On The Trail

As you may have noticed, I didn’t get around to posting anything about days 2 or 3 of eMetrics. I figured it was more important to spend the time participating in the conference than it was to write about it. That said, the conference and the thoughts it stirred up will be providing me with [...]

A recent ClickZ article by Shane Atchinson has caused a ton of good discussion on the Web Analytics news group In a nutshell, Shane Argued that traditional linear conversion funnels are fairly useless because few people browse a site using a common conversion path. He argues that a hub and spoke model is much more [...]

The cookie debate has died down somewhat, but the problem hasn’t gone away. I have 3 interesting datapoints from three different WebTrends installations:

Client #1 uses third party cookies set from “statse.webtrends.com.” They have 19.5% of “Visitors Not Accepting Cookies” (a WebTrends term that is pretty clear…). Now in this case these cookies would be [...]

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.

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 [...]

As mentioned in the previous post two reports (1, 2) have found that about 1/2 of all users delete their cookies at least once a month. Why does this matter to an online marketer? Well, cookies are used in a variety of ways to measure the performance of online campaigns. If you’re trying to measure [...]

Cookies are the online marketer’s best friend. Basically, they are a tiny text file that a website can write to your hard drive. Although it sounds vaguely sinister, it really isn’t. They are simply used to recognize a user as they travel from page to page. For example, when you log into Amazon they will [...]