Archive for March, 2006

UPDATE: When the folks at JupiterResearch saw the quote I cite below attributed to me, their PR folks quickly jumped into action and had the quote properly attributed to Mr. Dowling.

DestinationCRM just published an article about Omniture’s new partner program. They quote me:

“We’re seeing lots of integration with Web data,” says Eric Peterson, senior analyst at Jupiter Research, which he says is representative of the marketing industry as a whole. “Omniture is going in the direction that I expect a lot of the vendors to go in. Third-party integrators and partners are an important of the business; they’re leveraging that more effectively to deliver improved services and customized solutions.”

While there is some small chance I said something similar to this months ago when I was actually a JupiterResearch analyst, I rather suspect that this quote should be attributed to my replacement at JUP, W. Greg Dowling.

As many of you have likely already noticed, Alan Meckler sold my previous employer JupiterResearch for the tidy sum of $10 million to Kagan Research, not a bad return on a $250,000 investment! My former boss, David Schatsky, was made president of the new company and the folks I have talked to sound pretty upbeat about the whole thing. Given that the ClickZ and SES folks I talked to at SES NYC were all pretty impressed with their new ownership, hopefully this is a great deal for the research team and they all get to spend quiet summer days at the new corporate headquarters in Monterey, California.

Congrats to all involved!

I just saw this post from Jim Novo of, among other things, the Web Analytics Association’s Education Committee. Apparently, if you’re a good writer and have any insight into the analysis and testing of …

• Banner ads
• Rich Media (Flash, EyeBlaster, etc.)
• Branding
• Buzz/Consumer Generated Media
• Public Relations efforts

… then the WAA would like to pay you $500 for your work. Between 1,200 and 1,500 words which any good writer can kick out the time it takes to finish a double-tall nonfat latte.

Nice offer!

For those of you who are active members in the Web Analytics Association, you only have until March 30th to vote for new Board of Directors members. I was just looking at the nominees (requires member login) and noticed that two guys I know pretty well are running, Chris D’Allesandro and Clint Ivy. Chris and Clint are both web analytics bloggers and both extremely knowledgable about the web analytics arena in general having worked both as analytics end-users as well as analytics “process people” in very large organizations for years (Chris at JWT/Ford, Clint at Disney). These are guys that know the tools they use inside-and-out and have consistently pushed their respective vendors towards excellence.

While I am very sure that all of the canidates are well qualified to serve on the WAA Board of Directors, if I can figure out how the heck to vote, I’m voting for Chris and Clint. I think that it’s absolutely essential that experienced analytics practitioners like Clint and Chris help guide the Association, folks who have to do the real work day-in and day-out. Plus, their activity in the Yahoo! group and in their blogs will keep them doubly-connected to the largest part of the WAA’s constituency.

It’s too late to make “Vote for Chris and Clint” buttons but, well, hopefully you get the drift.

I just added MapSurface to my weblog so any of you can see the traffic to-and-from my weblog. All you have to do is click “Alt-X” and a layer will appear and provide some really basic web analytics.

I won’t know how much I like the tool until I have some traffic but I’m very interested in the idea of transparency in web analytics. Imagine if every web site provided some level of detail on a per-page basis — unique visitors, visits, page views, top “X” referrers — so that everyone could validate for themselves how popular/interesting/valuable other people found the content they were reading. Sort of like the “Page Rank” thing you get in the Google Toolbar but not just for Toolbar users and not only based on Google’s measurements.

What do you think?