To a great many, the following probably rings true…
Web analytics is something you know you need, but when you get it, you’re not sure really what to do with it.
It’s that elephant in the corner…once you get it home, you think “Umm, well, that’s nice…now what!”
The value from web analytics is not measurement. It’s about optimising your business goals, your audience needs, measuring the gap between the two and acting on the results.
But you can’t manage what you don’t measure and if you don’t understand what you’re measuring, you can’t improve.
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OMG – have you seen the new Discover? If not, why not? If so, you’re probably in heaven and I completely understand.
Discover v3 is the latest release of the ad-hoc analytics software from Adobe – and I have to say, Tim Lott and the team over there have done a fantastic job with this release, opening up capabilities that, once you start, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.
So, what’s all the fuss about? Read on…
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We’re just working with a client that uses Google Analytics for their measurement platform and as part of our overall strategic plan, we’ve done some supporting analysis for them, reviewing the last year with respect to a specific segment or two.
They get a surprisingly large amount of traffic for a WA business, which is especially significant when it comes to using Google Analytics. On average, they get about 25 million page views per month – so, over the course of the year, that’s somewhere around 300 million page views. During our supporting analysis, Google announced a new feature – controlling the sampling rate – and the results were very surprising…and scary.
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One of the things that’s not “native” to SiteCatalyst reporting is Time Spent by Referring Domain, which can be quite a useful segment to use. So here’s a quick tip to get it working.
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I thought I’d write this one given the general lack of information available on the web around getting Flowplayer reporting into SiteCatalyst v15.
I recently worked with a client who uses Flowplayer and we needed to get them ready to upgrade to v15. The challenge was, Flowplayer has no information about integration and what’s out there on the web seems to be for v14 code. Additionally, with Flowplayer you can’t use the AppMeasurementExtension – you have to use the JavaScript methods.
Read the rest of this entry...There’s no excuse nowadays not to be optimizing across multiple channels. There’s heaps of tools available from no cost tools to paid tools and there’s plenty of consultants willing to help you get out there and lead you down a path of optimization.
Just remember though, 90% of optimization is done by people, only 10% by the tool. It’s people that create the optimization strategy, the ideas to test, the segments, the content, the creative and of course, the insights that come from the results – both good and bad.
So how do you know if free is ok or whether you should invest in something a little more robust? It depends how serious you are about optimization. It also depends on what analytic tools you run as well. It depends on what you actually want to achieve.
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As I find myself sitting in Auckland International Airport, waiting 12 hours for my next flight to LA (it’s 2am Perth time so I’m not quite with it), I figured what better time to write about success event pathing, as apparently my success event pathing for this trip wasn’t quite optimised for connecting flights at reasonable hours.
One of the things that you want to know about your site is the order in which certain events happen. If you’re using success events for various things, like tracking self-service transactions, or leads, purchases etc, it’s important to know the most popular order in which visitors interact.
Read the rest of this entry...Implementing web analytics successfully throughout an organisation requires more than just a “fire-and-forget” approach to the platform. There are many elements that go into making it worthwhile for your business…
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I’ve come across a few clients now that either aren’t using SAINT, are using it in a limited way, or are using it for campaigns only. Maybe people are confused by what it does, or daunted by it, or just don’t know what it can be used it for. It’s got uses that extend way beyond campaigns.
So, in this post, I’ll re-cap a bit about what SAINT actually is, and how it can be used, across a whole multitude of things.
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While Jerome is busy posting about the in’s and out’s of implementing Search&Promote, I thought I’d wade in with a post on why businesses should consider their search as a missed opportunity.
I’ve previously posted on what I think is a hidden gold mine of information called internal search. It’s an area of the site that many companies, quite frankly, ignore.
“Not too sure how to do anything with it, we assume it’s working just fine serving up results to random queries, so we’ll leave it alone and focus on our core purpose, driving people into our conversion funnel.”
Or something along those lines.
If that’s you, go stand in front of a mirror and slap yourself a few times! Wake up and smell the coffee…there’s much more to search than that!
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“I can’t find anything!”
This is the most common response we came across during the scoping and implementation of Search and Promote as the new internal search for Murdoch University.
Hardly surprising, given the issues with internal search that I covered in my previous post, but amazingly consistent!
In fact, one of the great truths we found during this project is that people truly don’t care where content is located, or whether it’s authenticated and/or accessible – they just wanted to type something in the search box, immediately find what they’re looking for, then carry on with their work.
We’ve now completed the implementation across our internal sites, and it’s working really well – so well that we’re now 2-3 weeks away from covering our external sites.
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