As I walk cheerfully down 6th Avenue, on my way to the Yahoo! 18th street office this Saturday morning, I stop by a red light, well, first, because you are supposed to (I believe), but mostly because I am hand in hand with my two daughters. In this obviously selfish action by me, I slow down a chap behind me, who in all his wisdom, lets me know what a jerk I am! I’ll be honest with you – this is not the first time somebody on the streets of New York have let me know their feelings about my traffic maneuvering choices This got me thinking about how we choose to label each other, and how that is coming through the recent launched twitter lists.

As I walk cheerfully down 6th Avenue, on my way to the Yahoo! 18th street office this Saturday morning, I stop by a red light, well, first, because you are supposed to (I believe), but mostly because I am hand in hand with my two daughters. In this obviously selfish action by me, I slow down a chap behind me, who in all his wisdom, lets me know what a jerk I am! I’ll be honest with you – this is not the first time somebody on the streets of New York have let me know their feelings about my traffic maneuvering choices

This got me thinking about how we choose to label each other, and how that is coming through the recent launched twitter lists. So before assembling a posse and hunting down my new friend from JCPenny; I thought I would collect all the lists my twitter followers use for me. You can see the result of this in a tag cloud below (I used wordle.net to create it):

So it seems like, I might actually be less of a Jerk and more of an analytics person. Personally I am fond of the terms sexy and data nerd. Ha!. (Perhaps they are actually conflicting labels though.. hmm). The other cool thing is that my blog is supposed to be about Analytics, Media and Marketing. Close eh?

Have a great weekend.. I am off for a walk around Chelsea (with the same two girls and traffic standards).

Cheers
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

Read the original:
Analytics guru …or just a Jerk!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Love it when web analytics data paints a clear picture (even if it is not a pretty one).

Love it when web analytics data paints a clear picture (even if it is not a pretty one).

I was happily segmenting data in the quest for actionable insights when I came across segmentation by page type (hat tip to Gabriel), specifically for e-commerce sites. Outside of the homepage you typically have two main types in an online store:

• section/category pages and
• item/product detail pages

You should be able to tag/segment your data by page type with any web analytics package - if you have a Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Web Analytics you get the page type tagging out of the box (very cool).

Then pull up your top landing page report, segmented by page type and look at some conversion and revenue metrics. Where does most of your traffic land? On a section or item page? What is the conversion rate per page type?

(Click for larger versions)

Answering these questions is inherently interesting, but the main value is to further segment by paid source, e.g. Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing.

In one particular case, I found that most Adwords traffic was being sent to section pages (not sure if this was intentional), but the data now shows me that sending folks to item pages could yield far better results:

Note that no matter what tool you use, you should be able to get this sort of data pretty easily as long as you have proper campaign tagging enabled.

Even if your data is not as clear-cut as in this example, you can now review your PPC strategy and make changes if necessary as you are in charge of specifying the landing page URLs.

View post: 
Segment by page type

Popularity: 11% [?]

Noticed that Marcel LeBrun replied to my last post on Radian6 now goes where no one else has (to my knowledge)  - thought I’d highlight it here. Marshall, You highlighted an important feature that is a significant part of our system (and not always obvious at first glance).

Noticed that Marcel LeBrun replied to my last post on Radian6 now goes where no one else has (to my knowledge) - thought I’d highlight it here.

Marshall,
You highlighted an important feature that is a significant part of our system (and not always obvious at first glance). We don’t just index content, but we also crawl and index numerous social metrics about the content and *continue* to track these metrics dynamically as they change over time. These are all the “actions” or “digital breadcrumbs” that are left behind as people interact with the content and they tell you there is attention, activity, engagement, going on with the content. And yes, we allow the user to view content and trends, not just by # of articles, but by any of these metrics which can give you huge insights as you pointed out in your post.

Also, we don’t just store the “latest counts” but keep the whole history so you can also see how the metrics changed over time for a specific piece of content or user. For example, if you see a video in the “river of news” with 130,000 views, but are wondering if the views (i.e. attention) is still accelerating vs fading, just click on the metric you want (view count) and you can see a sparkline of the views over time revealing if the growth rate has flattened or increased. Try it with a tweet, for example, and we will show you the person’s follower count as it has changed over time (which reveals interesting patterns too).

I’m glad you noticed this… our team works very hard on this capability.
Cheers,
Marcel

I noticed, and it was a sweet spot, that Radian6 captures video “views” and that is a tremendous time saver, if you ask me.  Here’s an example:

Without this feature, you’d have to open up each url, and look at it; plus, as Marcel said, the number of views is updated dynamically, to reflect the most recent information.

Impressive.   Same thing goes for Twitter Followers.

On another note, the migration of this blog  to a new hosting env was successful but there’s still some things I’m working on – and haven’t decided on – permalink mapping isn’t work the same way which affects links in Search Engines  (but most of my traffic isn’t from Search Engines) – not a big deal at this point.

See more here: 
More on using Radian6 to collect Video Views

Popularity: 17% [?]

I know I know, comparing data from different sources will give me different results , but what if the values of my report are binary: 0 or 1, yes or no, new or return visitor, female or male?

I know I know, comparing data from different sources will give me different results, but what if the values of my report are binary: 0 or 1, yes or no, new or return visitor, female or male? In this case I don' care as much about the absolute occurrences of Zeroes and Ones, but rather the proportion between the two values. I will then optimize for the value that gets > 50%. So if I somehow knew the gender mix on my site I could change the color scheme? Sounds like a decent optimization idea, right?

Well, I looked at two recent/updated sources of demographic data: Google Ad Planner (via Jeff) and Yahoo! Web Analytics (via Dennis) and compared data from the same site, an established multimillion dollar online retailer.

From Ad Planner:

From YWA:

What I don't understand is why one tool says there are mainly men visiting the site whereas the other says just the opposite. Granted, the way the data is computed is undoubtedly different, but I am still left with the decision: do I optimize for one or the other?

Or are they both right? Perhaps I should optimize my site based on the source of the traffic: traffic from Google gets stylesheet A and traffic from Yahoo! properties gets stylesheet B.

Has anyone had luck in doing onsite personalization based on demographics, or are demographics best used in ad campaigns?

See the rest here:
Demographic data in Analytics

Popularity: 28% [?]

Read iMediaConnection’s 4 technologies that are killing the URL by Jonathan Richman earlier today and thought it was a good article.  Meant to post this earlier but my blog seemed to be down for part of the day ( I think it’s due to DreamHost and the Cloud hosting environment ). One point Jonathan makes is that most online traffic comes from search engines , anyway, and since the first few positions in the search results (of Google , for the most part) is all that most searchers ever click on, most of the traffic that could come to your URL, won’t ever. He goes a little further out in saying that browsers like Google Chrome might end up bypassing search results and pick the best results for you, ahead of time, limiting choice even more; not sure I agree that’s happening - but I think it’s worth noting.  Jonathan mentions using Tiny Urls, while helpful for Twitter , defeat branding and also make it harder to track traffic, for a variety of reasons I covered in a recent post - has Twitter become more important than Google for traffic generation?

Read iMediaConnection’s 4 technologies that are killing the URL by Jonathan Richman earlier today and thought it was a good article.  Meant to post this earlier but my blog seemed to be down for part of the day (I think it’s due to DreamHost and the Cloud hosting environment ).

One point Jonathan makes is that most online traffic comes from search engines, anyway, and since the first few positions in the search results (of Google, for the most part) is all that most searchers ever click on, most of the traffic that could come to your URL, won’t ever.

He goes a little further out in saying that browsers like Google Chrome might end up bypassing search results and pick the best results for you, ahead of time, limiting choice even more; not sure I agree that’s happening - but I think it’s worth noting.  Jonathan mentions using Tiny Urls, while helpful for Twitter, defeat branding and also make it harder to track traffic, for a variety of reasons I covered in a recent post - has Twitter become more important than Google for traffic generation?

The last thing mentioned is QR codes- and you can imagine the difficulties site analytics would have tracking this  - as there are several actions (a simple program) that can be embedded into these codes.

QR codes are used in a lot of different advertising situations.

To me, what this says - you need to have  a strategy and measurement around it, to deal with the way your audiences are using emerging technologies and, to a large extent, businesses don’t have a clue.

Hmm … seems like this subject would make a great article for Entrepreneur.com -

See the original post here:
Social Media and URLs

Popularity: 12% [?]