For those of you who missed my presentation yesterday, “Web Analytics: A Day a Month”, you can now listen to the re-recorded webcast at WebEx thanks to Tableau and the American Marketing Association. I say “re-recorded” since once again I managed to bring a large enough crowd to the webcast to break WebEx. Web analytics is hot!

You can listen to the webcast without having to register (still requires name and email) until next week I think by going to:

amaevents.webex.com

Here are a few other things I should mention, as long as I’m writing:

• I’m going to be in Boston next week for Judah’s Web Analytics Wednesday event (rescheduled from last month due to me being a weather-wimp) and if you’re in Boston or nearby I’d love to catch up. Please join us in Cambridge!
• The next few weeks I will be in Chicago (Jan 25th), Seattle (Jan 30th), San Jose (Jan 31st) and New York (Feb 7th) giving the keynote address at OpinionLab’s client conferences. The nice folks at OpinionLab mentioned that they’re opening up the events to non-customers so if you’d like to hear me talk about how quantitative and qualitative data combined provide a much more actionable view of the online visitor, please join us!
• The nice folks at the Direct Marketing Association who gave away PDF copies of my book Web Analytics Demystified in exchange for participation in their web analytics survey (written up by the amazing W. David Rhee) are holding a webinar on the research findings on Januay 23rd. The event is not free but the research is pretty good and if you’re in the DMA you should consider joining the call.
• The nice folks at the Web Analytics Association are also holding a research call, tomorrow (Jan 17th) in fact, on the future of the web analytics industry. I think this event is free but it might only be free to WAA members (maybe if Richard or Andrea read this they can comment for all to see!) The call is tomorrow morning at 9 AM Pacific, noon Eastern and you can register to attend at the WAA web site.
• Anil Batra has apparently jumped on the “bounce rate” bandwagon and is having a “bounce rate survey” that he’d like you to participate in. I haven’t had a chance to take it yet but I really enjoyed Anil’s salary research so I’m sure he’ll do a great job with bounce rate too!
• I’ll be back in San Diego in late February at Aaron Kahlow’s Online Marketing Summit talking about Key Performance Indicators in a Web 2.0 World.  I really enjoyed OMS last year and am looking forward to getting back to Sea World Aaron’s event!
• I had nothing to do with that movie on web analytics, despite it being filmed here in the Rose City, and have no idea what Ian is talking about.  Ian should spend less time at the movies and more time reading what experienced practitioners are saying about Gatineau.  <grin>

If I’m forgetting anything please comment below.  I think you’ll really like the webcast — the feedback I got has been excellent so far (despite some people going gossipy about the title of my last post on the subject … cage match indeed!)

For the past two days readers and friends have been writing me asking my opinion of Brandt Dainow’s recent iMediaConnection piece on “Google’s Killer App.” Most of the questions run along these lines:

“Is this guy insane, or did I completely miss the revolution?

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/15823.asp

I am so impressed with Omniture I have a hard time believing that Google Analytics beats it. I have been in a bit of a bunker trying to keep the magic going here, but can you hook me up with a reality check?”

The reality check is this: Yes, Brent Dainow has apparently gone completely insane. Too bad too, since I kinda liked some of the stuff he’s written in the past.

Let’s consider some of the bizarre statements he makes in his article:

Google has killed the web analytics software industry with the release of the new version of Google Analytics. The new version was released just under two months ago and is simply a quantum leap above any other analytics product on the planet.

This is his opening statement, and I don’t know where to begin. Statements like “killed the web analytics software industry” and “simply a quantum leap above any other analytics product on the planet” are bizarre. Is Dainow paying any attention to the web analytics market? Omniture continues to accelerate, WebTrends has released a great new version of their application, Microsoft is about to release their own free offering, …

And don’t get me wrong: I really do like Google Analytics, and I use it regularly, but there is absolutely no possible justification for saying that Google Analytics is a quantum leap better than other available applications. Google Analytics has some pretty visualizations, a slick UI, and does a good job of integrating with Google’s search marketing products, but a “quantum leap?” I think not.

“Google Analytics version 2 is not revolutionary. It does not extend web analytics software by providing new forms of analysis. Neither does it extend our understanding of websites by offering new approaches. What Google has done is simply take every feature in every product on the market and put them all into one system, and then make it available for free.”

Google has “every feature in every product on the market”? Really? Are you sure? Because I can think of dozens and dozens of useful features that I’ve seen in solutions like ClickTracks, Visual Sciences, Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Unica, … basically every other solution on the market today that aren’t in the version of Google Analytics I’m using. Features like:

• Real visitor segmentation (multidimensional, ad hoc, etc.)
• Custom variables at the visitor, session, and page view level
• The ability to produce custom reports for automated delivery
• The ability to define custom metrics and customize reports in the interface
• The ability to import metadata as an input for analysis
• Commerce-related reports like browse-to-buy ratios
• A browser-overlay that can be customized

(This list goes on and on and on, and has been discussed a great deal by folks like Judah Phillips and Phil Kemelor.)

Dainow continues:

“I am surprised by the range of features Google has added. I would have assumed some had been patented by the companies that created them. I can only conclude this is not the case. The range of features Google has borrowed from other products suggests the web analytics software industry managed to do 10 years of research and development without registering even one patent. This must be unique in the history of computing. If Google has stolen patented ideas, then I can only conclude they simply don’t care and will rely on their massive cash reserves to sort it out later.”

I suspect that Google does not own the patent for the browser overlay, for path analysis, and the JavaScript page tag. I would not assume that Google believes they have “stolen patented ideas” but you can be sure that some lawyer, somewhere, probably does. Maybe the companies that own these patents are pissed at Google but are hesitant to sue a company with the financial resources of GOOG?

Daniow then gets a little more personal:

“I say this as someone who, until this month, ran a company that produced web analytics software and directly competed with Google Analytics. No more. There is simply no way my organization can produce the range of features Google offers and make them available for nothing. We will keep the consulting arm going but use Google Analytics as the reporting system.”

This is perhaps both the most confusing and most telling statement in the entire article. His statement is confusing because one would have thought that as the CEO of a web analytics software company Dainow would have had a more refined understanding of the features available in the market today, the patent market, and the overall utility of free software.

His statement is telling because it sounds like ThinkMetrics is about to become a GAAC (Google Analytics Authorized Consulting) partner, in which case the bizarre pro-Google rhetoric in this article begins to make sense.

[UPDATED: Brett Crosby from Google wrote me and said that ThinkMetrics was not currently nor was about to become a GAAC partner. Which really only makes Dainow’s post that much more bizarre!]
At least, it makes sense that Dainow would want to write a bizarre cheerleader piece like this, I still cannot come up with any justification for iMediaConnection to publish something so strangely biased, poorly researched, and obviously wrong. Perhaps they too have decided that the rest of the vendors are dead and thusly unlikely to buy advertising on their site. I know I wouldn’t be sending a check to iMediaConnection anytime soon if I were Tim Kopp at WebTrends or Gail Ennis at Omniture.

Dainow then makes an even more confusing comment:

“I have been converted to Google Analytics version 2 purely by the strength of the product. It is not just the range of features that is impressive, it is the integration and flexibility.”

If by “integration” Dainow means “with Google’s products only”, and by flexibility he means “a total lack of flexibility” then I suppose I agree. Call me crazy, but I think integration means the ability to pass a variety of data automatically into and out-of the application using defined APIs, not just being able to see Google AdWords impressions and costs. And I think flexibility means the ability to collect multiple custom data, to define new data schemas, and to reprocess data if necessary.
I guess we just have different definitions.
Dainow continues to blather on and on (his “Blather Index” is very high in this article!) about the greatness and wonderfulness and amazing beauty of Google Analytics. For example:

“All the tables are clickable so that I can instantly drill down on the elements that stand out. For example, I recently analyzed the performance of a tourist site’s listings in travel directories. I was able to drill down on specific directories and see which pages and descriptions were working and which were not. Within the same directory, I could see some listings that had a bounce rate of 9 percent and others with a bounce rate of 70 percent.”

Well no wonder Brandt’s so in love with Google Analytics: The tables are clickable and he can instantly drill down on elements that stand out! That is certainly a feature not found elsewhere in web analytics …
I’m getting snarky so I’ll wrap this up. Dainow concludes with the following:

“But despite its failings, the overall range and flexibility of Google Analytics, combined with the price (free), leads me to expect the new version to totally dominate the market and drive most competitors out of business. You need an extremely good reason, or three, to continue staying with any other product.

If there is to be any future in web analytics software for any competitor, that company will need to rapidly expand the scope of reporting available and seriously enhance flexibility and drill-down capabilities.

Industry consolidation is sure to follow, and I expect WebTrends to be one of the few companies with the pockets to pursue such a strategy. It is surprising that Microsoft has not produced a product to compete.”

In these three short paragraphs, Dainow demonstrates a near complete lack of understanding of web analytics and the web analytics marketplace. Google Analytics already dominates the market in terms of total domains coded, but dominance isn’t defined by the breadth of your coding, it’s defined by the success your customers have using your application!

I’m not saying that GA customers aren’t able to be successful, but the data suggests that they still have a long way to go before the value of Google Analytics, or any free analytics application (sorry Ian!), can be assumed. Web analytics is hard and “pretty”, “free”, and “Googly” don’t make it any easier. Dedication and commitment make web analytics easier, not free and click-able.
There are hundreds of good reasons for any company to continue to use an alternative to Google Analytics: Dedicated support, “Enterprise-class” (sic) product features, and a company-wide commitment to customer success, not just to gathering all the world’s data, are three that come to mind.
Most of the licensed solutions on the market today have significantly greater reporting, flexibility, and drill-down capabilities than exist in Google Analytics. Visual Sciences, Omniture, WebTrends, ClickTracks, Coremetrics and others have all spent years working on these kinds of issues, and I think their customers largely agree that they’ve done a pretty good job. Visitor segmentation, custom reporting, and data warehouse analysis are all fundamentally important to “real” web analytics and are all basically absent in Google Analytics.

No disrespect to the management team at WebTrends, but don’t you think that Omniture and their $1.16B USD market cap would qualify as “having deep pockets”? Not that Omniture is likely worried at all about the competitive threat described in your article — plus they’re going to save a bundle by not advertising at iMediaConnection!

Regarding Microsoft and Daniow’s desire to sell Bill Gates his discarded web analytics solution … I think Dainow is the only person in the world who didn’t read last week about Microsoft Gatineau!
The comments at iMediaConnection basically all ask Daniow the same question–What planet are you from, dude?–and are best summarized by this comment:

“oh please….. it is lousy — we are now going to move to Omniture because of all the deficiencies in 2.0 — this kind of post must be paid by Google because people who use it for major adspends (Over 1m for us) know what a lousy move this was for us.. hey but I know the bloggers are excited.. while it has a few nice additions the removal of so many key features and the inability to see metrics together that previously were easy to compares are serious detriments.. plus it is not nearly as sophisticated as it once was.. stop drinking the kool-aid ..” (Elxiabeth schachin)

Well put, Elxiabeth.

In summary: I’m sorry to hear that things didn’t work out for Daniow’s company, especially with the great success that almost everyone else in this industry has been having for the last 24 months. And I wish him all the best as a GAAC partner — the world definitely needs more GAAC partners and smart people able to provide technical support for Google’s wonderful and amazing free application. But the kind of biased, self-serving, and poorly researched rhetoric published in Daniow’s piece has no place in the market today, at least in my humble opinion.
What do you think? Is Google Analytics going to destroy the web analytics marketplace? Is GA2 the best web analytics application in the entire universe? Are you calling your licensed vendor today to cancel your contract, and calling your broker to divest your holdings in OMTR and VSCN now that Daniow has made such a compelling case? I’d love to hear what you all have to think.

Thanks to everyone who has been so engaged in the debate over Technorati’s utility as a data source for ranking blogs.  I guess I opened a can of worms with that post but the debate has been just great!  But on to bigger and better things …I’m just about to board my flight to Tokyo, Japan to give the keynote presentation at Digital Forest’s Marketing ROI Day conference on August 1st.  I’m very excited about this opportunity and to finally meeting my generous hosts at Digital Forest.  If you are reading this and live in-or-near Tokyo, please come to Marketing ROI Day and meet me in person!

Incidentally, I’ve finally updated my presentation schedule.  You can learn where I’ll be presenting pretty much through the end of the year at this URL:

http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/link_list.asp?l=Presentation

Finally, I think I mentioned that I’m writing for DM News now.  My second article, titled “Hiring Myths for Web Data Talent” is now available online (and theoretically in print as well!)  In this article I address four key issues that anyone looking to hire experienced talent — regardless of which analytics platform they’ll be using — needs to consider.  I encourage each of you to read the article, but here is the top-line summary of hiring myths:

1. That an analyst is always the most important “first hire”
2. That a mathematics background is a must
3. That web analysts salaries can be easily compared to common IT functions
4. That a good hire guarantees positive return on investment

I welcome your comments and feedback regarding my presentation calendar, the DM News article, and pretty much anything else you’re interested in chatting about.

In all of the fuss about NetRatings dropping page views as a metric used to calculate site popularity is the fact that the company actually did a pretty smart thing: they took my advice from February 15th of this year and rolled in a very valuable and useful “sessions” metric. Well, maybe it wasn’t my advice they took, but I think it was a great idea either way to drop page views since they’ve become increasingly inconsistent to instead focus on the one metric that is consistently applied and well defined, sessions.

Unfortunately NetRatings chose to focus their announcement on “total minutes” saying that time was a better measure of engagement. Personally I’ve never been a very big fan of the time spent metrics — I guess I’ve just looked too long and too hard at all the problems associated with how time is collected and recorded in the web analytics realm.

There is a really engaged thread at the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo! Groups on this subject that is definitely worth a read if you’re interested.

And I’ll admit, I don’t have all the details associated with how panel-based services like Neilsen and comScore track time spent. If they’re actively tracking the user and only counting time when the browser window is active and the mouse is moving, well that would be a good use of the panel. My suspicion is that, like in web analytics, they’re simply recording the delta between the first and last request for a page in the domain — a strategy that suffers from a litany of well-described problems.

The two I see as most problematic are:

• Single page visits are either difficult to count or not counted in time spent calculations
• The amount of time a web page is open is likely only poorly correlated to their actual engagement with the page

Some have already noted that the fact that very popular sites like Google will do poorly in time spent on site because one of the dominant use cases involves only a single page (I search and I go.) Conversely, depending on how time spent on site is calculated, the search engines may have inordinately long times spent based on a search leading to a long browse time on a discovered site, leading back to the search results (same session, clock is presumably still ticking), leading to the next discovered site, etc.

I for one use iGoogle in exactly this way: I load the page frequently throughout the day and do nothing more than look at a single page view. In fact, unless Nielsen is either tracking the AJAX-interaction with the iGoogle interface, or counting single page view sessions, it is likely that my interaction with iGoogle is not counted at all. But let me assure you, I am quite engaged with the content in my Google portal (something that would be well evidenced by the total session count I generate at the site each day.)

As I looked back through the plethora of comments that my original post on using sessions to compare sites I noticed that I had made this statement in response to a comment from Jacques Warren:

• If you want to compare two or more web sites, use sessions because of the reasons I outlined in my original post.
• If you’re interested in the number of people coming to one web site (presumably yours), use de-duplicated unique visitors but be mindful of cookie deletion.
• If you’re interested in the activity of people on your web site, and if you have a “Web 1.0″ web site, use page views but be mindful of issues like code coverage, proxies, robots, etc.
• If you’re interested in the activity of people on your web site, and if you have a “Web 2.0″ web site built around RIAs, etc., use some form of event model.

I’ll stand by this. Until I know more about how N/NR and comScore calculate their time spent on site metrics it’s hard to believe their numbers to be any more useful or accurate than those provided by direct measurement systems. That said, I’d welcome a briefing on the subject from either company if they’re reading this and are interested in having me pick apart their methodology spending some time with me.

If companies really need to use time spent on site, they should consider using better key performance indicators for time such as Percent Low/Medium/High Time Spent on Site categories (something I talk about at length in The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators.)  That way N/NR could report on the percent of all tracked sessions that were “30 seconds or less”, “31 seconds to 5 minutes”, and “More than 5 minutes” (as an example) which would give us a more powerful view into the relationship between visitors and the time they spend on site.
At the end of the day I like that N/NR has provided a consistent and easily compared metric to their customers in “total sessions” which is what I will inevitably focus on as a measure of site popularity. Having devoted quite a bit of time to describing what I believe to be a solid measure of visitor engagement, it’s difficult for me to think about “time spent on site” (or even “total sessions”) as a good proxy. Time spent, recency, depth of session, session number, etc. are all components of engagement, not direct measures.

What do you think? Is Nielsen right and I’m crazy? Have you been looking closely at your time spent on site metric for years and are delighted that the rest of the world has finally caught up? Or are you like me and spend far too much time browsing from site to site, flipping from task to task, and thusly confounding clocks and counters on every site you visit?

I welcome your comments.

Awhile back the folks at comScore called me and asked if I would be surprised to learn that cookies were being deleted at a pretty high rate. Of course I said, “No, because I reported as much in 2005.” Through the course of the conversation, however, it became clear that comScore had the ability to shed new light on our understanding of cookie-based measurement; specifically they had the ability to measure the rate of deletion associated with first-party cookies.

comScore published the results of that study today.

I will fight the temptation to smugly say, “Ah ha! I told you so …” since the comScore data shows that I was both right and wrong when I first wrote about cookie deletion when I was with JupiterResearch. I was right in my assessment that this is happening far more frequently than those of us in the web analytics field particularly want to believe. But I was wrong in my assumption that cookie deletion was largely limited to third-party cookies.

The comScore data reports that over 30 percent of their panel of 400,000 home user computers deleted both first- and third-party cookies. Now, when I talked to Andrew Lipsman and Gian Fulgoni from comScore I repeatedly encouraged them to check and double-check these findings since especially their number for first-party cookies is much, much higher than I think any of us expected to see.

That said, I have no reason to believe that comScore would make this claim frivolously (okay, except for the fact that they provide a competing methodology to cookies) … I have asked comScore for a deeper briefing on their research but nothing has been scheduled as of this posting. Perhaps on my urging comScore took their research a step further and surveyed a subset of their panel asking about their stated behavior towards cookies. In the press release, Dr. Magrid Abraham addresses this in the context of the conventional wisdom that assigns greater risk to third- than first-party cookies:

“There is a common perception that third-party cookie deletion rates should be significantly higher than first-party cookie deletion rates,” continued Dr. Abraham. “Because many PC users reset or delete their cookies using security protection programs, conventional wisdom dictates that people are more likely to selectively expunge third-party cookies – which are generally deemed more invasive – while maintaining their first-party cookies. But these findings suggest that selective cookie management is not prevalent, a fact that comScore confirmed via a survey, with only 4 percent of Internet users indicating that they delete third-party but not first-party cookies.”

Yikes. When you look at the tables in the comScore study you can see where the problem is coming from: serial cookie deleters, the 7% of site visitors (measured via the comScore panel) that are repeatedly removing their cookies and thusly will appear as a new site visitor with every visit. I addressed the idea of serial deleters in my final JupiterResearch report on “The Crumbling Cookie” and, at the time speculated that some of the more nefarious activities available through the Internet were to blame.

Still, I never would have put the number as high as 7 percent.

It’s interesting to me that cookies are back in the news. It will be more interesting to see how all of this is digested in the coming days, weeks, and months. I wonder if Seth Godin will comment on the comScore study? I mean, I’m not sure that the “echo chamber” argument applies to comScore’s panel of 400,000 measured, identified individuals.

This seems to be a topic ripe for commentary and conversation. What do you think? Is comScore crazy? Is this report flawed? Or are we just fooling ourselves when we believe that “unique visitor” counts are an accurate representation of the number of real human beings coming to our web sites over long periods of time?