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.

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…

Many companies struggle with an effective digital measurement strategy, often due to the lack of resources or the lack of understanding how it can provide an effective return on the investment.

And it is an investment. Generally you’ll incur people and training costs and you’ll incur licensing costs for the various platforms. These are all ongoing costs.

But you can demonstrate an ROI that will far outweigh the costs incurred, if you spend the time and effort in putting a solid strategy together. Read on to see the 6 key elements to a successful measurement strategy.

Just a quick post…finished presenting at the Perth Think Tank (#perththinktank), talking about the value of measurement and measuring user engagement. Around 220 people were there, including the Lord Mayor of Perth! I’m honoured.

It seems that I’ll be hitting the road again, presenting at a couple of conferences. One in Perth, the other in Sydney…

Albert Einstein once had a picture hanging on his wall at Princeton that read:

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

He was a smart cookie and often referred to it…and it definitely rings true for web analytics.

Bit of surprising news, Adobe is buying Omniture for $1.8billion.

Still taking this in and many thoughts running through my mind at the moment. Seen Adobe purchase a few companies in the past and the results have been varied. They are, after all, a product-based company, offering little in the way of services. Omniture on the other hand, is a service-based company. Very different business models, very different thought processes.

Just presented on how to get value from your analytics platform to around 150 people at the Marketing Higher Education Symposium 2009, at the Sydney Convention Center.

Slides are available on my blog.

If you’re thinking of trying to compare web analytics results by vendor, or even by the original log file, you’re in a for a very tough time.

Genie + bottle + uncork = Long time, not good time.

The problem is that while there are basically two different methods of data collection (via server logfiles or via JavaScript tags), the variables associated with both, in a real world environment, make it almost impossible to compare results.

And therein lies your genie out of bottle, and you scrabbling around trying to justify the results. You’re best off not even trying.

I was chatting with one of our School Deans today about various results and he posed the question “Is it possible to see which courses people viewed after seeing one course?”. His interest was based on the fact that the user doesn’t always purchase the “most frequently visited course”. They often view one thing, but end up purchasing something else, and our reporting doesn’t highlight that behaviour.

Now, that got me thinking…that’s probably pretty common behaviour. So how can we make that visible?