On The Trail

I’ll be off to the eMetrics conference in Santa Barbara
next week.  I’ll be blogging from there one way or another. If
you’re planning on being there drop me a line. It’s going to be great!

Webtrends has published a cookie report. It’s kind of a me too affair, but there is a wee bit of new data in it. They basically confirm the other reports out there. The bit of new data is confirmation that 3rd party cookies are the ones that are primarily rejected – an average of 12% and up to 17% in some verticals. If you’d like to read it it is here: Web Trends Cookie Deletion Report.

John Udell has an excellent entry this week about “Envisioning Information”, both the Tufte book of the same name, and the actual process. His main message is that current information visualization tools such as Excel are woefully inadequate. I’ll agree with that! I think presenting web analytics data is one of the biggest challenges facing the field today. Excel is stuck in the paper paradigm — anything you do in Excel can be printed out on a big sheet of paper. Why the limit? Computers are excellent at quickly changing the display of data (either in an animation or in response to user interaction) so why doesn’t Excel take advantage of that? Probably two reasons: it is hard to make it easy and people don’t realize the need. Udell also points out Visual i|o which sells software that tries to solve this problem. Unfortunately, Visual i|o doesn’t sell products, they sell “solutions” which, typically, are much more expensive in both time and money. What I want and what the marketplace needs is a $300 product that I can download and use with no fuss and muss.

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 that people actually are not stupid and they’re not lying either. Atlas’s results now show MORE cookie deletion than Jupiter’s original report (although it is in the same ball park).

We can argue about the exact numbers, but I think it is becoming clear that about 1/2 of internet users delete their cookies at least once a month.

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.

Continue reading How to drive Business Success Seminar

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

Continue reading Another Cookie Deletion Report

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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Continue reading Underhanded workaround to the Cookie deletion problem…

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 be collecting all your intimate tax info. Matt Belkin from Overture has a nice quote that I’ll bet was taken out of context:

“We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site,” acknowledged Matt Belkin

He probably wishes he had ended the sentence “…that the website chooses to send to us”, since that is a bit more accurate and less sinister. The article makes it sound like the analytics companies have full run of their client’s websites. They really only can get what the client chooses to send them, so the onus is really on the website to follow it’s published privacy policy.

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

Continue reading Yahoo names CDO