On The Trail

Today, a little web analytics advice from Donald Rumsfeld:

The Unknown
As we know, 
There are known knowns. 
There are things we know we know. 
We also know 
There are known unknowns. 
That is to say 
We know there are some things 
We do not know. 
But there are also unknown unknowns, 
The ones we don’t know 
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense [...]

We just finished up a round of usability testing on our site at work. It was incredibly frustrating in many ways. Watching person after person unable to complete the most simple task … I wanted to jump through the 1 way mirror and shake them: JUST CLICK ON THE LEFT NAV, dammit! Frustrating because although I [...]

There has been a ton of discussion on the Yahoo group about Tealeaf, particularly why and how it is different from traditional Web Analytics apps. Since I’m familiar with both, I thought I’d give my perspective.
Tealeaf collects everything. I mean everything. Every cookie, every image request, every bit of information entered in forms, everything. Their [...]

I thought it odd when Avanash titled one of his posts “Web Analytics Demystified” since that’s kinda sorta an established web analytics brand. It seemed an especially poor choice of title because it was a post about web analytics basics which were covered in Web Analytics Demystified (the book) which was written by Eric Peterson. Now Eric Peterson [...]

It’s been a long time since I posted here, but one of my new years resolutions is to post more often. Plus, what with new GA and Microsoft code being released the cry for an update to my WA Detector script has been deafening. Well, actually only Jaques Warren of http://www.waomarketing.com/ asked for an update, [...]

I’m back! I’m attending a WebTrends conference today (worth it if you’re into WebTrends), and conferences get me in the posting mood.
Today Ian Thomas points out Live 3d Stats which IMO suffers from a very bad name, but might actually be worth the money. One problem with working with web analytics is that it is really [...]

Big changes, to tell you the truth. I’ve gone and switched jobs. Previously I was at a small consulting company focused on many smallish lead gen and very small e-commerce sites. As of this week I’m working at a largish online retailer as their lead web analyst. Life is good: I realized today that my [...]

As luck would have it I’m responsible for web analytics on several lead generation sites. I’ve been working diligently for many moons to “close the loop” on these leads so I can optimize for leads that close, instead of just optimizing for leads in general. I’ve had pretty good success with this approach, but it [...]

Well, instead of spending my free time writing interesting blog posts, I’ve been fooling around with my software and hosting. The blog looks almost exactly the same on my new Wordpress site, but I’ve managed to break all my permalinks. Eh, I don’t have that many posts anyway so I guess it’s not that big a [...]

Some recent posts on the Yahoo! Web Analytics board gave me an idea. For quite a while I’ve had debugging bookmarklets for Omniture and WebTrends. They are immensely helpful and way more convenient than digging through the source looking for an elusive tag. The idea I had was to wrap them all up into [...]