BusinessWeek has a truly exciting front page story today (February 21, 2010).

BusinessWeek has a truly exciting front page story today (February 21, 2010). Especially for somebody like me who repeatedly and openly declared an obsession with the state of News Media and in particular how Data and Analytics, in that regard, can help publishers increase their current performance.

BusinessWeek: AOL Moves to Build Tech `Newsroom of the Future’

I’ll leave the article to you, but have a look at the following comments (some of them, perhaps a tad naïve, but so aggressively data driven, that you have to love them):

• The [web analytics] numbers tell the growing number of journalists who work there how well their articles are performing
• Judicious use of Web-analytics software is a hallmark of what AOL Senior Vice-President Marty Moe calls the “newsroom of the future”
• We really want to enhance journalism with technology
• [Provide] journalists up-to-the-minute data on how much traffic those articles generate
• News editors’ computers come equipped with software—created internally by combining data from AOL’s own analytic tools with [other resources]
• Audience growth and audience engagement have to be the things that we judge the most off of our journalist investments
• AOL [is] considering sharing a portion of quarterly profits with staffers whose work fetches the most page views

That’s hardcore language, when you think about how data is shunned upon in other news organizations. I for one think that the newsroom of the future is data driven! Optimization is not about driving towards the lowest possible common denominator, and better performance could as easily push relevance, as compared to the general idea of pushing everybody toward easy digestible celebrity news.

Is Tim too aggressive for you ?

Cheers
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

More here:
Analytics is building the Newsroom of the Future

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It is not uncommon to see News Media Publishers drive un-segmented page views as one of their primary Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) - And one of the biggest page view drivers for online News Media today are the common use of Galleries (slideshows if you will). I would argue that those additional page views, however massive they are, don’t deliver the same value to the advertiser, as compared to the core product (the news article) - and ultimately isn’t really what the user/reader wants. I studied the usage patterns of one of the biggest News Media publishers in the US as part of an optimization dialogue and created the following four News Media content segments : Galleries News articles Front pages Other Giving me a much better understanding of where the bulk of the page views and thus the advertising inventory is generated.

It is not uncommon to see News Media Publishers drive un-segmented page views as one of their primary Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) - And one of the biggest page view drivers for online News Media today are the common use of Galleries (slideshows if you will). I would argue that those additional page views, however massive they are, don’t deliver the same value to the advertiser, as compared to the core product (the news article) - and ultimately isn’t really what the user/reader wants.

I studied the usage patterns of one of the biggest News Media publishers in the US as part of an optimization dialogue and created the following four News Media content segments:

• Galleries
• News articles
• Front pages
• Other

Giving me a much better understanding of where the bulk of the page views and thus the advertising inventory is generated. There is no surprise in the below bar chart that visualize the total number of page views per news media content segment.

Galleries make up for almost 60% of all page views, which is a dramatic number. I believe it is dramatic, because you don’t have to conduct to many studies or interviews, to find that the value of a gallery page view, is probably not the same as news article page view. I was therefore interested in telling a different story with the same data.

I summed up the total time spent on each of the content segments using a simple time spent metric. Whether you believe that total time spent on news media content segments is identical to reader attention, probably doesn’t matter too much, as I am sure you would agree that, if not, it is at least a decent proxy metric.

There might be a positive surprise in the below visualization, which quite clearly shows that galleries might have the most page views in total, but that the core news media article product (and the front page it is promoted on) is where the reader spend most his time, and I would argue his attention.

It is therefore somewhat sad to see quality news articles getting thrown into ad exchanges and sold alongside galleries. I was therefore positively surprised and happy to see that Nick Denton and his Gawker Media announce their move away from measuring success on page-views. Starting 2010 they will measure and compensate success on Unique visitors. I’m no direct fan of one metric over the other and am not sure gawker has the ability to accurately calculate a true unique visitor. I am however a fan of not valuing every page view the same, simply because, any decent publisher knows how to increase page views without adding any real value to their publication (yes, I am talking about galleries).

- OR as Nick said it “An item which gets picked up and draws in new visitors is worth more than a catnip slideshow that our existing readers can’t help but click upon.”

There is some really good commentary on the subject on The Nieman Journalism Lab’s website as well.

Cheers
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

The rest is here: 
News Media that use Galleries to increase Page-views don’t increase Time-spent (Attention)

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Tracking mobile activity has become, not just a nice to have feature, but a necessity in any mature Web Analytics tool. You of course know this already

Tracking mobile activity has become, not just a nice to have feature, but a necessity in any mature Web Analytics tool. You of course know this already. Find below a set of entertaining custom Mobile reports from Yahoo Web Analytics, using dimensions such as.

• Mobile Device Maker
• Mobile Device Model
• Mobile Device Screen size
• Carrier name

The numbers themselves are rather exciting actually, even though my point is, just to show you some of the Dimensions you can use, when doing your mobile analysis with Yahoo Web Analytics. Enjoy!

Cheers
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

Continued here:
Tracking Mobile Devices in Yahoo Web Analytics

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As I have stated repeatedly over the last year or so – I am obsessed with the state of News Media and in particular how Analytics, in that regard, can help publishers increase their current performance . This post is nothing more than exciting boyish musings, that does little to validate my conclusions

As I have stated repeatedly over the last year or so – I am obsessed with the state of News Media and in particular how Analytics, in that regard, can help publishers increase their current performance. This post is nothing more than exciting boyish musings, that does little to validate my conclusions. Anywho, this is my blog!

I was really excited to receive a Kindle the other day, as I finally got to actively try out a new reading experience in regards to my above fixation. If you think about it, kindle, or similar e-reader experiences, like what B&N or Sony peddle, provides the opportunity to deliver a digital magazine, while actually capturing a set of metrics. Still limited and few, but metrics nonetheless. My first set of purchases was (of course) Data Driven Insights with Yahoo Analytics, but also the Economist Magazine (both Amazon kindle links).

Like you, I am most sure, I tag into an endless stream of information (news), flowing in from RSS feeds, Twitter and so on and so forth. I even believe that I am somewhat selective in my limited 28 RSS feeds, following 57 folks on twitter etc. – BUT still en endless information stream nevertheless. I personally see that as somewhat of an issue, never being able tick a box and say that you are finished.

The first positive element about e-readers, speak directly to the above issue, which is that, it creates, just as with a traditional magazine (in paper), the feeling of having consumed and completed a task. I don’t believe this is a bad feeling to emulate in digital magazines. I for one have the interest and willingness to consume an editorial package that goes beyond the actual article. There is a huge difference between me letting a friend know that the December edition of Wired Magazine was really cool, as compared to me sharing a link to Evan Ratliff’s Vanish Article (which just adds to the endless stream).

The first negative element about current digital magazines on e-readers, is that they bring nothing to the party, above and beyond what I get from the printed magazine. They almost detract from what I have gotten used to from their online editions. Where I have the audio interview, the video extension, the additional pictures that didn’t fit to print etc.

Conclusion (day 3):
I honestly believe that a tablet of some sorts will provide the opportunity for a prospering digital magazine industry, I in particular see the need for a curated editorial product that can be consumed, completed and finally commented on as a whole. Everything that seems like a task - MUST create a structure to finish, which is my biggest issue with today’s endless information stream. However, I believe the digital magazine is up for a transformation which is more radical than the print replica I just read.

Please note that this comment is, of course, not about the hardware, but about the digital magazine concept. It is also difficult to figure out to what extent data mining and traditional analytics is being used in driving the digital edition – seems like NOT at all on the Kindle today (in the eye of the publisher, I am sure Amazon is mining the hell out of usage patterns). Well, more about this subject later, when I get even wiser.

Interesting digital magazine prototypes (video demos), especially the Mag+ presentations from Bonnier:

• Bonnier Mag+
• Sports Illustrated, Tablet Demo
• Wired Tablet Concept

(Please have in mind that my experience is limited to me having access to a kindle and the Economist for a few days, so don’t be shy in adding to the discussion, I would love to hear about your immediate experiences)

Cheers
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

View original post here: 
My immediate thoughts on Digital Magazines – after buying the Kindle

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The traditional Web Analytics industry tend to bring up the concept of a universal tag (a common data collection tracking script) now and then. Which is not at all bad thinking, I even participated in a session at the X change Analytics symposium in San Francisco earlier this year, on that subject.

The traditional Web Analytics industry tend to bring up the concept of a universal tag (a common data collection tracking script) now and then. Which is not at all bad thinking, I even participated in a session at the X change Analytics symposium in San Francisco earlier this year, on that subject. However, thinking it through, you might agree with me, that there is probably little point in creating a universal tag, as you (the web analytics deployment engineer) doesn’t really get anything else but yet another somewhat proprietary tag. What you might get though, is a vendor independent tag, which is probably a much better way to think about this, when brought up. If this is of your interest, I suggest you go have a look at Tealium (They call it universal tag though, but describe it as one tag, any vendor).

Having said that, I would like to suggest a different route, one that I in particularly talked about in my Adobe acquisition of Omniture post - where I suggest that the content and tracking marriage will be won or lost on a Web OS level.

BUT - while we wait for my prophecy to come true, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can move towards a simpler web analytics data collection deployment, and at the same time a much richer data set. This sounds like the deployment engineers nirvana, but it might not be that far-fetched, if we take a step back and look at what we already have.

The universal tag should not be a standardization agreement in between a few web analytics vendors or even a forced through Web Analytics Association standard, neither should it be a vendor independent tag, developed by consultants.

I suggest that web analytics vendors adopt the most popular Microformats, so that the plain vanilla tracking scripts presently in place are able to read already semantic tagged elements.

Read that again. Think about it.  You get more data, better data, with little or no effort - other than what your web analytics vendor have to do. When analytics experts spots an enterprise web property with nothing more than a plain vanilla tag, it creates a tiny giggle. It shouldn’t be that way though, that simple tag should be able, through settings, to adopt and read Microformats, so that it becomes a whole lot more sophisticated - and that without ANY web analytics tracking script hacking. Using this idea, the extreme scenario, will be that anything else BUT plain vanilla tagging is laughable, simply because you will overwrite semantic rich information.

Example

Let me provide an example to illustrate my point on how comical it is that we force ourselves to mark up important data points twice, and sometimes even more:

If we look at the following Article from one of AOL’s web properties:

We will see, through the page source, that they use Omniture Sitecatalyst and that they collect sematic rich information into a set of custom fields:

s_265.disablepipath = false;
s_265.pfxID = "nws";
s_265.prop2 = "Article";
s_265.mmxgo = true;
s_265.prop1 = "World";
s_265.channel = "us.spherenews";
s_265.linkInternalFilters = "javascript:,sphere.com";
s_265.pageName = "nws : Iran Admits Guards Beat Prisoners to Death";
s_265.prop9 = "bsd:19287999";

This type of web analytics tagging is very much standard and if anything above average level in sophistication. Well done AOL! However, if you take a second look at the page source, you will notice that they have chosen to implement the hNews Microformat.

<div class="article hnews hentry item" id="article-19287999">
<div class="postTop clrFx">
<div class="artHeadline">
<h1 class="entry-title">
Iran Admits Guards Beat Prisoners to Death</h1>
<div class="miniComm">

<p class="author vcard"><b class="fn">
ALI AKBAR DAREINI</b></p>
<span class="source-org vcard"><span class="org fn">AP</span></span>

(*I didn’t paste all the hNews Microformat used elements, so take the above as confirmation only and go look at the page source, for a full look at the use, which will actually show MORE semantic rich information that whats being tracked with Sitecatalyst)

Which just shows that the values inflated into the Omniture Sitecatalyst custom fields, are essentially a duplicate tagging effort, as this is already included into the hNews tags. This should have been, if not automatic, then nothing more than a tick-in-a-box in the Omniture settings sections, confirming that the client would like to pick up hNews tags.

Conclusion

The universal tag should not be an agreement in between web analytics vendors or even a forced through Web Analytics Association standard, neither should it be a vendor independent tag, developed by consultants. I suggest that web analytics vendors adopt the most popular Microformats, so that the plain vanilla tracking scripts presently in place are able to read already semantic tagged elements.

Merry Christmas
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

n.b. If this makes little sense, or if your thoughts are around, what’s the point? go read a) Avinash’s technical implementation post (which by its breath shows the pain in deployment) and b) Ian’s post about whence the universal tag? (which provide other great viewpoints on how to solve the current pain)

Excerpt from: 
Using Microformats to extend Web Analytics tagging

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