The Commerce360 Blog

Turning off poor performing keywords - especially when they're well targeted - can be a surprisingly tough decision. Marketers and managers want to see their ads running for the terms and phrases that they believe define their businesses. And there can be a hesitancy to taking the hit on the top-line revenue number even when considering the negative returns.

From an analytics point-of-view, we've developed a way to quantify and display the opportunity or benefits of turning off keywords using the SAINT classification capabilities of Omniture SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter. The result is a chart/table as seen below (click to zoom) that shows the historical revenue and expense associated with terms we've chosen to pause/turn off.

In this example, we see a series of keywords turned off over a six week period, and the revenue and expense that was spent on them over the past 60 days. In other words, if these terms had been turned off sooner, this client would be over $5,000 ahead (the actual number is higher than shown because many of these terms were off for much of this time period.) It's a great way to bring visibility to an activity that we know is right but often makes certain people nervous.

Of course, we could display this report showing the actual revenue and expense associated with each keyword, but aren't doing so here for privacy reasons.

Note that we could easily do this pro-forma, tagging a bunch of terms and presenting the historical losses in order to get approval to go ahead and pause/kill the keywords. I'm sure it sounds like an easy decision to some, but believe me there are CEO's, VPs of Marketing, and Line managers out there that do not like to see top-line revenue go away, regardless of the ROI. Sometimes making a visual case for stopping the losses is required.

Obviously, this process should go hand-in-hand, or follow, an effort to determine why these keywords aren't working, and improve creative, bids, landing pages, or offers to make them perform better. But sometimes there are barriers to getting some of those items fixed, and sometimes a keyword just can't win.

To create this report in Omniture, create several classifications in the SearchCenter Keyword Classifier, including KW-Status (which we load with On or Off) and KW-StatusOffDate. Export the SAINT file to excel, populate these two fields, import the SAINT file, then create the report from the Commerce >> SearchCenter menu.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Everyone is understandably pleased about Google’s decision begin sharing the URLs of sites that run your adwords ads on their content network, because the transparency (and related features) will allow you to filter unwanted sites from your distribution. Opting into the Content Network is no longer an all-or-nothing proposition.

This is great for many reasons. The consensus seems to be that the real motivation for the change is big brand advertisers who somehow couldn’t be cajoled into buying blind placements like the rest of us online dopes. (Don't believe this stuff about them being afraid of Quigo.) These guys have a lot of money sitting on the sidelines, and Google wants it – so they’re finally willing to give the rest of us something we’ve been requesting for years.

The big win here that I haven’t seen mentioned in the flood of articles and posts, is the impact this will have on click fraud. The Content Networks (Google’s and everyone’s) are home to all kinds of shady characters, and the inability to see who was sending clicks (and spending your money) has always left us with the sneaky suspicion that the reason Content Networks virtually always underperform the Search Networks or Google itself is fraud.

Seeing the URLs will enable us to note a sudden spike in traffic from any site, review the sites to see if they appear reputable, and understand traffic patterns in a way the ‘black box’ system didn’t.

But I’d like one more thing. (Don’t I always?) Don’t just share the URLs in the adwords interface, pass them along in the referring URL so we can collect and track them via our own website analytics. It would be great to track individual URL performance over time, associate click-costs to products sold to specific referring sites, and even define site groupings of our own choosing to look for patterns in what makes a successful Content Network ad-hosting site.

Transparency is good. The ability to track is better.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After giving the team the requisite long-weekend after a big product launch, it's time to start requesting additional features in Omniture D2 :-)

Playing with the Site Analysis view for a little while and it's hard not to get addicted.

The 3D view is such a clear way to display and understand relationships between pages and underlying metrics. While the default X-Y metrics are page-depth and orders, another pairing I have found interesting is Page Views and Revenue (participation).

Using these, highly visited pages position themselves near the top of the chart, and high revenue pages to the right. So pages clumped at the upper-left are popular but non-producing, while pages at the lower-right are profitable but could use more traffic. There's lots to think about as you scan where your pages fall.

Which brings me to feature request #1. I'd like a 'smart' way of adding pages to the Site Analysis view. It would be great to be able to automatically add the top 5 or bottom 5 (ok, make it a user configurable number) pages from any defined Page Group based on how they would position themselves along the current X or Y axis. So in my example above, I'd like to be able to add the top 5 (or bottom 5) pages from the 'Categories' group that deliver the most (or least) revenue based on participation. Or the top/bottom 5 based on page views and see where they fall in terms of revenue.

Right now on a site with tons of pages, scrolling through the picker and trying out each one - while cool - can become slow and tiring. What I'm looking for (initially) is the winners and losers. As someone said at the NYC launch last week: "Let software do what software does best". Surely the software can find the winners and losers better than I can.

Bonus implementation idea: Let me draw a square region on the page and fill in all the pages that would land in that region.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Without claiming this is an exhaustive or even a well ranked list, here’s what I like best so far about Omniture D2 (Discover 2.0): (note see earlier post for a broader overview of Omniture D2)

• The ability to mix traffic, path, and commerce data freely. The distinction between these in SiteCatalyst is arbitrary and based on the legacy code base. It’s great to have that constraint lifted.

• Instant segment filtering. On the site analysis screen, the funnels, and other screens that don’t work like the report panels, you can instantly limit the data to any definable segment by just dragging a segment tag up the segment bar near the top of the page.

• Page groups. For funnels (and probably some other pages) you get to define named groups of pages and then apply the group where before you had to use an individual page.

• Unlimited nested metrics. This is the core of what the Report Panels allow, and while it can be easily over-used, it’s really powerful and makes it possible to find the answer a lot of otherwise unanswerable questions.

• The ability to customize segments. If you only want ‘purchasers’ to be people who bought more than 5 times, or to create a segment based just on people who purchase one particular category, you can.

• Dynamic and informative graphics. This capability could be blown-out tremendously, but the interactive pie-charts do a good job of making the information inside the data clear.

The interesting thing about this list is that it isn’t too different from my top 5 wish list for SiteCatalyst. That sounds like great news – my wishes have been granted. Except they haven’t. SiteCatalyst still has none of these capabilities, and I have a feeling it’s going to be even more frustrating to live without them there from here on out.

This gets to the core of some of what I haven’t quite come to grips with yet - the relationship between SiteCatalyst and Discover 2. Omniture positions it as ‘the next level of analysis’ and therefore a premium product and a targeted solution for ‘more complex problems’. There is certainly a lot of truth in that, but it also seems like quite a bit of spin or wishful thinking.

The truth is that D2 just solves certain web analytics problems better than SiteCatalyst, and does so because it was built later on a different platform and using newer technology. Certain core features are clearly advanced, but ironically when you look at D2 vs Discover 1 there are just as many features that are simply enhancements of existing stuff (such as new funnels and new page flow) as there are radically new ones (like Site Analysis). Omniture is walking a fine line in calling this a different product and charging for it incrementally – and substantially.

In some ways this is a great way to solve an age-old software development problem. Switching core code and underlying platform is nearly impossible to do in ‘mid-air’. Having Discover evolve from V1 to V2 and hopefully V3 as a stand-alone product from a development point of view provides us with the latest technology and makes the migration gradual and rather easy.

This is not to say that the two products substantially overlap today. SiteCatalyst is still full of features and reporting capabilities that Discover 2 doesn’t provide. Having SiteCatalyst exist enables the D2 guys to not have to spend time re-inventing everything so they can do all this cool new stuff – I get it. But a version or two down the road it’s hard to imagine that they don’t come back together.

Or perhaps the products just get rationalized better, one as a reporting plus a little analysis and the other as a hard-core analysis tool – but both delivered in a common interface and on a common platform. It’s easy to see how a very nice two-tier solution could be coming another version or two down the road.

These issues aside, I can’t imagine a serious SiteCatalyst user not wanting/needing Discover 2. It completely changes your relationship to the data, because the powerful interface lets you move through the data in so many directions at once – changing the reports, metrics, segments, time frames and visualizations all within a single interface. I was able to use this to discover and clearly document some very significant marketing issues for a client last week that I would have never been able to really know or certainly prove without D2.

I give Omniture a lot of credit for breaking off the team and resources to built D2. While it causes some temporary issues, I’m really glad to see the next generation of website analytics coming from inside Omniture rather than outside. We’ve made a substantial commitment internally and on behalf of our clients D2 gives me confidence that over the next 5+ years we’ve bet on the right team.

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PS: If you’ve got questions about D2 please feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll answer them as best I can.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I first saw Omniture Discover 2.0 (or D2 as they affectionately call it) about a month ago, and have been playing with it for about three weeks. It’s an extremely impressive and useful tool in many ways, although I must admit there are many aspects of it and implications of it that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around yet.

In this post I’ll describe many (but not all) aspects of the product, and in the next I’ll offer some initial thoughts on what it all means.

D2 lets you access and look at data from Omniture SiteCatalyst and Omniture SearchCenter in new and very interesting ways. While it is entirely a compliment and extension of the core reporting capabilities of SiteCatalyst (and even the Excel Tool) in many ways it makes you wish that it was a replacement for them – it’s so much more fluid and dynamic and responsive.

The interface is striking in many ways – starting with the very cool Site Analysis screen which shows selected pages of your site in a dynamic 3d representation on a X-Y axis chart, complete with flow animation in the arrows which link the pages.

(Note you can click on this and all images in this post to zoom for more detail)

There’s an incredible amount of information packed in this display: the height, width, and color of each page-cylinder tell you the number of visits, page views, and revenue participation of each page (at least initially, you can assign other metrics to these attributes). The page’s position on the Y axis tells you how deeply into the site the users (on average) encountered that page, and the X axis tells you how many orders where generated by page visitors (you can change these assignments too). The thickness of the arrows between pages tells you how many visitors followed that path. And if all that isn’t enough you can rotate the whole space in 3-dimensions and zoom in and out freely. This baby has sizzle.

But sizzle aside this is very useful. Instantly you can see which pages are producing traffic but not revenues. (Drop a bunch of different category pages on the page for example, and the winners and loser pretty much line up left to right.)

There are nearly-equally cool visuals and capabilities for fall-out funnels (with the ability to define groups of pages as a single level), next page flow (with the ability to interactively follow the chain endlessly), and virtual focus groups (which let you watch animated versions of the complete paths of selected individual site visitors).

But the core of Discover 2.0 is the reports panels. Here is where you access Discover’s ability to present and relate nearly every report and metric in an ‘n-dimensional analysis’. It’s easier to understand by example. To start, select just about any standard report you normally find in the SiteCatalyst path, traffic, or commerce menus. So if we bring up Traffic > Finding Methods > Search engines we’re presented with a report showing each search engine and how many visitors it brought in during the selected timeframe.

This isn’t much different than SiteCatalyst other than the nifty pie cart graphic. But now the fun begins. Suppose you also want to see the revenue by search engine. Drag the revenue metric into place, and nearly instantly you get the data.

Wonder how first time visitors compare? Drag the First Time Visitors segment onto the screen, then add the Revenue column and there you have it.

Curious about how the length of stay impacted revenue? Click the plus sign next to Google, choose Paths > Length of stay and now you see the lengths the produced the most revenue and how much.

Dying to know what product category those 47-page visitors purchased from? Click the plus sign next to Pages Per Visit: 47 and choose Commerce > Products > Categories and you’ll find out.

Think that the secret lies in the number of carts created not just revenue? Drag out the Carts metric.

You get the idea. Starting with any data, sub-report by virtually any other data, going as many levels deep as you want, with simultaneous display of just about any metric. All operating on live unsampled data sets and near-instant speeds.

There is lots of additional control, including custom metrics, the ability to set variables regarding existing metrics (like how many visits defines a loyal customer), and incredibly powerful segment definitional capabilities.

This covers a lot of the key features but by no means all of the capabilities of Discover 2.0. It’s an amazing and powerful product and a welcomed supplement to SiteCatalyst 13.

Update: The follow-up post is here.

Also: Feel free to leave questions in the comments, and I'll answer to the best of my ability.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today Omniture (OMTR) announced the acquisition of TouchClarity, a software services firm which provides automated on-site behavioral targeting. This is a very significant acquisition because it highlights a move beyond web analytics as referenced in their recent adoption of the phrase ‘online business optimization platform’ as the way they describe the role they want Omniture to play for their customers.

It’s a great vision as it addresses both conceptual desire to have a master dashboard and control panel for all of your online marketing issues and the practical pain of having to deal with disparate systems from separate vendors. If Omniture is ultimately able to develop/deliver tightly integrated components for a wide range of the important services, and create a robust way to enable 3rd parties to smoothly connect their software via the Genesis API, the advantages for both Omniture and its customers would be tremendous.

Today’s reality is a highly frustrating mess as the core systems upon which an online business must depend that work almost entirely independently and often provide either conflicting data or disparate data that can’t be connected. We’re constantly forced to either wrestle disparate data sets to the ground (we win some, lose some), guess at connections, or just admit that we ‘can’t get there from here’.

One would think that sitting with complete web analytics data plus full access to reporting from an affiliate network, the email vendor, the video server, Hitwise/Comscore, SEO tools, CRM, multivariate landing page testing tool and oh-yes-the-legacy-back-office-slash-accounting-system would give a complete and detailed picture of an online business. Reality is not so pretty.

As one of our clients said recently: “I just want any two data points to match”. But beyond this seeming impossibility - Jim Sterne’s ‘true but not accurate’ has become a mantra – it’s the competing trends and missing connections in the various data sets that are the real frustration.

A system like TouchClarity is based on user profiling and subsequent personalization, so the benefits of both data integration and control with SiteCatalyst relative to both defining the on-site behaviors that define the profile or user segment and reporting on the personalization results in combination with other commerce or pathing information is clear.

I hope Omniture takes advantage of their ownership of both sides of this integration to really do a showcase implementation enabling all the connections and reporting options a hard-core real world user would want. And then figures out how to generalize this ability to allow all Genesis and other API connections to go that deep.

This leads to my fear about this strategy and an idea that might help to prevent it. I worry that as Omniture adds components via acquisition we get solid but not spectacular integrations, a gradual disincentive to open or support the API to allow competitive components a fair shot, and pricing that creates an analytics/optimization suite further limiting the access of 3rd parties. It’s brilliant business for Omniture but the road to Microsoft Office for the rest of us.

The trouble isn’t bad faith but reality – each of these products is incredibly complex and the desired integrations against all the relevant user scenarios even more so. Take this across an expanding product line, and all the market segments which are adopting Omniture which each have very different ‘last mile’ needs, and the fact that most current users can’t seem to get past 10-20% utilization because the software already overwhelms them, and you have a world where things are getting more and more complex and most users need more and more simplification while a relative few (say 10-15%) want the exact opposite.

SiteCatalyst is probably the most complex piece of software I’ve ever used. I’m over two years in and feel like I’ve got a good handle on about half of it. It continues to impress me in many ways – which is saying something given its complexity and that of the tasks for which I use it – but there is also a nearly endless stream of things I want it to do that it can’t. Importantly it usually isn’t that what I want isn’t technical possible or even structurally unsupported, it’s usually that there is no UI some rather trivial issue of how the data is currently stored/related.

So here’s my idea (desire): Open up the presentation layer of SiteCatalyst so others can extend/replace report writing and graphics etc for both verticals and special needs. It would be great to have 3rd parties and users creating bookmark/dashboard packs that add-in for different type of analysis – not just with the current capabilities (which would be a nice start) but some of which are dependent upon plug-ins that actually extend the presentation or computational capabilities. And with full access to data from third parties via Genesis, data sources, and future API extensions.

I’m suggesting that Omniture take the ‘platform’ word in its tagline seriously, and enable a new class of 3rd parties to participate in the eco-system at the visualization layer. It seems a lot safer bet for everyone than having to rely on one company to keep up with the explosion of demands that the rest of the platform growth ignites. I have no idea of the technical issues implicit of this request, but put a couple of guys on it will ya  :-)

The market need to understand and control online business is massively under-served right now and as more companies move from their backwater little 1999 implementations into the kind of much more robust situations they need to be relevant and competitive in the future the needs are going to grow geometrically.

It’s great to see Omniture taking such a bold approach to this market. I think they’re dead-on to make moves like this acquisition (and to sacrifice some short term profitability) to take ground now while it’s relatively cheap and perhaps more importantly there isn’t significant competition for these deals. I think they fully realize how large of a game they’re playing and the associated requirements and risks. There are challenges there including those I’ve mentioned, but I’m really looking forward to the next moves and the ongoing execution.

Update: Coverage at ClickZ and Paid Content

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've mentioned recently that we're working to integrate word-of-mouth into the online marketing programs we manage for our clients. Tonight I came across an interesting opportunity to 'participate in a conversation' on behalf of one of our clients - with someone who has also mentioned here in the past - Jason Calacanis.

It seems Jason is working on losing weight and as he frequently does he's using his blog to get ideas and feedback. One of our clients has a diet product with a very different (and scientifically based) approach to the problem. I think it would be perfect for Jason to assist in his weight loss, and until we can get Oprah to recommend the product I can't think of a better way to get a powerful online reference. So I left a comment, offered him a few free cases with no strings attached.

In the best possible case, Jason will accept our offer, try and like the Satiatrim, and then chose to mention it. In the worst case, he'll accelerate his weight loss. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you'll be in London this week at SES, please check out Commerce360's Liana Evans who is speaking on the 'Search In Regulated Industries' panel on Thursday at 9am.

Liana is a frequent SES speaker, and in addition to managing organic search optimization for many of our clients, is prolific blogger at her own Search Marketing Gurus blog.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today Jason Calacanis helps us take another step towards honest language for online marketing. He does this by saying that some sites don’t deserve traffic.

He says it as part of an insult meant for the ‘snake oil SEOs’ and their clients, and in a post otherwise filled with ignorance regarding search engines let alone optimization.

But never-the-less, he’s exactly on target with the notion that the first step towards ranking well in the search engines is deserving to be ranked above everyone else.

What a great way to start a conversation about improving search engine rankings: “Do your pages deserve to be ranked #1 in Google?” “Is yours really the most relevant and important site on the entire internet relating to the word _________?”

The perfect ensuing discussion would review the merits and shortcomings of the website, define the editorial and structural changes necessary in order for both the client and the SEO to agree that the site deserves to rank highly, and plan the allocation of time and resources required to make the needed changes.

But even in this idealized situation the need for genuine Search Engine Optimization isn’t really reduced very much. Jason’s contention that “‘if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you're gonna do just fine in the rankings” is simply wrong – if by ‘fine’ you mean ‘achieve the majority of your potential in terms of organic search engine traffic’.

This thinking is a prime example of the concept of ‘coincidental SEO’ as mentioned in a previous post. And it completely ignores the fact that naturally occurring language, page structures, and often otherwise legitimate programming practices can severely limit organic search results. No matter how deserving the site.

Jason did very well with his sites, apparently without formal SEO. But he had the luxury of building blog sites which naturally include lots of ever-changing content and gain oodles of great inbound links, and he was doing it in a time when blogs were particularly well looked upon by the search engines. He also selected subjects with huge market interest and delivered compelling sites that captivated enormous numbers of people – so it’s easy to see how he believes you can ‘do fine’ without SEO.

But I have a simple question for him: Would things have turned out even better if your sites had generated 3x to 10x the traffic? Can you honestly say that you wouldn’t have rather had the significant incremental traffic that good search optimization would have provided?

Jason deserves all the success of Weblogs Inc. But he’s not doing anyone any favors by generalizing his experience into advice for others. Websites need to first focus on being best, on deserving the high rankings they aspire to – but then they have to systematically attain those high rankings by intentionally structuring their site, targeting their keywords, and otherwise optimizing based on the attributes the search engines measure. It isn’t enough to be the best, you also have to be perceived as the best.

PS: In no way should this post be taken as a defense of either the dishonest or clueless who make up the majority of the ‘SEO profession’.

Bonus link: On a related matter, you gotta love Greg Boser.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If someone sees only one page of your web site before they decide to leave, did they bounce or did you bounce them?

I don’t think it’s simply a semantic distinction. Talking to marketers about bounce-rates the general impression is usually that ‘these things happen’. And while often the conversation includes a discussion of reducing the bounce rate, there often seems to be an unspoken assumption is the visitors were unqualified or fickle or otherwise to blame.

We’re guilty (at Commerce360) of perpetuating this mindset in the way we often describe the issue to executives new to the term: “It’s as if people came to visit your business, took one step inside the door, then turned around and left.”

I think we’d all be better off if we turned the language around. They didn’t bounce. You bounced them.

They came to your site – on purpose. They clicked a link because they thought you could answer their question, solve their problem, or otherwise help them attain whatever it was they were seeking. In most cases, you created the impression that your site could help, with the ad you ran, the keyword you purchased, or the content that inspired someone to link to your site. Somehow your marketing or your site attracted this person.

But when they arrived, the site didn’t fulfill their expectations. In effect, the site told them to leave, because the information or solution they sought probably wasn’t there, or wouldn’t be complete or accurate, or just that it might be available but would require some work to get at it. Or maybe your site created an impression that just made them not want to do business with you – I ‘get bounced’ from small online stores all the time not because the business is small but because the site makes them ‘seem’ too rinky-dink to be credible.

There are hundreds of possible reasons why people leave so quickly, and obviously some of them are more about the source or the visitor than the site. But the vast majority of bounced visitors are failed opportunities, and when marketers accept these numbers as ‘normal’ they’re doing both the business and the visitors a great disservice.

The people you bounce from your site – especially when stacked up by the hundreds of thousands - should become the motivation and justification for spending the time and money necessary to help your website live up to its (expressed or implied) promises.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I really try to avoid posts about new Google products or features. But today they put one out that is actually related to search and it’s terrific. It’s an upgrade to Google Webmaster Tools that provides clear and useful information about who links to the pages in your website.

Until now the tool available for finding the inbound links to your site were very poor (like all other SEO tools). And while Google is clear that this new information isn’t complete, it is significantly better than what we’ve had before in terms of both quantity (there are way more links listed than before) and accuracy (we’re now shown how many links point to each page and can easily see and download the linking URLs).

This is important because inbound links play a critical role in how pages from your website rank in Google and the other search engines. (Skip this part if you already know how it works.) The search engines essentially measure relevance and reputation – and the only clues they have are what you say about yourself (the content on your web pages) and what others say about you (the links into your site and who/where they’re from). As such, optimization is the process of managing website content (which words go where on what pages) and cultivating relevant links.

So half (or more) of our organic search engine fate is in the hands of inbound links, and for the first 10 years or so of the internet age we’ve had to do without very good visibility into these links. Technically speaking, it’s been like getting ready for a date without a mirror. We’ve had only a vague idea of where we stood going in and just enough information to be confused afterwards.

One tab over in Google Webmaster Tools, under Statistics and Page Query, Google shows a seemingly random sampling of the link text they found pointing to our site. This another piece of the puzzle, so while they're feeding us peasants why doesn't Google link these two pieces of data so we can see the link text for each inbound link?

If they don’t, let’s hope someone puts up a simple tool where you can upload the .cvs file of your links (which you can now download) and then see a nice anchor text analysis. I bit someone is probably coding it as I type this request. If you're the one doing this, please also grab the PageRank of the linking page, and let me upload a list of target keywords so you can tell me how many of them are found on the linking page too. Thanks.

In any case, thanks to the good folks at Google for this tool. Here's hoping it's the first of many Webmaster Tool enhancements we see this year.

For more details and helpful analysis of the new features, visit SearchEngineLand)

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With this rush of analytically minded visitors we're seeing today based on the link from Avinash, I thought I'd take the opportunity to solicit some information. So you may have thought you were here to read a blog, but I'd like to you to participate in a little survey / project.

Like everyone else who spends time with Analytics software, I'm often asked for advice on selecting an analytics tool, and the virtues of one program vs another. (Usually the 'another' is Google Analytics.) While I have my preferences and reasons why I've made that decision, it still isn't easy to summarize these reasons or convey them to someone else, and of course every unique situation impacts the 'right' decision.

To develop a better and more comprehensive answer to this question, I've recently taken to carrying around a little notebook and writing down the questions that I have for my analytics software. My theory is that over time I'll be able to take this list and then try to answer these questions in a variety of packages and by documenting that exercise I'll have a real world solution to the problem of both recommending (and justifying) certain solutions.

My goal is not to build a 'checkbox' style capabilities list, but rather to provide a few sentences of context as to the possibility, simplicity, caveats, and context of how each package is able to provide 'answers'. In a perfect world, the answers would clump in ways that would make it easy for someone to decide which tool is right for them.

My lists are grouped by subject. Questions about traffic acquisition, questions about visitors, questions about the site structure and content, questions about the economics of the business. Many in some ways correspond to standard KPIs, but I'm purposely trying to put these into the form of business issues/questions not simple titles of information types.

So if you'd please, comment here with one or three of the questions you want your analytics program to answer. Common ones or vexing problems, everything is welcome.

I'll compile the list, organize it as best I can, and publish it back out. Perhaps even set up a wiki where experts in the various packages can contribute answers and examples. Thanks in advance.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm starting to feel a bit like the pre-'99 Susan Lucci, but honored none-the-less to nearly make the 'Top Web Analytics Blogs' list for the second time. The esteemed Mr. Kaushik does much to promote and assist the analytics community, and his blog-roll is no exception.

I can only suggest that you take his advice, link here, and get this blog onto the top 10. It took Ms. Lucci 19 tries to make the big time - so making it anytime before about June 08 will be considered a victory.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)