If so, I should apologize again! For those of you that missed it, I had a morning session and since my JetBlue red-eye flight had been soooooooooooooooo on-time while I worked for JupiterResearch I figured I would just catch the red-eye, cab into midtown and make my panel with an hour to spare. It was a fantastic plan …

… until the toilets on my flight came up broken.

For some reason, the pilot didn’t want to cross the country with a full flight with no toilet. Me, I was sleeping, but I suppose I see his point. So anyway, two hours later we hear “flush, YES!” and the flight pushes back. But my window has closed and I know I’m going to be late …

… and then the cabbie took me through Queens to get to midtown.

New Yorkers tell me this makes sense. Must be that “New York state of mind” people talk about …

Either way, I arrived at SES 45 minutes late, exhausted, stressed out, with airplane “bedhead” and my comfy travel sweater still on (seriously, it helps me sleep when I’m crammed next to some stranger who is drooling on me.) Rebecca Lieb, the panel moderator, saw me from the stage and said “Oh good, Eric Peterson is here. Come on up here Eric …” so I pulled my suitcase down the aisle, grabbed a glass of water, jumped on stage, said “Hi” to Neil and Jason and gave a 15 minute presentation on key performance indicators.

Chaos, absolute chaos!

I apologized profusely to Rebecca afterwards and again every time I saw her over those few days. She laughed it of and said that she’d had good feedback on the session … I think her word was “memorable”

I guess she wasn’t kidding. Rebecca and the SES team have invited me back so I’ll be on the Multichannel Metrics panel at SES San Jose on August 7th. Rebecca made me promise to fly in the night before (smart!) and the panel is at 4 PM so there is little chance that I’ll mess this one up …

Knock wood.

Anyway, if you’re going to be at SES in August, come to the panel. I’d love to meet some of my readers and hopefully the panel will be as memorable (in a good way) as it was in New York.

For those of you interested in multichannel metrics (something Visual Sciences excels at, I should add) but not able to make it to San Jose, I’ll be on a similar panel at the Shop.ORG Annual Summit titled “What Numbers do Multi-Channel Merchants Look at each Monday Morning?” I believe I’ll also be at the WebSideStory Client Summit doing a Digital Marketing University class on key performance indicators the next day (October 12th) but I suppose I need to confirm that with Pelin at WebSideStory. Pelin, do you read my blog? ;-)

I just saw a nice follow-up comment to my polite (I mean, I meant it to be polite) disagreement with Avinash about his “Top Ranked Analytics Blogs” list from Blackbeak (arrrrrrgh!) In his comment, Steve says:

“Web analytics demystified is the best blog around when it comes to web analytics, but because Eric hasn’t optimized for Technorati he doesn’t appear in their SERP.”

Awwwwww, can you feel the love? I can.

It’s true, I have not optimized for Technorati but I did recently “claim my blog” with them which somehow propelled me to the sixth position in Avinash’s list. I’m not honestly sure how I would optimize for Technorati if I was so motivated …

… anyway, thanks Blackbeak! I love your work too!

A. Clinton Ivy, the Instant Cognition blogger, is working his way through an analysis of his first 100 days of blogging, a trend perhaps started by Xavier Casanova in his 11 part (and counting) series on “Blogging Success: What Lessons Have You Learned” and recently joined by Avinash Kaushik in his “Thirty Days in Numbers” post.

Don’t you love it when analysts blog?

Anyway, Clint’s post today (part II in what will perhaps be a series like Casanova’s) has some interesting anecdotes. My personal favorite is this:

It boils down to this: “Eric T. Peterson is GREAT for business!” Since historical referral data has been available, Eric is responsible for 28.9% of all referrals.

Why thank you Clint!

The volume of traffic I push to my friend Clint is only surpassed by “directly referred traffic” at nearly 30%. Clint indicates that he needs to do a segmentation study on this data but hopes that 30% indicates “brand loyalty”. My suspicion, knowing what I know about why referring URL information gets dropped, thusly forcing sessions into the “directly referred URL” bucket, is that some of this is attributable to non-HTML RSS readers for which no referrer exists. You can see a small amount of traffic from Bloglines, My Yahoo and Google (his 1.5% which without knowing more one could assume is the Google Reader which should appear as “www.google.com/reader/view/” in a URL-level analysis) but it’s hard/impossible to know how much of Clint’s 30% is coming from RSS software, mobile phones, etc.

Clint’s comment about the steady quality of traffic I drive to his site:

My hypothesis is that, for whatever reason, there is a great commonality between Eric’s audience and those who find this blog useful so I get a relatively steady stream of referrals from his site.

Eric Butler commented to me once that he believed he was benefiting from the top-slot in my blogroll, and recently Matt Jacobs commented that I am driving a disproportionate volume of traffic to his blog. Maybe the steadiness Clint experiences is due to his placement in my blogroll?

Fortunately, I too am a navel gazer and so I measure everything on my site and in my RSS feeds. A quick analysis going back to January 1, 2006 shows that:

• From my Blogroll, I have sent Clint 205 clicks over 185 sessions from 168 unique visitors. More importantly (as in, “What has Clint done for me?”) these visitors have a 5.4 percent conversion rate back on my site, having bought a handful of books and submitted eight email addresses (some 0.7 percent of my total value since January 1, 2006)
• Eric Butler, on the other hand, holding the number one slot in the Blogroll (by virtue of his last name) has seen 616 clicks from 513 visitors over 562 sessions. Folks clicking to Eric from my site have a 7.7 percent conversion rate and have contributed 2.7 percent of the total value I am tracking (again, book sales and leads)
• From January 1, the top five Blogroll-traffic recipients were Eric, Xavier, Chris D’Allesandro, ROI Revolution and Bob Page (on a per-click basis) whose “clickers” converted at 7.5 percent and helped me sell roughly $1,000 worth of books. Thanks Guys!
• Since June 1st, more relevant since I have dropped some folks from my Blogroll, the list is Eric, Matt Jacobs, Avinash, ROI Revolution and Chris D’Allesandro whose “clickers” have converted at 5.5 percent and helped me sell just under $150 worth of books.

As I look at the distribution of Clint’s “clicks” they do appear to be quite steady, about 4 per day with peaks on May 10th and May 24th (no correlated increase in sitewide traffic on those days but I did update the web site on May 24th, moving Clint up in the list a bit so perhaps that was blog readers checking out the new site.)

Interestingly, all clickthrough referrals coming from the Blogspot.com domain since January 1, 2006 have only driven $140 in book sales and had an overall conversion rate of 9.0 percent. Still, I guess I shouldn’t complain … Avinash, bless his heart, has sent me 38 visitors who have consumed a great deal on my site (485 page views, fourth in a list of known blog referrers) but none of these folks have converted … I suppose that’s what I get for being critical ;-)

Are you tracking your in-bound and out-bound traffic to this level of granularity? If so, what else are you tracking? If not, why not? Leave me your comments!

When Bryan Eisenberg sent me a reviewers copy of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing I was pretty impressed, it’s a great book. When they then showed me the preview of the CD that could come with the book I was more impressed, they have some great companion materials. Now that the book is officially for sale, I recommend that you don’t take my word for it, you should get your own copy today!

Hey, I just noticed that the book is number one on the Business > Consumer Behavior Bestsellers List at Barnes & Nobel online. Very cool!

Congratulations to both Bryan and Jeffrey on getting their next bestseller out the door.

I had to get the information from a FeedBurner forum (thanks FeedBurner!) but I figured out what I was doing wrong with how I was describing the feeds on my web site. Blogger produces an Atom feed and I had been describing the document incorrectly. Now, if you go to my home page and use the Bloglines bookmarklet you’ll find my weblog feed and if you go to the All Site RSS Feeds page you’ll see all three feeds.

Also, if you’re a long-time subscriber like Mike and Xavier, you need to make sure that you update your feed URL. I’ve gone to a scripted feed for tracking purposes and if you continue to use the old feed (atom.xml) you’ll see funky behavior. You can visit this page to get the new feed URL.