Happy New Years my readers! I hope the recent holidays treated you well regardless of your faith, persuasion, or geographic location. I wanted to take a quick break from all the heavy privacy chatter these past few months and tell a little story about the generosity of our community and one individual in particular.
If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed me cryptically tweeting “it’s not about you, it’s about the community” from time to time. I started sending this update as a subtle hint to a few folks who harp on and on about their accomplishments, products, and “research” in the Twitter #measure community … but sadly those folks never got the hint (so much for being subtle, huh?)
Over time the tweet became something larger — it became a reminder about what we all are capable of when we think about more than our own little world. ”It’s not about you, it’s about the community” is about some of the greatest contributors in the history of web analytics, people like:
Jim Sterne, who years ago realized that we needed a place to gather, and who wisely picked the Four Seasons Biltmore in Santa Barbara, California. While Emetrics may have become a profit-generating machine, those of you who know Jim and know history understand that the conference is as much about and for the community as it is anything else;
Jim Sterne, Bryan Eisenberg, Rand Schulman, Greg Drew, Seth Romanow, and others who founded the Web Analytics Association years ago when it was clear that we needed some type of organizing body, committing themselves to hundreds of hours of work without thinking about how they would make money off of the effort;
Jim Sterne (again!!!!) who has been making sure that we all know who is doing what where and when via his “Sterne Measures” email newsletter for as long as I can remember;
Avinash Kaushik, Google’s famed Analytics Evangelist, who has long committed the profits from his books on web analytics to two amazing charities;
Super-contributors to the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo Groups, folks like Kevin Rogers, Yu Hui, Jay Tkachuk, and dozen more who still take the time to answer questions from newer members of this rapidly expanding community;
Past and current Web Analytics Association Board members and super-volunteers, folks like Alex Yoder, Jim Novo, Raquel Collins, Jim Humphries, and so many more who give their time and energy every month to make sure the Association continues to evolve and grow;
Activists and evangelists like my partner John Lovett, who in the midst of writing his first book on social media analytics has taken the time to shepherd our Web Analysts Code of Ethics effort through the Web Analytics Association Board of Directors;
Everyone who has ever hosted a Web Analytics Wednesday event, including luminaries like Judah Phillips, June Dershewitz, Tim Wilson, Bob Mitchell, Emer Kirrane, Perti Mertanen, Alex Langshur, Anil Batra, Ruy Carneiro, Dash Lavine, Jenny Du, David Rogers, and way too many more folks to list who contribute their valuable time to help grow organic web analytics communities locally;
All of the over 1,000 members of the Analysis Exchange, many of whom have contributed to multiple projects to make sure that nonprofit organizations around the world have access to web analytics insights;
Dozens of others I am forgetting, and probably hundreds more I have never even met …
When I think about this list of people and their individual contributions to the web analytics community it is almost overwhelming — how lucky we are to have such considerate and giving friends! Still, people have been giving back for years and so it is rare that I see something or someone in the community that really blows me away …
Until recently.
Not everyone knows Jason Thompson, and I suspect he would be the first to admit that not everyone who knows him actually likes him, but if I had to pick one “web analytics super-hero” for 2010 Jason would be my hand’s-down, number one choice. See, Jason was smart enough to not just get the web analytics community to give back to our community,he managed to get our community to help provide clean water to an entire community in a developing nation.
Having worked repeatedly as a volunteer with Analysis Exchange Jason was introduced to charity:water, a nonprofit organization who’s vision is very simple: to provide clean, safe drinking water for everyone on the planet.
Water.
Not a great blog or free books, not data or solution profilers, but water that mothers can bring to their children. Clean, pure water that I would venture each and every one of the members of the web analytics community takes for granted and rarely even considers the source and its availability.
But Jason thought about it, and what’s more, Jason did something about it. Thanks to some cool new technology Jason was able to donate his 36th birthday to help raise $500. By leveraging Twitter and his web analytics community he was able to raise that $500 by December 18th. Having met his goal before his birthday Jason didn’t stop and settle, he set the bar higher, working first to raise $1,000, then $3,000, and finally $5,000, enough to provide water for an entire village – 80 people for 20 years.
Jason’s effort brought out the best in our community again, collecting donations from luminaries and lay-users alike … hell, he even got money from his mom! Some of the biggest names in web analytics helped Jason along, and donations large and small rolled in right up until Ensighten’s Josh Manion put in the last $300 on Jason’s birthday, putting him over the top and completing his final goal.
Honestly I don’t know Jason very well, but I do know passion and greatness when I see it. Jason once again served as a reminder that “it’s not about you, it’s about the community” and he did more than just tweet obnoxiously … he put his time and money where his mouth is and did something real.
Bravo, Mr. Thompson. Bravo.
If you don’t know Jason I highly recommend following him in Twitter (@usujason, if you’re into Twitter) and, if you see him at a conference or event do like I will and buy the man a drink. I for one am going to let Jason be an example of how I can work even harder to make a difference both inside and outside of the web analytics community in 2011 and beyond.
To this end I composed a preliminary “Web Analysts Code of Ethics” that I had planned to work on here in my blog (with you all) and then turn over to the Web Analytics Association. Much to my surprise, according to my partner John Lovett (who is a Board member) the Board of Directors loved the preliminary code and asked to have it publish at the Web Analytics Association blog.
Easy enough, and so I would like to redirect all of you over to the Association blog where I and the WAA both would like to hear what you have to say about this early effort. The comments have already started over there, and of course if you’re more comfortable commenting here then by all means, I welcome that.
As I mentioned a few times in my recent Beyond Web Analytics podcast (not live until early on September 13th), I believe that we need to start advocating on our own behalf and I see this code as one small step in the right direction. Hopefully the WAA Standards Committee, the Board, and all of you out there whether you’re in the Association or not will join me in this effort to help the wider world understand what we all do (and what we do and will not do.)
Fortunately for Adobe they do not seem to be one of the targets in these suits, which makes sense considering the position the company has taken regarding the use of Flash. In my interview with MeMe Rasmussen, Adobe’s Chief Privacy Officer back April of this year, Mrs. Rasmussen explicitly stated:
“… the position we outlined in the FTC Comment on condemning the misuse of local storage, was specific to the practice of restoring browser cookies without user knowledge and express consent. We believe that there are opportunities to provide value to our customers by combining Omniture solutions with Flash technology while honoring consumers’ privacy expectations.”
On the topic of consumer privacy and web analytics, following up my partner John’s response to the Wall Street Journal article on online privacy (“Be still my analytical heart”), I recently wrote a piece for Audience Development Magazine titled “You are all evil …” While a little tongue-in-cheek the article encourages marketers and business owners to:
Have a rock-solid privacy policy
Not use tracking software they don’t understand
Not be unaware of what tracking software they have deployed
Have a clear answer for “how and why do you track us?”
Be transparent as hell when anybody asks what you’re doing
As I reflect back on the guidance we have provided in the past year I run the risk of becoming quite depressed. None of our recommendations are surprising, revolutionary, or particularly Earth shattering … but not nearly enough companies are doing most of these very simple things. Given this, one possible outcome is becoming increasingly apparent …
My friend Bob Page once referred to something he called the “Data Chernobyl” … a unexpected and massive meltdown in consumer trust associated with the data that we collect, store, and use to make business decisions. When you think about it for just a little bit the idea is terrifying … because everything we do depends entirely on our ability to collect, store, and use information about consumer behavior on the Internet.
Our livelihoods depend on everyone ignoring the fact that we track, understanding why we track, or getting something tangible out of the tracking we do. Sadly we have never offered anything tangible, we have never really made an effort to explain what we do in court of public opinion, and it is increasingly clear that the bright light shining on our trade isn’t going to fade anytime soon.
Now, as I declared in the Audience Development piece, I simply do not believe that consumers are as freaked out about tracking online as the media makes them out to be … the data I have seen just doesn’t support that conclusion. But consumers aren’t the real problem: the real problem: is the media, lawyers, and potentially the Federal Government. All three of these groups continue to generate page views, make money, and “protect the common man” (sic) by throwing our industry under the bus … and we aren’t doing anything in our defense.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
People much smarter than I am have repeatedly stated that they don’t want to engage the media or “privacy police” in a conversation that they cannot possibly win. To a small extent this makes sense, but at some point I wonder if we are going to collectively end up looking like my four year old when he knows he’s made a mistake. My son gets away with it because he’s awesome cute and I love him, but I am beginning to think the collective web analytics industry is not going to get away with mumbling and making lame excuses for much longer.
The advertising industry has the IAB and NAI, both of whom appear to be responding to articles, lawsuits, and Congressional investigation on many of these issues. (If you haven’t seen it yet, have a look at this amazing “privacy matters” campaign the IAB is running.) But we are not the advertising industry, we are the web analytics and digital measurement industry, and we need to have our own voice, our own lobby, and our own representation.
Since the framework for this already exists, I am officially asking that the Web Analytics Association formalize and finalize their Industry Advocacy program and represent the digital measurement community in the forum of public opinion.
I have already volunteered to help with this effort under the Presidency of Alex Langshur and reiterate that commitment to the current Board of Directors. The WAA needs to bring together corporate members and key practitioner representatives to quickly hash out a clear, concise, and practical position on the relationship between digital measurement technology and consumers. The current WAA Board is in perhaps the best position in years to make the decision to represent the needs of our community … but decisive action is required.
Without the WAA’s leadership on this issue I fear that over time we will lose the battle of public opinion and my tongue in cheek assessment of the “evilness” of our industry will be far less funny than it seems today.
Let’s not let that happen.
We are an awesome industry full of brilliant people. The work we do is some of the most valuable but least understood in the interactive world. I believe it is time to come out of the closet, accurately describe the value of the work we do, and stop shying away from a conversation we feel is stacked against us and a battle we are unsure that we can win. If we don’t try, without a doubt, we will remain our own worst enemy.
Long-time blog readers are likely aware that I’m not prone to writing about individual technologies or product features unless I have the opportunity to break the news about something new and cool (or not, as the case is from time to time.) But once and awhile a single feature comes along that in my mind is so compelling and cool I need to bend my own rules; Google Analytics new “Intelligence” offering is exactly that feature.
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past month and haven’t already heard about “Intelligence” have a quick watch of the following video pulled from the Google Analytics blog:
Pretty awesome, huh? What’s more, now that I’ve had a few weeks to play with the feature and think about it in the context of my published views on the Coming Revolution in Web Analytics, I think that “Intelligence” is one of the most important advances in web analytics since the JavaScript page tag.
While Google is certainly not the first vendor to apply some level of statistical and mathematical rigor to web analytics data, an honor that would likely go to Technology Leaders for their Dynamic Alert product or Yahoo for their use of confidence intervals when exposing demographic data in Yahoo Web Analytics, in my humble opinion Google has done the best possible job making statistical analysis of web analytics data accessible, useful, and valuable.
Some things I really like:
An approachable way to determine confidence intervals via their “Alert Sensitivity” slider. While the implementation doesn’t necessarily impart the level of detail some folks would like, the slider mitigates the prevalent concern that “people won’t understand confidence intervals.”
Great visual cues for alerts, especially when statistically relevant changes are not obvious based on traffic patterns. Sometimes traffic patterns just look like hills and valleys, even when something important is happening — for example, the next figure shows two alerts at the lowest threshold setting on September 16th that, upon exploration, turned out to be great news (that I might have missed otherwise.)
Good visual cues regarding the statistical relevance of the insight being communicated. This is tough since Google is trying to present moderately complex information regarding the underlying calculations and how much emphasis you should be putting on the insight. By showing a relative scale for “significance” I think Google has more or less nailed it.
Google Analytics finally starts communicating about web analytics data in terms of “expectations” instead of absolutes. All of us (present company included) have a tendency to get wrapped up in whole numbers, hard counts, and complete data sets. But we also know that Internet-based data collection just isn’t that accurate, and so any push to get us to start thinking in terms of predicted ranges and estimates is a step in the right direction. For example, I love knowing that on a given day Google Analytics “expects” between 311 and 388 people to come to my site from the UK!
Lots more, including the ability to pivot the views and look from a “metric-centric” and “dimension-centric” perspective, the ability to aggregate on day, week, and month, and the ability to add your own custom alerts based on changes in traffic patterns. Perhaps ironically this last functionality (“Custom Alerts”) is how we’ve all historically thought about “Intelligence” in reporting, and while useful seems somewhat weak compared to Google’s stats-based implementation.
While awesome in it’s first instantiation there are some obvious things that the Great GOOG could improve in the feature. Some ideas include:
More dimensions and metrics, although I believe both Nick and Avinash have commented that they are already working on adding intelligence to other data collected.
Some way to expose confidence intervals and p-values would be useful (perhaps as a mouse-over) so that the increasing number of analysts with experience in statistics could have that data in their back pocket when they went to present results.
Email alerts for the automatically generated insights, for example when “Intelligence” determines that five or more alerts have been generated it would be cool to get an email/SMS/Tweet/Wave notification.
The ability to generate alerts against defined segments, so that I could see the same analysis for different audiences that I’m tracking.
Mostly ticky-tack stuff, but again I’m pretty damn impressed with their freshman effort. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since evangelist Avinash has been talking about the need for statistics in web analytics for an awfully long time, but given that so many in our industry have balked at bringing more mathematical rigor to our work (including said evangelist, oh well) it’s encouraging to see Google move in this direction.
What do you think? Are you using “Intelligence”? Is it helping you make better decisions? Do you like the implementation as much as I do? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.
Few would argue that the past few years in web analytics have been, well, intense. The emergence of Yahoo Web Analytics, multiple management shake-ups at WebTrends, Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture following Omniture’s acquisition of Visual Sciences, WebSideStory, Offermatica, Instadia, and TouchClarity, and the continued push into the Enterprise from Google Analytics. From where I sit we have seen more changes in the last 24 months than we had in the entire 12 years previous (my tenure in the sector) combined.
When I think about these changes, I find myself coming to the undeniable conclusion that our industry is undergoing a radical transformation. More companies than ever are paying attention to digital measurement, and despite my disbelief in Forrester’s numbers, an increasing number of these companies are forging a smart, focused digital measurement strategy. At the X Change, at Emetrics, and at Web Analytics Wednesday events around the world there is more and more evidence that this wonderful sector I call “home” is really starting to grow up.
And we’re just getting started.
If you pay close attention to the marketing you see from Omniture, WebTrends, Unica, Coremetrics, and the other “for fee” vendors you’ve surely noticed a dramatic change recently. Nobody is talking about web analytics anymore; the entire focus has become one of systems integration, multichannel data analysis, and cross-channel analytics.
All the sudden web analytics is starting to sound like, gasp, business and customer intelligence.
Eek.
Since it’s late and since this post will be over-shadowed by the hype around Google Analytics releasing more “stuff” on Tuesday I’ll cut right to the chase: I believe that we are (finally) on the cusp of a profound revolution in web analytics and that the availability of third-generation web analytics technologies will finally get digital measurement the seat at the table we’ve been fighting to get for years.
Statistics, people … statistics and modeling, predictive analytics based on web data, true forecasting, and true analytical competition for the online channel. Yahoo’s use of confidence intervals when presenting demographic data and the application of statistical models in Google’s new “Analytics Intelligence” feature are just the beginning. As an industry it’s time to stop fearing math and embrace analytical sciences that have been around for longer than many of us have been alive. It’s time to stop grousing about how bad the data is and actually do something about it.
Do I have your attention? Good.
Thanks to the generosity of the kind folks at SAS I have a nicely formatted white paper that is now available for download titled “The Coming Revolution in Web Analytics.” Just so you can see if you might be interested here is the Executive Summary from the document:
“Forrester Research estimates the market for web analytics will be roughly US $431 million in the U.S. in 2009, growing at a rate of 17% between now and 2014. Gartner reports that the global market for analytics applications, performance management, and business intelligence solutions was US $8.7 billion in 2008—roughly 20 times the global investment in web analytics. Among their three top corporate initiatives, most companies are focusing their efforts online, expanding their digital efforts Internet to increase the organization’s presence in the least expensive, fastest growing channel.
Today, a majority of companies are dramatically under-invested in analyzing data flowing from digital channels. Even when business managers have committed money to measurement technology, they usually fail to apply commensurate resources and effort to make the technology work for their business. Instead, most organizations focus too much on generating reports and too little on producing true insights and recommendations, opting for what is easy, not for what is valuable to the business.
Web Analytics Demystified believes this situation is exacerbated by the inherent limitations found in first- and second-generation digital measurement and optimization solutions. Provided by a host of companies primarily focused on short-term gains in the digital realm, not long-term opportunities for the whole business and their customers. Historically these companies worked to differentiate themselves from traditional business and customer intelligence, focusing on the needs of digital marketers. Unfortunately, as the need for whole business analysis increases, many of these vendors are playing catch-up and forced to bolt-on data collection and processing technology as an afterthought.
The current state of digital analytics is untenable over time, and Web Analytics Demystified believes that companies that persist in treating online and offline as “separate and different” will begin to cede ground to competitors who are willing to invest in the creation and use of a strategic, whole-business data asset. These organizations are using third-generation digital analytics tools to effectively blur the lines between online and offline data—tools that bridge the gap between historical direct marketing and market research techniques and Internet generated data, affording their users unprecedented visibility into insights and opportunities.
This white paperdescribes the impending revolution in digital analytics, one that has the potential to change both the web analytics and business intelligence fields forever. We make the case for a new approach towards customer intelligence that leverages all available data, not just that data which is most convenient given the available tools. We make this case not because we believe there is anything wrong with today’s tools when used appropriately, but because we believe digital analytics should take a greater role in business decision making in the future.”
Since I pride myself on the quality of my readership I sincerely hope that each of you will download this document and take the time to read it. More importantly I’d love you to share it with your co-workers, friends, and followers on Twitter. I believe we are at a critical juncture in our practice’s history where the skills that have served us all along are not going to serve us for much longer, but I am always willing to admit that I’m wrong and more than anything I love a spirited debate.
