Archive for July, 2008

My good friends at Semphonic just published a bunch of video vignettes collected at last year’s X Change event in Napa Valley that are definitely worth checking out if you’re thinking about joining us in August.  Or, even if you’re already registered for the event, check out these videos and start getting pumped up for what promises to be a fantastic event!

As an example of the kind of content published at YouTube, here is my good friend and Web Analytics Assocation Board member June Dershewitz and some of her thoughts about the conference. Cool, huh?

There are 15 different videos at YouTube from brilliant folks like Anil Batra, Dan Shields, Manoj Jassra, Marshall Sponder, June, Phil Kemelor, Gary Angel, and even yours truly who has never been known to shy away from the camera (although perhaps I should have that day, what the heck was up with my hair!)

Don’t know what the X Change is? Read all about it at the official conference web site.

The same guys that want you all to believe web analytics is easy has now declared that “Visitor engagement formulas are largely another fad, just like parachute pants and the Hollywood diet. It’s a measure some consultants and vendors can pitch like snake oil.”

Omniture’s point that Visitor Engagement is a bad idea because it has subjective components fails to understand the work that folks like Jim Novo, Steve Jackson, Theo Papadakis, Joseph Carrabis and others have done; it makes me wonder if the author bothered to read anyone’s work on the subject.

Worse, it makes me question Omniture’s long-term commitment to Visual Site customers since Visual (= Omniture Discover OnPremise) is, at least for now, the industry’s leading solution for creating derived measures and experimenting with visitor-level data.  The point seems to be that simple measures of success, such as those provided by SiteCatalyst, are all that are required.

Hmmm …

We pretty much had this same debate a year ago when Avinash Kaushik disagreed with the use of calculated metrics to measure engagement, and I can see that Steve Jackson has already commented as such.  I wouldn’t normally have written about this except the author said one smart thing when he commented you shouldn’t “try to build a better mouse trap, when you’re not taking advantage of the one you’ve got today.”

Agreed.

If you’re thinking about trying to leverage any measure of visitor engagement, regardless of which measure you choose, you should definitely make sure your web analytics house is in order first.  Despite Omniture’s assertion, most people believe that web analytics is hard and requires a sometimes intense focus on people, process, and technology.  If you’re not staffed appropriately, if you haven’t defined your key performance indicators, if you haven’t established core web analytics business processes, and if you haven’t worked to optimize your web analytics implementation then trust me, Visitor Engagement is not for you.

A good analogy is the one provided in Tom Davenport’s book “Competing on Analytics” where he describes how baseball teams like the Oakland A’s and my friend Judah’s beloved Boston Red Sox, and football teams like the New England Patriots have used new and innovative metrics to evaluate the performance of players, concessions workers, and the entire fan experience.  Visitor Engagement is a new measure in web analytics, and thusly it will take a special type of analytical competitor to recognize the opportunity that this “uber measure” can potentially provide.  And just like some teams have shown that they are not ready to adopt new measures to evaluate their business, some companies are simply not ready to explore complex key performance indicators in an effort to “Compete on Web Analytics.”

If you’re like most companies doing web analytics today, it is likely that you will benefit more from focusing internally and learning more about how to leverage people, process, and technology more effectively, rather than look externally for new metrics of success.  You could get a good book on the subject of fundamental key performance indicators and spend a great deal of time implementing what you learn.

But if you’re interested in learning more about an innovative metric that describes the behavior and opportunity that exists with the 97% that don’t convert, a measure that you can apply to your advertising, content, B2B, marketing, or lead generation site that will compliment your otherwise robust key performance indicator suite, and a calculation that describes the level of Attention that visitors are paying to your site, your content, your testing and targeting, etc… well then I guess you’ll have to keep reading my blog (and Jim, and Steve, and Joseph, and a whole host of other people’s work who are committed to working these ideas out rather than just saying “balderdash!”)

If you’re not content to just keep reading and want to know more about my thoughts on Visitor Engagement, know this: I have been exceedingly clear that my measures of Visitor and Audience Engagement are new, and in their newness there is risk in the level of insight they may be able to provide you.  I am not promising you better skin, new hair, or more friends, despite the validation that the measurement of engagement recently received when NextStage was granted a patent for their work on the subject.  But, unlike some people, I have done my homework on the subject, and I continue to have conversations with some of the best companies in the world about how they can use new measures to improve their overall use of web analytic technology.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll put on my parachute pants, grab a glass of “Miracle juice”, and bust out the ol’ Snake Oil.

You may have already seen the press release this morning about some of the industry experts that we have coming to the X Change conference in San Francisco, August 17, 18, and 19.  If not, you should check it out!  Some highlights:

• Jim Sterne, yes … that JIM STERNE, will be joining us as a participant!  I’m not sure if I have seen Jim at an event where he is not the absolute Master of Ceremony and running the show so it will be nice to see my old friend (hopefully) relax and have the time to share his own experiences in our industry
• Many of the most influential vendors in the digital measurement ecosystem are coming, including Aaron Gray (WebTrends), John Squire (Coremetrics), John Dawes (Tealeaf), Eric Hansen (SiteSpect), Mark Treschl (OpinionLab), Eric Head (ForeSee Results), and more I am surely forgetting.
• We’ve also invited some of the best and brightest consultants in the business including Josh Manion and Bill Bruno (Stratigent), Jacques Warren (WAO Marketing), Aurelie Pols (OX2), Andy Fisher (Avenue A/Razorfish), Matt Jacobs (Digitas), Dan Sheilds (Wicked Science), Craig Danuloff (Commerce360), and of course the team from Semphonic!

By design, the X Change conference will be about 1/5 expert practitioners (the huddle leaders, who are amazing), 1/5 experts from the vendor, agency, and consulting community, and 3/5 practitioner attendees.  Given that the huddle leaders are practitioners themselves, we feel that we have a pretty solid (and extremely rare) ratio of experts to attendees, and that this arrangement will provide amazing value to attendees.

It doesn’t hurt that the experts we selected are among the best in the business.

Yeah, there are some folks that are missing, to be sure.  It would have been great if someone from Google Analytics could have come, and the guys from ZAAZ, and folks like Steve Jackson from SATAMA and others across the U.S.  But there is always next year, right!

Anyway, if you’re thinking about joining us in San Francisco the time to register is now.  Check out the official web site at Semphonic and get signed up today.

Now that the X Change conference is just over a month out several of the experts and huddle leaders that will be in attendance have offered to talk a little bit about what they’re going to be talking about in August.  Jared Waxman leads the Data Insights Group at Intuit’s Mountain View headquarters and is a very bright and outgoing member of the web analytics community.  Jared is launching a survey designed to help us all better understand how effectively we’re doing web analytics and will be talking about the results in his huddles at X Change.

Please read what Jared has to say and please take 10 minutes to complete his survey!

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Shortly after Eric Peterson invited me to lead a few of the X Change conference huddles this year, I realized something slightly ironic … We collect tons of data about our customers, but we still have far less cold, hard data when it comes to ourselves. In other words, what are the KPIs by which we can benchmark our own analytics practices against similar organizations?

If you’re not sure why this should concern you, ask yourself the following questions:

• When is the last time you received special recognition from your boss for how cutting-edge your analytics program is?
• How much of your last analytics budget proposal got approved?
• If resources were constrained, do you know which one analytics project would give your org the biggest leg-up?

The missing puzzle piece behind all these questions is: the right benchmarking data.

Chances are your boss wants to give you praise, but isn’t sure just which of things you’ve accomplished merits awarding you that mounted, singing Bass fish trophy (stuffed with cash, of course). And the budget? Management never wants to hear they’re about as cutting-edge as an animated gif. Armed with the right data, you can lay out for them what it’s going to take to catch-up, or take the lead.

If you really knew how your programs and capabilities compared to other companies in your space, you’d have the foundation for a pretty solid case for both the praise you deserve, and also the resources to beef up areas you’ve been slower to ramp on. This isn’t news, of course, and Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris’ book, “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” stresses the point that it’s not just about what you are doing on your island, but it’s about being faster and smarter that your competition in leveraging data and analytics.

So how do you know how you stack up? For a start, fill-out this 10-Minute Benchmarking Survey that I assembled to help your organization get a read on where you stand. It was challenging to come up with every use-case or application of web analytics in practice today and still have it be short enough that you can complete the survey while on-hold with your mortgage company. Ok, it was impossible. So I settled on a sampling of valuable activities that are components of many successful analytics practices. I hope you’ll agree it is sufficient for a strong directional read within key areas: Tracking, Competitive, Testing, & Predicting.

So I humbly present you with the Benchmarking Survey, and will reveal the results at X Change, and of course share your score back with you for your participation, once the results are compiled:

Start the Web Analytics Benchmark Survey

I hope to see you at the X Change conference. I’ll be leading a huddle on Testing Strategies alongside Dylan Lewis. At Intuit we have a sort of competition going for who’s group can take testing the furthest. We each have such different organizations and challenges, and that has led to very divergent strategies. Yet we are constantly learning from one another and looking forward to learning from the participants about what their challenges and strategies have been.

I’ll also be leading a huddle on Using Real-Time Surveys to Improve the Customer Experience. By building our own Voice of Customer apps, we’ve been able to provide an immediately tailored site experience for the customer and equally as important, effect more lasting improvements by orchestrating the right influence within the broader marketing organization.

Finally, I’ll be leading a huddle on Competitive Intelligence Tools & Methodologies. Sounds clandestine and exciting, huh? Truth is, I’d tell you more about this huddle if I could, but then I’d have to make you sign three different NDAs and learn the Intuit secret handshake … So just sign up and I’ll see you in person.

Since I am on the record as being supportive of the web analytics community around the world I wanted to make European readers aware of a webcast I will be doing next week.  Coremetrics has asked me to reprise the presentation I did on measuring visitor engagement that I did at their client summit last Fall.  The good news (for Europeans) is that the webcast is open to everyone and will be presented at 10 AM London time!

You can register for this free event at WebEx.

For those of you who can’t make the event because of holiday, or because like me the presentation will happen while you would normally be asleep, I am told that Coremetrics will be recording the presentation.  Assuming I am coherent at 2 AM my time and the recording comes of well, you should be able to download the webcast within the next few weeks at the Coremetrics web site.

I hope those of you in the European web analytics community will be able to join us next week.  I will try and leave plenty of time for questions and answers as well.