Good News in Bad Times

Omniture is one of the largest analytics providers world wide, and in the 3rd Quarter of 2008, despite doom and gloom around the business world, it announced revenue of $77.8 million, which was a 108% increase on the same time last year (unfortunately, overall they incurred a net loss).

Anyway, regardless of the net loss, the point is, that their revenues were massively up on last year, despite the worsening economy.

What does this mean for web analytics? Well, they are one of the biggest providers and obviously companies are buying their products. Which insinuates that more and more companies are interested in the performance of their website, and don't mind investing in it at this time. This will mean not only more job opportunities for web analysts, as companies look for people to decipher the endless reams of data tools like Omniture can produce, but it also means a maturing and increasing competitiveness of the online market.

With more companies using analytics packages on their sites, we should expect:

• more attention to search marketing, refinement of strategies, and increasing competition,
• more attention to site design, as site owners diagnose site design problems
• increased efficiency of websites, as site owners discover what works best

Generally it is a big plus for users, who should be able to enjoy sites which better meet their needs, are easier to use, and which are easier to find in the first place!

Google Analytics adds even more features

In October, Google Analytics released a few new enhancements to their tool, which are currently in Beta form. Unfortunately, not every Google Analytics user seems to get access to this yet, as it is just being rolled out.

Like most things, you don't see the true benefits of it until you use it, so rather than just tell you about it, I am going to show you some reasons I think it is fab!

For Search marketers, the ability to quickly compare and segment really reduces your workload. Rather than having to export and use Excel to make up your own graphs, you can quickly compare the performance of paid/natural by segmenting the e-commerce report (for example).

Another great feature is that you can now make your own reports. A useful one for search marketers can easily be made like this:
1. Click on "custom reports" in the left hand navigation
2. Make the metrics = visits, revenue and/or goals achieved
3. Make the primary dimensions = keywords, and the second dimension = medium

This way you can compare traffic from keywords (PPC vs natural) without having to switch between reports or export and make your own

For an overview of all your online channels, you might want to do a report which shows the metrics as visits and revenue, and the dimension being medium (which means marketing strategy - PPC, organic, affiliate, etc).

Google Analytics continues to evolve and become ever more useful, without becoming unwieldy like some other analytics packages. This development is a huge leap forward for analysts who want to really get down into their data. 

New Advanced Web Analytics Tool Released

American start-up, Nuconomy, launched a new web analytics tool on Tuesday. With their new product they aim to provide a very different approach to how web traffic is currently being analyzed.

Their aim is to go beyond page views to look at things like comments, ratings, uploads, purchases, multimedia (like video views) and links people share with their friends. Like Google Analytics this is a free product and is now available to the public at large. It will be interesting to see how the public responds and if they choose to use this instead of the now well established Google Analytics.

Motivational Analysis

In September, I attended the China Search Marketing Expo and China Internet Conference in Nanjing.

Although there was hardly any mention of analytics (whereas in the previous conference there was hardly any useful mentions), I found a talk by Red Brick Media's Micah Fisher-Kirshner very interesting. His talk was on motivational analysis and is one of those areas where analytics and conversion design work hand in hand.

I may be butchering his ideas/theories, but the following is my take on what he meant...

Motivational analysis involves looking at the motivation of your visitors, and then adjusting your website to try and better address their desires.

How do you know your customers motivation? Well what they type into the search box is basically them telling you what they are after! While this might sometimes be quite a short query, research shows that queries are getting longer - and therefore searchers are telling us more and more specifically what they are after.

By cutting your search visitor data by the term they arrived on, you can see how well your site meets your users motivations.

E.g. if you get a big bounce rate for customers whose search included the term 'cheap', then maybe your prices are scarily high
If you get lots of queries with location requests (e.g. law firm manchester) who don't then find your store locator on site, maybe you need to make that page more visible

This is such an interesting area, and there is way too much to talk about in a short blog post, however in future blogs I will give more examples of how you can use this kind of analysis, and you can also visit Micah's blog

Analytics always needs a pinch of salt

As an analytics practitioner I can often despair and get discouraged by the inherent inaccuracies within web analytics data.

Tags won't execute, people will disable cookies, there are a ton of reasons why the data could be imperfect.

Thats when I have to remind myself. Absolutes are irrelevant. What you need is to see the trends, because in web analytics, trends will hint at the truth.

Who cares if you can't tell exactly how many visitors visited your site. Is it more than last month? Are certain sources sending more visitors than others?

What you should do:

1. Compare to the previous month, is it up or down?
2. Compare to the market using competitive intelligence tools, like Hitwise or Google Trends lab - are you normal?
3. Compare to this time last year?
4. And after you have trended across all relevant time periods, compare and segment within your data - products, terms, sources, etc.

With all these percentages and ratio's, you won't need to know exact numbers!

In Web analytics, there is no absolute. You have to let go of perfectionism.

Google Analytics - Getting Technical

While many people might be satisfied with the web analytics packages available on the market, Google has now made Google Analytics available on Google Code.

Google Code is Google's site for developers interested in open-source development, and the site contains open source Google code  for such Google products as Google Notebooks, Spreadsheet, Calender and now Analytics.

Google Analytics on Google Code will  enable developers to create a custom analytics installation for their sites.

This new development should be of interest to anyone with a Google Analytics account, because every business and website is unique, and one size does usually not fit all as far as analytics goes.

You can use this new open source code to test playing around with tracking e-commerce and flash elements, customise filters and time constraints to suit your own site or simply use it to increase your understanding of how Google Analytics works.

Google Trends - check your competitors

Most people working in SEM would by now know about Google Trends, which is a free Google labs tool that I have fallen in love with and could play with all day long. One particularly good way to use it, is to enable you to check out how your site is doing against your competitors.

In the websites tab, you can enter any URL you like (up to four, just separate them with comma's), and Google will give you a graph showing Daily unique visitors.

This data can be segmented by region, you can vary the time period, and it also gives you a list of other searches visitors to that site made, and other sites they visited.

And? How can you use this? Well, a few suggestions...
- See how your competitors are doing - what sites are their visitors visiting that maybe you can target for ad space? What search terms are their visitors using that maybe you should optimise for? Are they successful in regions you haven't yet considered?
- Whats going on in your industry? Are you getting a decent slice of the pie? Is that fall in traffic due to something you have done wrong, or are your competitors experiencing it (and vice versa)? Are there competitors that you hadn't thought of?

Many of the features in this Google Labs product seem to be turning up in the Beta Google Ad Planner. I have just received access today, so hope to blog about that soon too!

Timezones FTW!

Well it seems that the China office has done it again. After my earlier post, once again the early eastern SEO news interception and distribution system (EESEONIADs) seems to be intercepting all of the juicy news before anyone else.

This time around, Aidan even managed to beat the Official Google AdWords blog with his post about the new changes to the keyword tool. At this pace, if the China office keeps this trend up they will soon be SEO soothsayers - predicting the search landscape for years to come...

Nailing Jelly to the Wall

Estimating search engine traffic by keyword is somewhat of a holy grail to me. Not only because everyone wants to know this precious information, but because, with all the data now available regarding searchers and searching, it kind of feels like something you should be able to work out.

If you look at the analytics for your own website I am sure you will see, that even if your ranking for a particular term remains constant for weeks and weeks, your traffic can vary, sometimes greatly. This is because your traffic depends not only on ranking but on a myriad of other things, such as:

PPC
Whether people are bidding for PPC on that term, how many PPC ads there are, what the copy of those PPC ads are, the competitiveness and commerciality of those terms.

Natural
Who is ranking around you, are they big brands? What is their copy? What is your own copy and your own brand strength?

Seasonal
What day of the week is it? what time of the year? is it sales time? Has your industry just been on the news for scandal, or in Heat magazine because all the celebrities are using it?

Despite my negative spin on this so far, many companies and individuals estimate traffic, for example;
Google Adwords
SEO book
Miva
Wordtracker
Wordze

While it might be true that I will never get better than rough estimates, if all these companies are happy to continue to try and nail jelly to the wall, then I just can't give up either.

ClickTale launches new analytical help

A new analytics program has been launched by ClickTale. For a long time analysts have been searching for ways to measure what happens in the actual online “shopping cart”. They have been trying to measure things like; how long does it take to complete a sales or application form, at which point is a potential sale lost and the reasons behind the buyers change of heart.

ClickTale answers all these questions and gives analysts deeper insight into the conversion process. It specifically measures;

• Which fields take the longest to complete
• Which fields are left blank and may be superfluous
• How often errors occur that force visitors to refill a field

This new found information allows usability experts and analysts alike to expand their range of tools and deliver more accurate and even more relevant statistics when conducting tests and studies. Best of all, this tool is freely available and requires minimum setup.