“I spend a lot of time thinking!” - Avinash Kaushik
“Questions are the fundamental things you need to ask to gain actionable insight” - Matt Bailey
“Did you see the fabulous eBay presentation?” - Anon
“How did I manage to spend $300 last night on champagne?” - Mike Grehan
“Many people I talk to can’t answer the question - what is the purpose of your website?” - Rufus Evison
“It’s not just what people do on your site but how they feel.” - Jim Sterne
“6% of data from the last ad is being used to calculate ROI. 94% is being thrown away!” - Esco Strong on Engagement Mapping
“When people start buying nappies they also start buying beer. Plus people who have condoms in their basket often pick up a cucumber too!” - Rufus Evison on the more bizzare joys of Tesco ClubCard data 
“As we go through life we try and figure out what people are communicating. We test we look at their body language, we look at their facial expressions, but then there is the problem of distance, we have to figure out other ways to communicate over long distances. And as the communication that we want to transfer becomes more sophisticated, we come up with more sophisticated and more elegant ways of transmitting that information.
We are getting good at sending signals. And when the technology comes around to help us send signals, it gets more sophisticated and more complicated. And we discover that we’re pretty good at receiving signals so we reach out to whatever kinds of signals are out there, whatever kind of signals we can find going by, to determine is there meaning there?
We take whatever data we can get and try and turn it into something that’s understandable, something that is logical, we take raw data and turn it into something that might be meaningful and hopefully is useful……………hopefully!
The number of signals that we are receiving are growing, the way that we are receiving them and interpreting them is improving. The potential for what we can do when we receive signals from people on our websites is enormous because we have a very sophisticated tool for receiving signals. We’ve got lots of different kinds of ways to receive those signals. We can array that data to be even more meaningful. We have the capacity to really, really listen to what’s happening in the market place.
We have the opportunity to move from simply reporting on what’s happening, to comparing us to others, to analysing what people are doing to dynamically returning signal with signal and try to match up with 1-1 marketing and peering into the hearts and mind of the market place.”
Pure nectar……
I’ve arrived in California for the eMetrics Summit and am really quite excited!
Being in charge of the adCenter Analytics Blog has meant I’ve had to get up to speed on the whole analytics industry……….and quickly!
It’s one thing going to web analytics sessions at a search conference and listening to Matt Bailey or Avinash do their very good & well established thing, but it’s a totally different bucket of page views to be thrust into THREE DAYS of numbers, goal, actions, funnels and treemaps!
How will I cope? Well at SES London I was a little nervous about attending a dinner Ian Thomas had organised for the Orion Panel - Jim Sterne, Bryan Eisenberg, Brian Clifton etc…. Ian had even said it might be a little dry & nerdy but it wasn’t at all.
I’m happiest when my brain is hurting! The wit, charm, intelligence and mental agility was immense and the generous repartee made for a fine evening…
Life’s about looking forward, moving forward and learning how to get there.
If you own a website, you could do worse than find yourself in amongst these guys…….you’ll definitely come away with some things to think about!
I’ve written a couple of pieces on the adCenter PPC Blog and the Analytics Blog in the last couple of days.
Check ‘em out…
Now off to Dorset now to visit my friend Ed Found who owns a restaurant in Dorchester and we’re staying in his Dorset guest house which looks fabulous.
There’s an interview I did recently with Ian over on the adCenter Analytics Blog!
I’ve known Brian Clifton since we were asked to speak at the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference in Iceland in 2006.
Passionate, articulate and highly intelligent (well he has got a PHD!) Brian has done much for the online advertising industry, preaching the importance of the sometimes misunderstood and underutilised discipline we call web analytics.
Today is Brian’s last day as Head of Google Analytics in EMEA, and he’s kindly agreed to this exclusive interview where he reflects on what he’s achieved, why he’s leaving and what he’s going to do!
You joined Google in 2005 to “define, develop and lead Google Analytics into EMEA” – How successful do you think your team has been in spreading the word?
Web Analytics is a completely different industry now compared to then. It really is amazing how fast things have moved on. What used to be a niche industry with just a few thousand active participants (bloggers, event speakers, consultants, analysts etc.) has now become almost mainstream. That is, an integral part of online marketing with participants now in the millions world-wide. I think it is safe to say that Google has been the driver of this change with my team helping large European advertisers with their adoption.
I’m someone new to championing web analytics in the internet marketing community via the adCenter Analytics Blog – what’s the secret to capturing website owner’s imagination and persuading them that web analytics should be a critical part of their strategy?
Monetization. That is, the value that measurement can bring. I always use a couple of slides at the beginning of my presentations illustrating a theoretical before and after effect of increasing your conversion rate by 1 percent. It always gets the audiences attention and sets the scene for why website owners should invest in measurement.
Why does all that data make people’s eyes glaze over? How can we make it easier for people to understand?
That’s traditionally been a common complaint from a lot of web analytics users. Web visitor data can feel overwhelming simply because the volume is high after all it is so easy and inexpensive to collect.
The Google philosophy has always been one of “data democratisation”. That is, unlocking tools from the exclusive realm of small specialist departments, and instead empowering all uses with data that they can hopefully contribute to the improvement of. After all, we are all web users, so we can all suggest improvements. Often the collected knowledge of the many can exceed that of the few available experts
Can you give us 3 top tips or things to look out for when analysing website traffic?
The single most important thing is to have a complete best practice implementation of your web analytics tool. Otherwise its “garbage in, garbage out”. It never ceases to amaze how much money organisations are prepare to spend just on ‘having’ a tool and yet do not invest on installing it to its full potential - so that they can actually do something with the data.
With good, clean data coming in, start looking for engagement points on your website. Apart from goal conversion rates, time on site and bounce rates are excellent top level indicators of success, or not. These can be used as your benchmarks for improvement.
If you have a site search feature on your site (internal search engine), analyse the keywords used by your visitors. This can provide invaluable insight as to what your visitors actually want from you, so that you can determine whether this aligns with your marketing message. What’s great about performing site search analysis is that visitors are using in their own terminology - it removes the guess work for marketers. It can also provide feedback for future product features - perhaps you were not aware that a significant proportion of visitors also want your specialist widget in metallic blue!
Today is your last day at Google – Why on earth are you leaving? It’s not the falling share price is it?
LOL, remember I joined Google in 2005, post IPO! In fact the beauty of working with a product that is free, is that its given me the freedom to build a team of product experts rather than sales managers. That’s a pretty unique position for anyone to be in and one that I feel immensely privileged to have been a part of.
Unfortunately that is also the caveat of being a manager - as your team grows you move further away from client interactions which is the part that most excites me. In fact, the vast majority of web content is made up of poorly optimised websites. By that I mean poorly optimised for visibility (visitors can’t find you via the search engines) and poorly optimised for the user experience (leading to low conversion rates). These two are closely related and web analytics is the key to unlock the potential of both.
Therefore from April 7th, I am happy to announce that I will be the Senior Strategist for Omega Digital Media - the company I founded back in 1997 that specialises in search integration and conversion marketing. They have been an official analytics partner for Google for many years (that’s how I got recruited by Google!), so the connection continues. I will be focusing my efforts on providing the service needed to help clients grow their business by making web analytics central to their strategy.
So your new book that you were plugging at Search Marketing World in Dublin yesterday, is it all about GA or can readers read the techniques and tips and apply them with other analytics solutions – like Microsoft adCenter Analytics for instance?
The book is entitled Advanced Web Metrics for Google Analytics, but is actually aimed at a broad audience - essentially anyone with an interest in making their web site successful. That includes website owners, marketers, web designers/developers, content creators, PR departments and all the various intermediaries. Its about measuring for success (the title of the first chapter) and applies best practice techniques on how to do so using Google Analytics.
There are of course some chapters specific to GA, but to be honest there is a great deal of feature parity out there among the various other vendors. So yes, it is possible to use the principals that I describe for any enterprise class analytics tool - including Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics which I even use on my own blog.
Thanks Brian and good luck with the book and the new venture!
Just posted over at www.adcentercommunity.com on the Analytics Blog - Web Analytics Tips - SES New York Style
I didn’t make it to Search Engine Strategies yesterday as I was busy getting set up for my announcement today about the UK adExcellence Launch.
The SES Photos I posted yesterday have been doing the rounds, and as you can see the event was pretty big and everyone was having a great time.
My favourite session on Monday was the Orion All Star Analytics Panel:
Jim Sterne - Bryan Eisenberg - Brian Clifton - Ian Thomas - Steve Jackson
I think it was a bit of a coup having some of the worlds finest web-metric minds on one stage, and the hour wasn’t a disappointing one.
Moderated by the enigmatic Kevin Ryan, the session dived straight into why advertisers should take advantage of the free packages out there - Google Analytics and the spanking new Microsoft Gatineau.
Brian E was quick to encourage people to go with them as they would have 65-70% of the functionality of more sophisticated, paid-for solutions.
It didn’t take long for the issue of privacy to come up. Should advertisers trust such big companies with their data, especially as they’re running the PPC campaigns many advertisers rely on for traffic too?
Jim responded to the doubts about trust and privacy by saying search engines know an awful lot about us and poo pooed the notion that anything sinister was going on by saying, “I’m upset that my bank knows how much money I have?!”
There was a suggestion that because the engines might know the conversions advertisers receive, they could somehow artificially inflate CPC prices. Brian C was quick to dismiss this by saying the market sets the price in the auction not the engine.
An over-riding theme was one concerning the lack of actual analysis of the data. Companies simply don’t have the resources to look at the data and take action. Steve talked about clients of his who are companies part of larger groups. The larger group has an analytics solution which, when the reports filter down to the individual company marketing departments, they simply don’t know what to do with the data.
Some expert tips included:
Jim - Look at behaviour. Segment based on your audience behaviour, finding out why a particular segment landed on a particular landing page using a particular KW.
Brian C - Check your bounce rate. Why are users coming to a page and then leaving it without going anywhere else on your site? - A single page visit.
Ian - Check out Gatineau’s demographic capabilities. See which age/genders favour what pages and adjust landing page products and text accordingly.
The there was talk of marketing effectiveness. The need for people to start using analytics wholesale is apparent but some companies are starting to get and understand the opportunity to take an authoritative view of the site.
All the panellists agreed that analytics isn’t accurate - you’re looking at trends. A lack of standardisation, different methodologies, different sessions and suchlike mean having spot-on stats is unlikely.
Before they all gave a “must-track-stat”, the subject of social-networking was touched on. How do you put a $$ value on a conversation? It’s not just about traffic, you’re driving customers to take action, to buy something or sign up.
Social measurement will involve tracking the conversations and assessing their impact but organisations have to get involved and wake up to this new phenomena and get out of their two-dimensional view of their world.
Killer Tips:
JS - Think E-Metrics not just Web Analytics
BE - More awareness of conversion rates
BC - A/B testing
IT - More understanding of privacy issues
SJ - We need to create a culture in companies to embrace web analytics
A point Ian made stuck out for me, when he foresaw analytics automatically being folded in to online advertising products and services in the future.
What does he know that I don’t? Better get a job in Redmond!
{UPDATE 22/2: Ian now wants you to Trust Him!}
Happy New Year to everyone!
The Flying Dutchman Joost de Valk has published a wordpress plugin for Gatineau which was jolly nice of him!
Hope you all saw the update about Gatineau on the adCenter Blog?
As Joost doesn’t waste any time getting plugins out to the masses, it’d be nice to vote for him at the Search Engine Journal Awards - be nice if you voted for the adCenter Blog and Live Search Blog too
