As a start-up you rarely have the luxury to set standards and drive an industry. You simply cannot wait for the industry to catch up to your thinking, as some of your few advantages are SPEED and AGILITY - you bend the rules any way possible and then figure out how to comply when you grow up. That said.

As a start-up you rarely have the luxury to set standards and drive an industry.

You simply cannot wait for the industry to catch up to your thinking, as some of your few advantages are SPEED and AGILITY - you bend the rules any way possible and then figure out how to comply when you grow up.

That said.

It is wonderful and probably one of the most pleasurable elements of working for a public company like Yahoo!, that I can participate in setting the agenda for my industry.

We took a decision which would require all users of Yahoo! Web Analytics to:

1. Disclose that they do web analytics and that it is done by Yahoo!
2. Provide a tracking opt-out link in their privacy policy

There is no doubt that this is working against any potential adoption goals we have, BUT it is the right thing to do! AND I am very happy to see that we (WAA) in the voice of Jim Sterne, the Chairman of the Web Analytics Association, agree and endorse these steps taken by Yahoo! I honestly believe that it is inevitable that most web analytics providers will require that their clients abide by this approach as well.

Cheers
Dennis

Letter from the Chairman,

November 20th, 2008

As an independent, non-profit organization, the WAA is sometimes asked for its position on relevant topics in the web analytics industry. Privacy is important to all of us as a misunderstanding of our tracking technologies can lead to distrust. Therefore, I wanted to share a recent question about page tagging and web beacons being mistaken for spyware as well as the WAA’s official response.

In 1999, Seth Godin taught us that opt-in is the right way to treat people regarding email. At the core of opt-in is notification and choice. Now that the public is becoming more aware of passive tracking technologies, the Web Analytics Association believes that there needs to be a clear, visible way for site visitors to make the choice to opt-out of web analytics tracking. Transparency as to what information is being tracked and how the data is being used is a must. It is simply an inevitable future privacy requisite from visitors on your website.

The Web Analytics Association endorses Yahoo! actions to provide transparency, notification, choice and control to visitors. Additionally, Yahoo! is taking this stance one step further by requiring and enforcing that websites who are using their web analytics tool disclose this fact to their visitors and provide an opt-out link for visitors who wish not to be tracked.

We believe it is not only good practice to expand your website privacy policy along the lines of what Yahoo! is doing, but it’s inevitable that most web analytics providers will require that their clients abide by this approach as well. As a corporate member of the Web Analytics Association, we are pleased that Yahoo! has taken this leadership position in the industry.

Privacy remains integral to our business, and consent is perhaps the largest component of building reputation and trust. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Jim Sterne
Chairman, Web Analytics Association

Go here to read the rest:
Web Analytics Transparency, Notification, Choice and Control to Visitors

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Ok Continuing to cover the 7 habits of omniture user, here are two more featues which are must use. This post covers the how and why you should use ominture targets and bookmarks. Omniture Targets: Setting Targets feature in omniture is great!, it helps you measure your performance against benchmark

Ok Continuing to cover the 7 habits of omniture user, here are two more featues which are must use. This post covers the how and why you should use ominture targets and bookmarks.

Omniture Targets:

Setting Targets feature in omniture is great!, it helps you measure your performance against benchmark. Target is very helpful for marketing campaign effectiveness,

When you set up targets for all your KPI’s, sitecatalyst shows both the actual and your target giving you a single graph overview of your performance.

How to setup omniture targets?

Ok here’s how you can quickly set up Targets

In Omniture Sitecatalyst 14.0, Click on My Account–> Targets (Manager)

Add Targets, here are fields description and some tips!

• Make sure your in the reporsuite you need to set targets for, that’ll be autopopulated
• Create a friendly target name ( Add to Cart daily, Daily Orders etc)
• In the scope section, select if you want to apply to all site or select default or custom target scope. For more granularity select the type by clicking “select item”
• Period: Select the period, and for granularity you can select day weekly or entire period. Now it’s suggested you use daily or weekly ( example daily order value, daily orders, orders/visit and weekly visits to certain section etc)

Accountability Matrix:

Accountability matrix is optional, but if you do want to use it go ahead and define the “X axis” and “Y axis” for your report.

Other useful tips:

• Omniture Sitecatalyst allows you to download all your targets in form of csv
• You can upload targets using the default template on omniture sitecatalyst
• You can also upload accountability matrix using the default template provided.

Why would you need targets?

• Tracking KPI: If your business team has set benchmark ( highly recommended) for all your KPI’s, Target can be set for all those to help you understand how your performing compared to benchmarks set.
• Marketing Campaigns: if you plan a marketing campaign for coming holiday season and want to understand the effectiveness of it either by comparing to last season or setting new benchmarks
• Traffic: If you plan to track visitors to your site and compare it to your expected results or compare to last year/season traffic, target is a must use
• Specific Metrics: Let’s assume your running a dedicated campaign for a certain city, and your capturing that in prop/evar, you can set target to see how your campaign worked in terms of traffic and conversion

End result of a Target in Omniture Sitecatalyst

Omniture Bookmarks:

Bookmarks are like shortcuts to your reports, very helpful when you create custom reports using calculated metrics.

How to set up bookmarks?

Open the report you want to add in your bookmarks and click on the bookmark icon in the toolbar. Make sure you create folders for specific section, this is quite helpful when you want to segregate reports.

Why would you need bookmarks?

• Bookmarks can help you get quickly to a report, it can be default or a calculated metrics
• Help segregate your acquisition, marketing, engagement and conversion report in one go
• Share it among your team/colleagues

P.S: The other posts in this series.

1. 7 habits of effective omiture user
2. Omiture alerts, the how and why

Do you have innovative way of using targets or bookmarks, or some out of the box use of omniture targets and bookmarks, Add on via comments!

Web Analytics India

Omniture Targets and bookmarks, the how and why

Similar Posts:

• 7 habits of highly effective omniture sitecatalyst users
• Omniture SiteCatalyst alerts, the how and why?
• Omniture Site Catalyst Excel Client Update
• Site Catalyst 14.0 to go live during Omniture Summit 08
• Power Strategies for Web Analyst using Omniture SiteCatalyst

View original here: 
Omniture Targets and bookmarks, the how and why

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Continuing our Things I Wish I Knew… series, Alex Cohen offers his Top 10:

1. You are Not the First Web Analyst - You do not need to invent web analytics. Somebody has encountered the problem you have. Establish a great base of knowledge by buying books like Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, joining the Yahoo Web Analytics Forum and subscribing to every measurement blog you can find.
2. Go to Emetrics NOW - Your world view is likely to be very myopic: all about your tool, your website, your business. You need perspective. The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit will open your eyes, especially if you’re just starting.
3. Your Tool Can Do More Than You Think - Most people assume that what you get out of the box is the limit of your tool. This is usually wrong 99% of the time. You must not be afraid to ask your vendor about what else it can do.
4. Start a Blog or Business - If you don’t really, really own the numbers you’re responsible for, you’ll never really, really learn the data. Pick some side project, a blog or a business, and measure the hell out of it. Trust me, you will learn a ton.
5. Automate Your Life - I’m repeating June here, but you simply must automate as much as possible. You will be stuck in Excel hell unless you can use technology better.
6. Test! Survey! - Repeat after me: not everything you need to know is inside of your conventional web analytics tool. Say it again. Now, do it. There is NO excuse not to start gaining experience. If you listened to #4, then you don’t need anyone’s permission.
7. Learn Other Disciplines (like SEO and Paid Search) - You will be better at your job if you understand what you’re measuring. Start dabbling in paid search, SEO, affiliates, email, WHATEVER. Just stop focusing on measuring and start focusing on doing the things you measure.
8. Communication is the #1 Skill You Need - Measurement without action is failure. If you cannot communicate your findings and persuade people to act, you will not be effective. Learn to present. Master the executive summary. Be one with PowerPoint.
9. Be Not Afraid of Technological Terms - I’m not a technically oriented person. But, the very nature of internet marketing requires that you at least grasp the basics. The nature of web measurement requires that you grasp a step above the basics. Like it or not, you need to tackle this sooner rather than later.
10. Teach Early and Often - It is very easy for people to start relying on you to measure. Unfortunately, this can quickly become limiting to your career growth. Measure for manager and he’ll optimize for a day, teach him to measure and he’ll optimize for life!

Alex Cohen writes Digital Alex, a marketing strategy blog. He handles Strategic Account Management, web analytics and multivariate testing at Commerce360, a search marketing software company based outside of Philadelphia.

10-Mar-08 12:00 PM
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Top 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started in Web Analytics #2

Popularity: 10% [?]

Companies with projects that deal with the internet in someway always surprise me. Say a company like Ford was evaluating the purchase of a major piece of machinery that was expected to increase plant efficiencies.

Companies with projects that deal with the internet in someway always surprise me.

Say a company like Ford was evaluating the purchase of a major piece of machinery that was expected to increase plant efficiencies. These efficiencies resulted in the plant being able to produce x more number of cars per day.

There’s no way executives at Ford would approve the purchase without their finance department performing some analysis.

Specifically, at a bare minimum I’m sure executives would want to know the project’s net present value (NPV), payback period (PP) and return on investment (ROI).

None of the above calculations are difficult (in fact, a few seconds in Excel produces the results!), the work all lays in the underlying assumptions that feed the simple formulas.

For most web firms however ROI is often the only metric ever discussed (and often only at a very high level). It isn’t that NPV or PP is impossible to calculate for web-based projects, but the analysis can be slightly more difficult. Often the difficulty is only rooted in the fact that many people don’t understand the relationships between revenues and costs behind online businesses.

I’ve taken a stab at writing a business case that demonstrates how to use web analytics to evaluate a project’s net present value. Please check out the following two files and let me know what you think!

Download the business case and the background!	Download the NPV analysis and the answer!

The rest is here: 
Web Analytics and Net Present Value - Part 1

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“The Web Analytics Report 2008″ is a long report. No, it is a “very long report,” writes its principle analyst, Phil Kemelor, who is vice president of strategic consulting for Semphonic, in the report’s opening words. “That is intentional.” It is 343 pages of user guide, thorough backgrounders on web analytics applications, technology and acquisition — and the meat of the report, in-depth reviews of 15 web analytics products and services. Long reports are bad when they are poorly organized. This is not a bad report. Nobody should have to read the whole thing, but that is only because nobody should have to read everything about every product.

There is no perfect technology, so good reviewers, particularly in emerging markets, must go beyond capabilities and reveal what’s missing, what doesn’t work and how to avoid known mistakes. It is thrilling to know what one could do, but it is profitable also to know what not to do. This report has no shortage of reasonable skepticism and warnings. The healthy doubt shows up early, in an introductory section about standards. Referring to the WAA’s standards, the authors observe, “It will be interesting to see whether consensus can be built around these standards.” Indeed.

Disappointingly however, the authors seem to have made no effort to discern vendors’ current or planned compliance with the WAA standards [PDF], leaving that homework to the reader: “While we can expect some vendors to tout that they are compliant with WAA standards and perhaps even change some existing reporting terms, you may end up with more investigation work to validate these claims.” This seems to say that standards are important, but not important enough to matter when choosing among vendors and products. Or perhaps it was just too difficult a task to include in this sort of report — but it would have been good to know why the authors decided to leave the further investigation to us. It seems as though they didn’t even ask the vendors the obvious question — are you now or do you plan to follow the WAA standards? Given the industry’s frustration with comparing analytics numbers between systems, greater attention to this issue would have raised the report’s value considerably. Perhaps that will be the subject of the next report.

The report does a good job of identifying the industry’s dirty little secrets that make some metrics — unique visitors comes to mind immediately — less than solid. A “data Accuracy” section describes the strengths and weaknesses of data capture technologies. Like every honest practitioner, the report acknowledges that many numbers are best used to identify trends, not absolute quantities. Caveat emptor. Or perhaps caveat counters, since no product or service is immune to the vagueness of certain Internet technologies.

Part of choosing a web analytics solution is to understand the business process it fits into. The report does a fine job of walking the reader from having no analytics to evaluating, choosing and implementing the solution. This is not merely a technical description, but a description of how analytics can meet management objectives, relate to or be part of organizational units (marketing? IT? finance?) and how it can interact with the people who build and maintain the web site.

In an emerging market, web analytics constantly faces new challenges as new web technologies are developed. The authors identify blogs, Flash, RSS, user-generated content and the use of qualitative analysis (surveys and such) as areas where vendors are racing to keep up with how data is delivered and gathered. At the same time, they propose that we are on the cusp of a fourth generation of web analytics (where do the years go?), in which “analytics tools begin to mature into the ‘brains’ behind website marketing and content generation.” If true, this is not entirely good news except for those of us who secretly long to become the center of attention. The same data we generate for reporting can and will be used for personalization, but since when was it a good idea to use the same system for production and reporting? Am I really going to tie data from Omniture, etc., back into my production system? Probably not. The good news is that this sort of bull… hyperbole only shows up here. The other 342 pages are practical and down-to-earth.

The report’s greatest strength is its scenario-based comparison of web analytics solutions. The rest could have been written by any reasonably bright person from information found on the web. The comparisons clearly came from in-depth discussions with actual users of each of the products and services. Each offering is rated many ways, based on types and purposes of the site being measured, who will manage and use the system and its reports, what kind of offerings — software, services, methods — the vendor offers. The authors and editors obviously put great effort into organizing the data into tables that make it easy to look up and compare the various offerings. If they hadn’t, the report would probably be 700 pages and nearly useless.

The result is a report that overcomes the vendors’ marketing noise to truly differentiate the products and services being reviewed. For each scenario, the offerings are rated as “Likely,” “Possible” or “Unlikely” to meet the needs. Screenshots and descriptions back up the conclusions. For example, to choose a random offering, IndexTools is ranked as “Likely” to suit multi-site analysis and interactive marketing analysis, but unlikely to be suitable for an application-driven web site. More important, the authors tell you why they came to those conclusions, which makes it easy for you to decide if you agree or not. Often, the greater value in these kinds of reviews is in the thinking behind the conclusion, not the conclusion itself, so this report earns high marks for explaining itself.

There isn’t much missing. Robots and spiders are treated as a problem to be filtered or blocked, rather than being essential to anybody who wants to be found via search. Open-source analytics packages are described very briefly at the end, which isn’t as serious an omission as the lack of any explanation as to why they are described so briefly. Are they that useless?

Bottom line? This report is well worth the price. While staying grounded, it paints a picture of what web analytics can be and how to get there. It makes you want to go out and measure something.

About Nick Arnett

Nick Arnett is Director of Business Intelligence Services at Liveworld Inc.

About CMS Watch’s Web Analytics Review

View a sample chapter of the Web Analytics Review from CMS Watch (registration required). The list of vendors and the table of contents are available without registration.

13-Feb-08 10:00 AM
See original here:
Review: The Web Analytics Report 2008

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