Archive for 'Web Analytics Demystified Business'

Adam, John, and I are incredibly excited to announce that industry veteran Brian Hawkins is joining Web Analytics Demystified to help us expand our offerings around testing, optimization, and personalization of all forms of digital communication. Brian is the most widely recognized expert in the field when it comes to Enterprise-class optimization and personalization technology, integration, and strategy. He comes to us from Offermatica by way of Omniture and Adobe, and we are delighted to build on our support for Adobe’s solutions, adding Brian’s expertise on Test&Target to Adam’s SiteCatalyst-related offerings.

Brian’s offerings at Demystified will look a lot like Adam’s — audits of current implementations, strategic planning for testing and optimization readiness, systems integration architecture and support, and planning support for the entire end-to-end process of site and application optimization in the Enterprise. While Brian’s technology expertise is strongest on Test&Target, his knowledge of what it takes from a teams, governance, and process perspective to be successful transcends platforms and I believe will incredibly valuable to any large business trying to become agile in their optimization efforts.

Brian is taking a little time off before getting started mid-month but I will be adding his blog, a description of his offerings, and more about him to the site very soon. Clients are welcome to contact us directly to set up time to meet Brian (and if you’re not a client you can call too, that is if you have any interest in testing, optimization, or personalization.)

Brian will be with us at Emetrics, Adobe’s Summit in Salt Lake City, and of course he will be presenting at our own ACCELERATE event in Chicago on April 4th. If you’re at any of these events and would like to meet or connect with Brian, please drop me a note.

We hope you will join us in welcoming Brian to the team.

Continuing our long-standing efforts to support the broader digital measurement, analysis, and optimization community around the globe, I am incredibly happy to announce the creation of the Analysis Exchange Scholarship Fund. You can read the press release and learn more about the effort at the Analysis Exchange web site, but in an nutshell thanks to the generosity of ObservePoint and IQ Workforce we are now able to financially support Analysis Exchange member’s in their efforts to expand their web analytics horizons.

What’s more, as soon as Jim Sterne heard about our efforts, he and Matthew Finlay immediately donated three passes to the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit each year — how amazing is that! Tremendous thanks to Corry Prohens, Rob Seolas, Jim Sterne, and each of their teams for their support of our efforts at the Analysis Exchange.

Analysis Exchange members in good standing are encouraged to apply for scholarship funds. We are open to ideas but in general expect these funds to be used for things like:

• Pay partial travel or registration fees for conferences like ACCELERATE and eMetrics
• Pay annual membership fees for the Web Analytics Association or other professional groups
• Pay partial tuition to the University of British Columbia’s Web Analytics courses
• Pay partial costs for the Web Analytics Association’s certification
• Pay for books, software licenses, and so on

Quarterly awards will be up to $500 USD per selected applicant and I imagine we will give two or three away each quarter depending on the quality of applications we get. You need to be a member of Analysis Exchange in good standing and have earned very good scores on projects to be eligible.

I hope you’ll take a minute to learn more about the Analysis Exchange Scholarship. I also hope you’ve been helping in the Analysis Exchange and you’re excited to apply for this funding!

If you have any questions about these funds please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Executive Director Wendy Greco directly. I am also happy to answer questions.

Thanks

Just a quick note at the end of the Thanksgiving holiday to encourage those of you who are still using Google+ to go and circle our new brand page for Web Analytics Demystified:

Circle Web Analytics Demystified in Google+

We have been sharing lots of information about our recent ACCELERATE conference in San Francisco. Moving forward we hope to share more “quick takes” and multimedia content in Google+ as well as hosting Hangouts with greater and greater regularity to discuss the key topics of the day.

Anyway, I hope if you’re in the U.S. you had a relaxing Thanksgiving and if you’re elsewhere in the world you enjoyed the quiet that happens when the U.S. goes offline.

I suspect by now many of you have noticed but this week we made two pretty amazing announcements here at Web Analytics Demystified. Now that the dust is settling I have some time to take a step back and offer up some comments on the announcements and what I believe they mean for our clients, our prospects, and the web analytics industry in general.

On Tuesday we announced that respected industry veteran Adam Greco had joined John and I as a Senior Partner. Adam is well-known to many in our community thanks to his high-visibility work during his tenure at Omniture, his popular “Omni-Man” blog, and his fine, fine work on the Beyond Web Analytics podcast series.

For John and I bringing Adam on board was a no-brainer. The guy is as bright as they come, he is articulate, and most importantly he knows how to squeeze every last drop of value out of the most widely deployed digital measurement solutions in use today — Adobe SiteCatayst and Google Analytics. Adam is committed to extending that expertise to all of the popular platforms as quickly as possible, and our hope is that by mid-year he will be providing the same great insights he has for SiteCatalyst to Webtrends, Unica, Coremetrics, Nedstat, and other customers.

Adam will be running our Operational Use Audit and Framework Development practice as well as providing custom training and generally supporting the rest of the Demystified service offerings.  Which brings me to our second announcement …

On Wednesday we announced an exclusive partnership with tactical and technical consulting practice leaders Keystone Solutions. Keystone is a slightly better-kept secret than Adam Greco, although their current clients certainly know who they are. Founded years ago by former Omniture super-star Matthew Gellis, Keystone has grown into a talent magnet comprable to, well, Web Analytics Demystified.  Matt Wright from HP, Kurt Slater from Expedia, Rudi Schumpert from Ariba, and a host of other amazing analytics technicians.

We have doubled-down with Keystone for one simple reason: in our experience they are the best of the best when it comes to providing fundamental and foundational support for any digital measurement practice. Especially against those same two “most popular” solutions — Google Analytics and Adobe SiteCatalyst — Keystone delivers in a way that few others out there are capable, and that is the kind of talent we prefer to work with in the field.

Through this partnership Web Analytics Demystified clients will be able to benefit from a dramatically expanded set of web analytics consulting service offerings ranging from on-the-ground implementation support to ongoing reporting and analysis to some pretty amazing custom solutions. They will also be taking the lead on our Tag Management Systems Audit and Deployment practice, an offering I expect to be red-hot in 2011 and beyond.

Now, unfortunate as it is, we were not able to pursue this type of relationship with Keystone without some cost. The immediate fall-out is that Web Analytics Demystified will no longer be participating in the X Change conference. While this breaks my heart after having put three years of sweat equity into the event, relationships change and so it is time to move on.

I do, however, promise every one of the hundreds of consultants, vendors, and practitioners we have personally invited to this conference over the past three years that we will be back, live and in-person, with something far more “Demystified” in nature. Based on our work with Web Analytics Wednesday, the Analysis Exchange, and hundreds of other events around the globe, we have a pretty good idea of what is truly missing from the web analytics event landscape … and now, thanks to Adam and the team at Keystone, we have the means to deliver.

I welcome your comments and questions about both pieces of news, and I hope you’ll keep your eyes open in the coming few weeks for even more news from our growing company. It is exciting times, indeed.

Today I am really excited to announce the publication of our framework for mobile and multi-channel reporting, sponsored by OpinionLab. You can download the report freely from the OpinionLab web site in trade for your name and email address.

This paper builds on our “Truth About Mobile Analytics” paper we published with our friends at Nedstat last year and focuses on both measurement in mobile applications and, more importantly, a cross-channel measurement framework built around interactions, engagement, and consumer-generated feedback.

• Interactions occur in every channel, digital or not. Online and on mobile sites we call these “visits” (although that is a made up word for interactions); in mobile apps the interaction starts when you click the icon and ends when you click “close”; in SMS it starts when you receive the message; on the phone it starts when you dial, and in stores interactions start when you walk up to an employee.
• Engagement is simply “more valuable” interactions. Regardless of your particular belief about the definition of engagement, we all know it when we see it. Online it happens after some number of minutes, or clicks, or sessions, or whatever; in mobile apps it happens when you’ve clicked enough buttons; on SMS it happens when you respond to the message; on the phone it starts when you begin a conversation, and the same is true in a physical store.  We say engagement is “more valuable” because without engagement, value is unlikely to manifest.
• Positive Feedback happens when you do a really, really good job. Measuring feedback is a critical “miss” for far too many organizations. Apples “app store” and the value of the star-rating system has essentially proven that there are massive financial differences associated with positive and negative experiences … but most companies still make the mistake of ignoring qualitative feedback altogether.

These three incredibly simple metrics can be applied to every one of your channels, your sub-channels, and  your sub-sub-channels (if you like.)  When applied you can create an apples to apples comparison between your web, mobile web, mobile apps, video, social, etc. efforts.

Then you can apply cost data, and you’re really in business.

I don’t want to say much more than that but I would really, really encourage you all to download and read this free white paper. When we put something like this out — something we believe has the power to really transform the way everyone thinks about the metrics they use to run their business, and something that has the potential to force dashboards everywhere to be scrapped and started over — we’d really like your collective feedback.

DOWNLOAD  THE WHITE PAPER NOW

Thanks to Mark, Rick, Rand, and the entire team at OpinionLab for sponsoring this work. If you’re the one person reading my blog that hasn’t seen their application in action, head on over to their site and have a look.