The nice folks at Elastic Path asked me awhile back to give a presentation on web analytics for online retailers.  Their request made me realize I am still sitting on data I collected last Fall — a mistake I know but a function of the velocity at which Web Analytics Demystified, Inc. has grown in the past year.  To make up for this delay in some small way I will be sharing the data I collected from online retailers in a free webcast this coming Thursday.

If you’re an online retailer doing web analytics please consider spending an hour with us Thursday at 9:00 AM Pacific / Noon Eastern.  Among other things I will be covering:

• What the measurement landscape looks like for online retailers
• How satisfied online retailers are with their web analytics vendors
• How web analytics has impacted spend on paid search marketing

This last point I think many of you will find especially interesting.  Given Yahoo’s recent (re)entry into the web analytics market, and the assertion from Google that Google Analytics drives sites to spend more on search marketing, I set out to answer the question “Do you spend more on paid search marketing because of information gained via web analytics?”

Tune in Thursday morning to hear what I found out.

You can register now for free thanks to Elastic Path.  Talk to you Thursday!

Yep, it’s that time of the year again, time for my bi- (soon to be tri-) annual pilgrimage to Europe to meet with some of the best and the brightest overseas. I’m very excited about this trip for a handful of reasons:

1. The trip begins in London next Monday at what is likely to be the largest event in the history of Web Analytics Wednesday. Thanks to the fine folks from SCL Analytics and Unica and a little support from E-Consultancy there are currently 128 people registered to attend the event! London has always been a hotbed of WAW activity and this is my first time attending the event. I’ll be giving a short presentation on “The Future of Web Analytics” and taking questions from the audience.
2. On Tuesday I will be presenting at Nedstat’s “Streaming Media on the Move” event at London’s Soho Hotel and talking about the white paper I recently authored with Nedstat’s Chief of Innovation and how measurement is changing in a Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 world.
3. Wednesday and Thursday I will be in Amsterdam doing private presentations. Over the years I have grown to love the beauty, culture, and diversity Amsterdam has to offer (despite the presence of what Aurelie lovingly refers to as “the narcotourists!”)
4. Friday I will be in Brussels, Belgium with the fine folks at OX2 giving a private presentation and participating in another special Web Analytics Wednesday event (albeit a somewhat smaller affair)
5. The following Monday I will be in Helsinki, Finland working with my partner Trainer’s House/Satama and giving a presentation on Measuring Lead Generation site. The folks at Satama are great to work with and I’m very excited about getting to spend more than 18 hours in Helsinki this time …
6. Back to London on the 8th for some client work and home on the 9th. Phew!

If you’re in or near London or Brussels I’d love to meet you at one of the Web Analytics Wednesday events. I suspect I will also have a little free time in Amsterdam and Helsinki so if you’d like to meet in one of those cities, please feel free to drop me a line and we can try and meet!

All of you who attended my American Marketing Association webcast titled “Web Analytics: A Day a Month” earlier this month, and any of you who missed it, who would like something you can share with others in your organization can now download a (mostly) free white paper on the same subject from Tableau Software. I say mostly free because you have to give some information, and I suspect that when you do, a sales-person may call.

You can request the paper from this URL:

http://www.tableausoftware.com/web_analytics_wp_peterson

Thanks a ton to the nice folks from Tableau for sponsoring the webcast and this short white paper.  If, after you download the document, you have any questions, I’m more than happy to hear from you either through my blog or directly via email.

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!)

Happy Holidays to everyone reading this blog! I hope that all of you had as relaxing and enjoyable a holiday season as we did here at the Peterson house. But now that the holidays are behind us it’s time to put the Wii controller down (thank goodness!) and get back to work — and what better way to start the year than with a free webcast!

I routinely get email from people new to audience measurement who are looking for guidance regarding setting up a successful web analytics program in their organization. They relate all kinds of interesting anecdotes like “I heard web analytics was easy but we’re not getting anywhere fast” and “we heard that bounce rate is this amazing, wonderful metric but it just doesn’t seem as useful as people say.” I do my best over email to help point them in the right direction but there are only so many hours in the day, especially since I have a small business to run, research results to publish, and an entire community to participate in.

Thankfully the American Marketing Association and Tableau Software are generously sponsoring a Web Analytics Demystified webcast describing our recommended quarter-by-quarter, month-over-month program for building a world-class web analytics program. Because web analytics is hard, it is my belief that rather than try to “boil the ocean” it pays to have a strategic roadmap with a reasonable but aggressive pace. It will certainly take you more than an hour a day to be successful with web analytics, but over the course of a year any company can develop the necessary competencies to create brilliant, amazing, and magnificent success.

In the webcast—which is on Tuesday, January 15th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time by the way—I will be giving a year’s worth of guidance covering topics like:

• Building dashboards, reports, and analysis that give you the facts for better decisions
• Setting up a “Web Analytics 2.0” measurement environment
• Sifting through mountains of website data to quickly find what matters most
• Allocating staff and resources for maximum benefit
• Reconciling different sources of data
• Selecting vendors and improving vendor relationships

You can register for this free webcast at the American Marketing Association web site:

http://www.marketingpower.com/webcast435.php

I hope before all of you get too busy in 2008 you’ll take the time to join the AMA, Tableau, and I on January 15th!