paris Casino Sign with Calculator:right:0]]
While I was there, just to keep my head in the game, I tried to figure out how they were measuring the success of their multiple marketing techniques. The advertising and marketing that [...]

There’s a new KPI making the rounds called the “Net Promoter Score”. The score is pretty simple. It’s based on a single survey question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend”, 10 = very likely, 1 = not likely. Subtract the percentage who answer 1-6 from the percentage who answer 9 or [...]

WebTrends just started the promotion for their new version, apparently it is slated for release in late April. They’re calling it “WebTrends Marketing Lab”. They’ve put a PDF up on their site about it here:
WebTrends Marketing Lab (PDF)
From the pamphlet there look to be a few new and noteworthy features, so it looks like a [...]

There is an interesting article on Slate today regarding analytics and the difficulties of knowing exactly how many people visit a website. He compares numbers from comScore, Nielsen/NetRatings and Slate’s own IBM SurfAid analytics and finds that they are quite different. These differences ALWAYS crop up whenever you measure a site using different systems, and [...]

I just finished reading Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I’m still not sure exactly why they called it that, but it was interesting from an analytics perspective, and it was quite fun to read. Stephen Levitt, the economist who co-wrote it, seems to like to find odd data sets [...]

Nature.com reviews a study that shows that people can make accurate assessments of a website in 50 milliseconds. This actually isn’t that big a surprise. Malcolm Gladwell has written a whole book on the subject called Blink. This just underscores the importance of your key entry pages. Have a high bounce rate? Have someone take [...]

A nice succinct recipie for success from someone who has proven his ideas with several paydays:
“People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.”

Peter Merholtz of Adaptive Path comments on the (very important) link between analytics and design. Linking updated design to (hopefully) improved results is a pretty obvious win for everyone: the designers prove their worth and the business people understand what they got for their money.
One thing he didn’t mention is the idea of [...]

A few months ago Google purchased Urchin — a very solid mid-level web analytics tool. This weekend Google released a re-packaged version of Urchin as Google Analytics . It’s a tag based system that is hosted at Google (so it requires no software installation, only the addition of a bit of HTML code to each [...]