It was good to hear the “what do you look for when you first see an implementation?” question. For me, I ask: 1) Send me the reports you look at regularly OR the analyses you have looked at most recently (more often than not…there are none), 2) describe who is responsible for reporting, analytics, and implementation — names, where they are in the organization, and how much of their time is spent on that work (more often than not…it’s 1-3 people who dabble on the side), 3) set me up with a login to the tool (I also snoop around site-side with Charles/Proxy or the Digital Pulse Debugger as appropriate to get a sense of whether they have any customizations, whether they’re doing any onclick tracking, etc.). The challenge here is making sure our client teams that the data/access I’m asking for isn’t because I’m going to dive in and analyze the data, but, rather, so I can get a handle on whether the client is doing that at all. IF the client is doing much on that front, then this exercise surfaces *who* is doing it, which, in turn, is who I want to be talking to directly.

As for why companies spend money on WA tools and then don’t invest in the people, Avinash has been lamenting this for years — it led to his 10/90 rule. Jenn nailed it, though (and I’ll now extend) — even a poorly implemented WA tool can spit out charts and graphs, and it can even spit out data that is “interesting.” Just because marketers are being bludgeoned to “be data-driven” doesn’t mean they know what that means. So, if they get a chart out of a tool and work that into a PPT deck, then they’ve effectively seen the emperor’s clothes, whether they’ve really gotten value out of the data or not.

DudeB: “Why?”

DudeA: “Um, I dunno. It would be good to know.”

DudeB: “Why?”

DudeA: “I like the pictures”

DudeB: “And what will you do if you find out that only 2 out of the 10 pictures are clicked on?”

DudeA: “Well, nothing. This isn’t a very important page. I like the pictures. Those people probably don’t buy my stuff. Have you got any cheese?”

DudeC: “PUT DOWN THE CLUB AND STEP AWAY FROM THE CLIENT!”

That returns 2 and 3 word phrases.

-Rudi

Great show, very worthwhile, very enjoyable.

-d

scott

Thanks for listening and for the feedback.

-Rudi

I don’t agree with a lot of what was said but it was a very thought provoking interview.

I fear the day companies start hiring based on specific measure certifications, it’s a lazy and dangerous practice. It is this mentality that has corrupted our institutions of higher learning. Our colleges are turning into degree producing factories where students primary motivation is getting a grade and ultimately a degree.

At the end of the day, if I pass the WAA Cert, all it means is I am good at passing the WAA cert, nothing less, nothing more.

If you are looking for future podcast ideas I would love to hear similar viewpoints from other marketing disciplines, eg someone who is 100% dedicated to SEO or a leading email marketing specialist.

Shame we couldn’t tease out any future features of GA.

The ‘black hole’ comments surprise me, I have never found GA to give tangibly different results from the other major tools.

Very interesting and I like the topics and that in every podcasts you invite a guest.

In this podcasts I could learn about the Forrester Web Analytics Wave. I am from Germany and only read in blogs about „CMS Watch“ or an german comparision called „Einkaufsführer Web Analytics“, so very interesting to know about the wave Report.

I have seen on the Forrester Website the last Wave (Q3 2009) with 8 Vendors. I like it, that you choose only 8 and get in Detail for those.

Best regards from Hamburg

Hope that this helps.

- Phil

Thanks for the great show. I’ve mentioned it on my blog: Top Digital Marketing podcasts: http://bit.ly/cWVDPO

Looking forward to hearing new episodes!

Alex

I forgot to ask, what do you all think about the measurement industry now that GA is rolling out many similar functions offered by paid vendors like custom report by SiteCatalyst or WebTrend. Will Google have yet another Monopoly in the analytic space?

Now back to the product itself. Aside from non-real time, GA’s limited to Site-level metrics only in most of its reports. Furthermore, it can’t segmentize visitors like the way SiteCatalyst does. However, SiteCatalyst is extremely expensive, though it is perhaps the most “relied” (not just used like GA) Analytical tools by major enterprises in the world.

Thank you for listening and for the comments. I understand your point. However, our goals are not to be investigative reporters nor do we want to do anything that would cause issues for our guests (or hosts).

-Rudi

In the mean time, you could research how extended permissions work to get a sense of how you can pull in profile data from Facebook users. The project we’re working on uses the access token we get from a user who grants us permission to pull FB profile data in order to pre-populate a form in a Facebook application.

Hope this helps!

I am not sure of the particulars on how to do this, but speak to Ed Hewitt at Omniture. He will know how.

-Rudi

Thank you,
Dave

The info and advice provided by Stephane is so valuable, right from the start of his experiences dealing with I.T and developing the maturity model.

Well done guys on another super podcast!

Thanks for catching that! I fixed the post.

-Rudi

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-Rudi

That’s odd. I don’t any in chrome or firefox. But thanks for the notice, I’ll do some more digging.

-Rudi

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It’s just music to my ears, love to hear more.

Again, if resource is not an issue, why not.

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I have high respect for Eric. I am always the devils advocate, so I hope folks here don’t mind me just throwing my opinion out.

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thx
aseem

I also did not hear anyone at Summit try and “upsell” any of the offerings. There were many, many conversations about the strengths and weaknesses of various tools.

-Rudi

- Peter

I can appreciate your frustration, although I honestly didn’t feel like any of the Insight conversations I heard were aggressive upsell attempts. I think the key thing to keep in mind is that there are simply some things that Insight does extremely well (in particular, multichannel analytics). It’s important to recognize the distinction between “upsell” and merely talking about a tool’s strengths. Insight is a new tool to many Summit attendees; obviously, we can’t just not talk about a tool that may provide significant value to many simply because it has powerful features and a price tag.

Thanks,
Ben Gaines
Community Manager
Omniture, an Adobe company

Disappointed but not surprised to hear that Omniture is continuing the same old up-sell game from Discover to Insight. It was nice to hear though that they are finally getting around to fixing the basic SC product and achieving parity with the other solutions out there.

utilizing page titles is vary problematic as soon as any SEO efforts are put in place. utilizing URL structures can also cause problems as the website changes over time. many sites use different products for different parts of their sites.

for larger more enterprise sites, the best way to implement is to have the pages output web analytics values in javascript that are not related to URLs, pagenames or design elements which often change without the web analytics team being made aware until AFTER a reporting problem has started.

We would like to talk with Dennis. If only we knew someone who could help us set that up

-Rudi

Thanks for listening and for the comments! We are glad you are enjoying the podcasts.

-Rudi

1. One of the most interesting outcomes from creating the wizards was to realize that a web analytics solutions by itself is far from being sufficient for web business insights. For example, if traffic to your site is down is that because you did something wrong or is traffic to your competitors also down? ==> You need more than web analytics to answer that critical question.

2. While most web analytics solutions will enable you to create the analytics proposed in the wizard you may need the vendors’ advanced ad-hoc anlaysis modules in addition to the basic reporting module. Unless you are using a solution where both are available as part of a single solution.

Akin
Unica

Good news: the wizards shoudl be suitable for any vendor’s web analytics solution. Have a look at http://MultichannelMetrics.com/wizards and see the bird’s eye view flow charts.

Depending on the package that you use for web analytics you will create the related analytics in one way or other. But hopefully most tools should support most recommendations in one way or other.

Keep me posted please how it goes. You can add your own thoughts and comments at each step of the wizard.

Big, big, thanks to Rudi, James, and Adam for the chance to participate in a beyond web analytics podcast!

Akin

Thank you for listening and thank you for your comments.

Can you provide a little more detail about your environment? Vendor Name, types of analysis you would like to do, etc.

-Rudi

Great stuff, keep up the great work!!

Pritesh Patel (Twitter: priteshpatel9)

I tested the download and playing the file via the web player and both worked for me. Please email podcast@beyondwebanalytics.com if you continue to have issues. Be sure to include OS / Browser / Player info.

-Rudi

I’m hoping to hear this so I hope you can get it fixed!

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Thank you for the PercentMobile mention.

http://percentmobile.com/page/431/7-reasons-to-consider-mobile-analytics-for-mobile-site-tracking

The Bango platform solves this by placing a layer above all these methods – which provides a consistent visitor ID for tracking while also leveraging all the best physical IDs below. It’s your shared key across all platforms, sessions, connections, devices etc you mentioned. This is one way in which we deliver our 8x accuracy, our industry partnerships is another.

Best recommendation to anyone is to try us out at http://bango.com/analytics.

Andy.

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@Nathan – Thanks for the comments. I’ll have to check out the tool.

-Rudi

To be a thorough discussion of implementation validation tools, your listeners may also want to evaluate our solution SiteAudit. SiteAudit is a server based analytics auditing solution with support for all the major analytics and Ad vendors. We have a free account for anyone to try us out. Request one here: http://www.observepoint.com/contact/sales

Best,
Nathan

Thanks for the comments. It would be great to see Omniture offer more bundles of their tools. It would really set them apart.

-Rudi

Thanks for the question. What I would recommend is starting off with an A/B test to find out which design is optimal across the segments of traffic that come to the site. Once you have a winner from the A/B test, I would follow up with an MVT campaign to find out why a particular design won over the others. The results of your MVT will also provide a nice opportunity to apply the learnings to other areas of the site.

Without knowing what the differences in the designs are, I would include all the KPI’s that you think can be affected by these different experiences. Since this is an e-commerce site I would include conversions, AOV, RPV, and total sales but also maybe repeat visits, page views, and time on site.

Thanks again Bhargava,

Brian Hawkins

If I were to start A?B or MVT for a website, which would be the starting point (for a e-commerce site). I am seeking this clarification as i need to compare diff designs. Like, will we be able to set up some KPIs for test that we conduct?

Thanks,
Bhargava

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Thank you for the comments. If you have any questions or specific topics you would like to hear covered in future podcasts, please let us know!

-Rudi

-Rudi

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