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!)

A number of folks from around the world wrote me after downloading our recent research on web analytics salaries in the U.S. asking if we had comparable numbers for Europe, Canada, and the rest of the world. I don’t have anything formal, but I was able to use a very cool product from Tableau Software to analyze the raw data and produce the following:

Keep in mind that the non-U.S. salaries were translated into U.S. dollars (USD) by the respondents so there may be some error introduced during that process. “Rest of World” includes Asia/Pacific, Mexico, Middle East/Africa, South/Central America and Caribbean. I had to group “Rest of World” to get an appropriate sample size (around 30 responses) so this group is not particularly useful but I wanted to include it.

A few things pop out at me from this data:

• Canadians are, by and large, underpaid compared to their U.S. counterparts, with 95% of respondents indicating they are earning under $100,000 USD annually (see figure below)
• European salaries appear to be more-or-less similar to those of their U.S. counterparts, but this is a function of how I have grouped salary bands together (see figure below)
• There is a pronounced difference in salary distribution here in the American West, with only 59% of respondents reporting salaries under $100,000 USD and 34% earning between $100,001 USD and $150,000 USD annually

Regarding Canada and Europe, here is an expansion of the salary distribution at the lower end of the salary scale:

Here you can see better how respondents in Canada and Europe are paid in the lowest salary band (under $100,000 USD annually)  Canadians, 95% of whom report making less than $100,000 USD have a much less skewed distribution than European respondents (48% of whom report earning less than $50,000 USD annually.)

Both my son and I are sick today so I’ll hold off providing any more analysis but what do you think?  If you live in Canada or Europe, does this make sense to you?  Have you been reading job postings from here in the U.S. and wondering about how salaries being offered differ from those where you live?  Is there something about business or culture that explains this data, or do you think it’s simply a function of the relative awareness of the need for dedicated web analytics resources?

A lot has been written recently on the hot job market for web analytics positions. Perhaps because there is such a profound gap between the number of open positions and the number of experienced practitioners looking for jobs, web analytics salaries run pretty high. We collected a bunch of data on salaries earlier this year and our report on the subject is available now.

Some of the key insights:

• The average U.S. web analytics practitioner, across all job types (end-users, vendors, consultants, agencies) is reported to be earning $86,883 annually in salary and bonus
• Those of us working for vendors are the best paid, with the average vendor practitioner earning $105,192 in salary and bonus
• Unless you’re working for a very large company (5000+ employees), the difference in average salary is negligable
• There appear to be three “tenure groups” for salary, which may be as much a function that people get raises by switching jobs as they do waiting patiently for a substantial salary increase
• As we’ve published previously, companies relying on defined business processes are paying far better than those relying on employees or those lacking any formal approach towards web analytics
• There may be hope on the horizon for those companies actively seeking experienced practitioners

Because I’m trying to write shorter reports, I’ve also created a companion web page that will allow readers to examine all of the salary data we used to produce this report, segmented over 30 different ways. Hopefully everyone will find this data interesting, regardless of whether you’re looking to hire or looking for a raise. The report and companion data are available here:

• Web Analytics Salaries 2007: Insights and Observations (PDF format)
• Web Analytics Salary Data

I welcome your feedback on this research — your reaction to the data as well as your opinion about the value of our publishing this research on an annual basis. I have to admit I rather enjoy being able to publish this research so hopefully everyone out there is finding it valuable.

UPDATE: I am lame for forgetting to thank June Dershewitz, James Gardner, and Dylan Lewis for spending the time to review this report prior to its publication.  Thanks June, James, and Dylan!

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Web Analytics Demystified Fall 2007 survey!  We had nearly 1,000 responses again and a quick glance at the data shows some very, very interesting results.  Remember, if you want to see the results once I get them written up, you can either leave me your name and email address or, even better, subscribe to my weblog since I’ll be talking about the results as soon as they’re available.

Hot on the heels of our survey, the fine folks at the Web Analytics Association are gathering some similar information in what they’re describing as a “groundbreaking survey”.  I just took the survey and they certainly are asking some interesting questions.  Help the association out and take their survey right now!

I’m not sure if you have to be a WAA member to take the survey, but hopefully if not they’ll be making the results available to everyone.  Maybe someone from the research committee could comment below and let my readers know how the data will be used?

Twice a year Web Analytics Demystified conducts a survey of the practitioner, vendor, and consultant landscape in an attempt to answer critical questions about web analytics. This week we have our Fall 2007 survey out in the field, and I would personally love it if you would take 15 minutes and participate!

Take the Web Analytics Demystified Fall 2007 Survey Right Now!

This particular survey is focusing on web analytics tools and will examine their distribution of deployment and overall customer satisfaction with the tools and the vendors who supply them. The survey is completely anonymous, and if you have any questions about the survey, please email them to me directly.

As a small token of thanks for your participation, everyone who completes the survey will be given a discount code to purchase The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators for over 50% off the cover price (a savings of $10.00!) Additionally, all of the resulting research will be made freely available through this web site (you can download research from our Spring 2007 survey here.)