Posted by Andrew Edwards | January 17, 2012
Let's suppose there is an imaginary company in the packaged goods business that is a heavy user of web analytics data to improve their online product offerings, campaigns, and digital partnerships. And let us suppose they had for several years used outside web analytics expertise to deliver much-needed actionable insights to their business users. The business teams have been getting good, actionable information and have begun to rely more heavily on the outside experts who know the tools and techniques necessary to generate value.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards | January 3, 2012
Another title for this column might have been "Who Even Cares About Privacy?" or "Since There Is No Privacy Anymore, What Now?"
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Posted by Andrew Edwards | December 5, 2011
Often considered hopelessly out of the money in the horse race of web analytics, governments around the world still publish guidelines and establish standards, all of which are available for free. Plus, the fact they are not necessarily cutting edge makes them good yardsticks by which to measure where the broad middle settles when it comes to standards, understanding, and expectations as regards to analytics.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards | November 21, 2011
The question may be age-old, but it bears stating afresh: is it better to have your tools conform to the paradigm of compatibility/workability; or unique/targeted (assuming the latter is also "better at what it does" than the former)?
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Posted by Andrew Edwards | November 7, 2011
It was easier than we thought. It took us not much more time than we'd planned. The developers put in a universal tag. We enabled a spreadsheet. We served cookies (at least that's what I heard). The test data came in. We clicked some buttons in the analytics tool and got dashboards. When the site launched, the early word was that we had increased our visitors.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards | October 24, 2011
A recent study by IBM says that 56 percent of CMOs are not ready to be held accountable for marketing ROI - including web ROI. According to the study, a minority of them are looking to the web as a source of market intelligence. Most continue to rely on other marketing reports of a more traditional nature, and the article especially notes a lack of adoption of digital marketing analytics.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards | October 10, 2011
"Actionable" is one of those new words that has sprung up in the digital economy, typically referring to data or events that can be the foundation for a resulting beneficial effort on the part of the possessor or recipient of the "actionable" item. In the world of measurement and web analytics, it often is used to define an insight gained from understanding visitor behavior: "Understanding that the intra-page behavior in our download funnel was indicating a long load time after clicking certain choices, gave us an action item." Meaning: "That insight was actionable."
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Posted by Andrew Edwards | September 16, 2011
The premise of online advertising is not just that people see ads like they do in print, but that the effectiveness of the ad is supposed to be directly measurable. Based on measurement using web analytics, the enterprise can model customer behavior and plan future campaigns - at least that is how it's been sold to us all. But what happens when the measurement process is so truncated as to become almost a parody of measurement? Who wins the race when we just stop at the beginning like a balky thoroughbred refusing to get out of the gate?
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Posted by Andrew Edwards | September 12, 2011
By now we know that Twitter, perhaps alone among any time-sensitive news source, provided the world with thousands of brief, pinpoint reports about the recent Northeast earthquake on August 23. Anyone with a browser and a Twitter account became a cub reporter, and the results could be compelling, especially when routed through an editorial structure at a more traditional online news venue (generously weeding out the outlandish and the demonstrably false). We are now accustomed to immediate, real-time updates from wherever news unfolds - not from Anderson Cooper, but from a thousand eyewitness missives aggregated and fed to your browser or even the computer in your pocket that is often referred to anachronistically as a "cell phone."
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By Andrew Edwards on June 10, 2011
Revamp in 30 days? I can almost hear the readers say to themselves: "How can that be possible?"
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By Andrew Edwards on March 09, 2010
Traditional media folks -- those at big print outfits, especially -- are hoping Steve Jobs will have saved their jobs by coming up with a device that will do for print what the iPod did for music.
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By Andrew Edwards on December 14, 2009
It's like the Swiffer commercial, where an old sponge-mop is outside a window, peeking in at a housewife who has moved on to better mops, while "Love Stinks" plays in the background. The old mop is trying to win her back, even going so far as to hire a Mariachi band to court its perfidious ex-partner.
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By Andrew Edwards on August 11, 2009
They don't actually say they hate web analytics. They say it's necessary. They say it's an important part of their customer satisfaction delivery mechanism. They say they wish they had more of it, if only the existing web analytics tools were more suited to their needs.
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By Andrew Edwards on June 12, 2009
I was talking to a senior marketing friend the other day -- he's been CMO at a couple of major analytics vendors -- and telling him about how the enterprise analytics applications (Omniture and WebTrends mainly) often require some level of customization before yielding meaningful results.
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By Andrew Edwards on April 09, 2009
Recently a customer contacted me and said her company was having a number of analytics reporting problems -- broken or missing reports, lack of trust in the data, and inability to align new reports with emerging business criteria. "I'd like you to spend a couple of days training our staff," she told me, "and then they can take care of these things themselves."
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By Andrew Edwards on May 18th, 2011
Few marketers know of the mountainous treasure trove of data available to them via the use of web analytics. Many are surprised when, having deployed an analytics tool, data comes at them in a gusher. It often seems too much, too fast, and is more often than not, little understood. Web analytics can easily become too much of a good thing. It can also be inaccurate, misleading, overloading, confusing, even paralyzing.
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By Andrew Edwards on April 18th, 2011
Until evidence was presented to me this year at certain digital marketing events, I had long understood the crossroads where agency meets analytics to be not unlike the crossroads where guitar picker meets the devil: legendary, but doubtful and not wholly convincing in its result (except for rare genius).
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By Andrew Edwards on September 21st, 2009
Don't get me wrong—I love Photoshop. I've used it for many years with great satisfaction. I also love Omniture's suite of web analytics products. I've used them for years (almost entirely on behalf of customers) with great satisfaction.
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By Andrew Edwards on September 10th, 2009
Cookies are a foundational part of accurate web analytics. They let us marketers recognize returning visitors and allow us to perform some very useful tasks, such like as user segmentation and path analysis, without which we'd have to consider ourselves rather primitive digital marketers indeed.
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By Andrew Edwards on July 22nd, 2009
A recent Forrester report indicated that a rather large percentage of enterprises are using Google somewhere, somehow. I don't doubt it. But what I do know is that there are very few enterprises relying today on Google for their main analytics effort.
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By Andrew Edwards on June 15th, 2009
Advertising agencies—and especially digital agencies—are among the most fascinating companies in the world. They are staffed (most of the time) by whip-smart, sometimes arrogant, fun, creative, young, attractive people.
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By Andrew Edwards on June 1st, 2009
Free is a magical word. It sprinkles fairy dust everywhere it goes. It can open the mind of even the stoniest corporate curmudgeon. It can spark a flicker of hope in even the most cost-averse marketing department that maybe, just maybe, they can get real, actionable web analytics without having to pay for it.

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By Paul Demery on July 23, 2009
After chugging along for years with a basic web site used only to book rail tickets and passes, Rail Europe is on the fast track to online sales growth after relaunching its site as a travel portal designed with analytics to learn visitors` preferences.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on July 27, 2011 at 9:29 am
How many times have you bailed on a site because it loads too slow?

How often do you suppose the site owner knows this is why you abandoned?

The gap between these two instances can get canyonesque, and the wider that gap, the harder it is for the site owner to understand what is driving their critical site-abandonment data.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on July 22nd, 2011 at 8:36 am
...or has digital marketing finally come to admit it's a form of direct marketing?

Either way, the recent announcement that web analytics industry pioneer Rand Schulman is joining the Board of Directors at the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation represents a watershed moment in that organization's forty-six year history. And Terrie L. Bartlett, President of the DMEF, seems to agree. Recently she said that while the DMEF board has a number of illustrious figures, Rand would represent what amounts to a "very new set of eyes for the DMEF".
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on July 18th, 2011 at 11:39 am
We know the meme--that information wants to be free. For the sake of argument, let's say we buy into the notion that information has volition, even metaphorically, and can "want" something. But isn't it just a cuter way of saying "People want information to be free for them to use"?
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on July 6th, 2011 at 11:47 am
Until evidence was presented to me this year at certain digital marketing events, I had long understood the crossroads where agency meets analytics to be not unlike the crossroads where guitar picker meets the devil: legendary, but doubtful and not wholly convincing in its result (except for rare genius).
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on June 20th, 2011 at 11:47 am
Yes, I am a founder of the WAA. I formed it with Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg in the far distant past--before Google Analytics! Before Facebook! Before Twitter! Back then it was the former CMO of WebTrends and WebSideStory, Rand Schulman, who got the three of us together and fomented the idea we found an organization solely devoted to the success of web analytics as a discipline. I have not been directly involved with the WAA in several years so please be assured there is no agenda behind my plugging membership
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on June 6th, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Is web analytics giving you a case of "agita" because it's complicated and not very pretty?

Rest easy. All you need to do is drop a line of Google Analytics code into the header or footer of your page and then...that's it! Analytics becomes beautiful and fun. It's that simple! Is that not amazing?

What's amazing of course, is how many people actually seem to believe that.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on May 25th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
Most of the time, if you are at an industry seminar and a "panel" is "debating" an issue, you can rest assured that no great drama will pass as you check and recheck your email to see if anything interesting has come in. Most industry panels are exhibitions of cautious meandering such that the panelist gets to tout some pet notion while being careful not to undermine or offend what may be a powerful potential adversary (or just plain friend) at the other end of the dais.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on May 10th, 2011 at 9:11 am
The ubiquity of Facebook would be fascinating enough without its additional centrality to the growing number of companies wishing to market to Facebook users as part of their social media campaign planning. And to its credit, Facebook has provided a unique marketing and personal contact engine that deserves all due respect. Today, Facebook has perhaps half a billion users and shows little if any sign of slowing. That kind of reach is proving irresistible to marketers; and to serve this market, a nascent industry of "Facebook marketers" has sprung up. These companies specialize--they say--in making your Facebook campaign more effective.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on April 27th, 2011 at 9:33 am
I have been serving web analytics customers for about nine years now. Most of that time I have also known WebTrends quite well--as an offering as well as a company. Disclosure: my company is a partner with WebTrends, as it is with some of the other vendors in the web analytics space.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on April 22nd, 2011 at 7:32 am
The condition of web analytics today is a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma.

The superiority of measurable media, loudly proclaimed as the very reason why ads have gone to the web, and the reason why news printed on dead trees is itself dead or dying, and the reason why bookstores and record stores are going the way of the pterosaur; despite these loud claims, measurement itself is notorious across the land for its shallowness, its lack of accuracy, its general state of brokenness and dissatisfaction.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on April 12th, 2011 at 5:37 pm
So much has been said of web analytics "best practices" that one begins to imagine these success formulae are well known and implemented across the spectrum of analytics practitioners.

However, based on facts observed on the ground, in real customer situations, it is less likely that "best practices" are well understood than that they are completely missing in even some of the most advanced enterprises undertaking analytics today. And as in most cases where wisdom and experience are underutilized, the result is both time-consuming and costly to the enterprise.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on March 24th, 2011 at 7:03 pm
Yesterday I attended the OmmaMedia Analytics conference in New York. Typically this event draws lots of ad-tention from ad people on M-ad-ison Avenue and this year was no exception.

In the past this conference only served to point up the gulf between web analytics (or more broadly, digital analytics) and what the Madmenandwomen think is important to know about their hugely expensive on line activities.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on March 16th, 2011 at 9:29 pm
UIn a former post ('Tag, You're 'It' (1)"), I discussed some of the technical ways in which the all-important task of tagging can become bogged down in developer cycles and thus in some way stand between the user and good reporting.

Today I would like to approach the subject with a slightly altered viewpoint. ntil evidence was presented to me this year at certain digital marketing events, I had long understood the crossroads where agency meets analytics to be not unlike the crossroads where guitar picker meets the devil: legendary, but doubtful and not wholly convincing in its result (except for rare genius).
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on March 8th, 2011 at 6:13 pm
If "engagement is the marketing buzzword of the decade" as imedia's Doug Schumacher has said, then I guess I just went to the decade's most buzzworthy event? It was, after all, called "Engage", hosted by the venerable WebTrends in San Francisco last week.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on March 7th, 2011 at 5:04 pm
It seems nearly every confab of analytics folks (or digital marketing folks) features at least one and sometimes more than one "marketing book" on offer as a giveaway or a "show special".

Having seen many and read some of them, I have noticed a pattern: many (but not all) spend a long time telling you how what they're going to tell you is going to change your professional life. Then they tell you it's all about "you" and how you'll go forward newly confident having read the book
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on February 16th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
A couple of weeks back when Egypt was in uproar, folks were saying it was because of Facebook. I was saying it was not.

People are still saying it was at least partly because of Facebook. I am still saying it was not.

But when I saw the now-famous protester in Tahrir-square say into the MSNBC microphone "This is our Facebook!", I knew one thing were true:
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on February 7th, 2011 at 6:31 pm
About a year ago I was at a conference where Huffington Post's head of Analytics was talking about how they used data coming off their site, which had just passed the Washington Post in online viewership.

At the time I felt it was of some moment that HuffPo had passed WaPo, but now that WaPo is far back in the dust of HuffPo, it seems like less of a milestone.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on January 31st, 2011 at 4:48 pm
...or at least not the part where the dictator does the perp walk on his way to paradise in a lofty chalet somewhere far, far from the Pyramids.

Not to make light of important affairs shaking one of the world's most strategic and most ancient nations--and I do not--but what seemed to catch the Western eye most glaringly at the start of the troubles was not, say, "access to Suez" or "twenty-million Cairenes are angry", but "hey, they can't Tweet over there!!!".
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on January 25th, 2011 at 4:19 pm
I was hoping the Tea Party would beat me to it, but it appears they have missed the bit about the Federal Government seeming to force browsers to add a "don't track me" option into their list of options; and about how my favorite browser, Firefox, has apparently added one. One day I will need to find out how to activate the widget so I can leave it de-activated.

Perhaps the Tea Party cannot pick a villain here. Is it big corporations, trying to spy on citizens as they munch in the free garden of delights that is the world wide web?
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on January 18th, 2011 at 4:29 pm
We need to get a little more tech-y for a moment than usual. That's because we're going to discuss briefly the issue of "tagging" as it relates to web analytics and web optimization.

In nearly a decade of working with large enterprises to solve analytics problems, I have seen the issue of correct tagging rise from nonexistence (when we used log files only) to a near necessity (if the goal is accuracy and granularity). The very large roadblock has been, and will continue to be, deployment of these innocent-seeming little snippets of code that get placed into a web site's html.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on January 12th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
Putting my Mac bigotry on hold, I purchase the best Smartphone offered by my carrier, which at the time was the Android by Google. If I had waited a couple of days and heard the Verizon/iPhone announcement, this blog post would not have been necessary. But I was in dire need of a Smartphone, and moved perhaps too quickly.

My Android was delivered to me with a brief "training session" that explained exactly nothing of any use. This was my first hint that the Android was getting off on the wrong foot with this unabashed admirer of all things Jobs hath wrought.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on January 6th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
As the great cogs of government begin to creak under the burden of a new House Ruler, they also begin to process on our behalf the question of whether the Internet should fundamentally change into Something Else.

I am referring to a cause that has been kicking around since Marconi was contributing his best to communications technology: and that is the question of whether the communication backbones of the nation are free from capricious blocking (or profit-seeking blocking), or whether they will be a place where content and availability are separated strictly (as in church and state).
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on January 3rd, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Happy 2011 to both digiterati and luddites. I spent the Holiday break trying to pretend I was not worried I'd be outblogged during this fallow period of the year.

Also during this time, two items caught my eye in the media.

First was that the last roll of Kodachrome got developed somewhere in the Midwest. R.I.P. the "nice, bright colors" (-Paul Simon).
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on December 22nd, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Recently the new Colossus that appears to stride all on line media--Mr. Zuckerberg of Facebook--claimed to be thrilled with his new partner's "underdog" status. That partner was Microsoft.

I almost feel like that's enough of a post in and of itself, and with the holidays upon us I am tempted to leave it.

But it is a subject too fascinating to resist.
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on December 16th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
I will tip my hand on this one:

Remember a little company called "AOL"? And how it was the ten ton gorilla in the on line space in the 1990s?

Remember "MSN", which was supposed to be Microsoft's very own Internet?
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Posted by Andrew Edwards on December 14th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Now the furor over privacy goes global. With the advent of Assange and crew, the subject of privacy itself no longer has any. The world seems divided between those calling his work terrorism, and those championing him in the name of transparency (especially as it relates to use of our tax dollars).

And as digital marketers, we are now forced to reckon with new scrutiny about the collection and use of on line data (better known as web analytics) in general. In the past we had those whom I call "privacy zealots" claiming that targeted advertising based on usage was equivalent to Walmart putting a billboard in your front yard.
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by Andrew Edwards, Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 8:47 AM
Google has made enormous inroads into the Web analytics community. Their free analytics product has changed the landscape for analytics vendors. Even at large enterprises, Google Analytics is deployed in numerous ways -- either as a control, a corporate sandbox, or via the wildcatting efforts of a single marketer trying analytics on for size.

But does Google fit the bill for your company?
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By Andrew Edwards - May 26, 2010
Today's wave of social media venues--YouTube, Twitter, the "blogosphere", Yelp, Yammer, Facebook, comments on Facebook and beyond--have become, with their multithreaded, ungoverned, one-to-one and one-to-many interactions, the IP-powered equivalent of the ancient Commons.
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	Driving Web Success with Yahoo! Web Analytics Web analytics is specialized, and the tools that address it are powerful. But web analytics, as it is practiced widely today, clearly suffers from a lack of efficiency in the overall web analytics process. A tool like YWA puts a great deal of power in your hands, and you do need to have a team in place that knows how to develop and deploy that power. First, it’s important to audit what you’ve already got. Take a look at the state of any web analytics in place already, whatever tool or combination of tools it may be. View Presentation >
	Driving Web Success with Email With an open rate of 11.5% and a clickthrough rate of 2%, we are looking at averages that rival what would be considered above average in regular print-based direct marketing. But the clickthrough rate does not tell the whole story. Email effectiveness cannot be separated from overall site effectiveness. They’ve got to work together to achieve the desired result. Therefore, every marketer needs to understand where email sits in the overall conversion engine. View Presentation >
	Driving Web Success Web Analytics Today: Few Organizations are Succeeding Confusion over where to focus measurement, Leading tools hard to use and have gaps, Poor implementations are the norm, Flawed tags and data collection, Quantity of data is ahead of quality of data, Lack of focused expertise, . . .can this be fixed? View Presentation >
	How to measure and manage your way to Web ROI Meaningful Measurement, Configuring web analytics tools to measure what matters most, Improving accuracy of web analytics data, Answering business questions with web analytics, Proving web ROI View Presentation >

As the web marketplace has matured, the need to derive tangible business benefits from the web has become an obvious challenge. In response to this, many of us have recognized the importance of web analytics in measuring and achieving ROI—but few of us are reaping enough benefits from web analytics technology. Read More >

New partnership to provide significant, customized insight into site-user behavior patterns that drive business results. Read More >