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Upcoming Events and Conferences

March 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The next few months are going to be busy with a few conferences. Below is the list of the conferences where I will be, starting with the most recent. I would love to meet with you if you are going to be at one of these conferences.

  1. Do’s & Don’ts for Behavioral Segmentation, Targeting & Interactive Marketing – San Francisco, CA March 9th
    Expanding on their Web Analytics Association webcast, this interactive panel session digs deeper into the proper methodology behind developing a comprehensive online marketing plan. Discussions include:

    • Techniques to build comprehensive online behaviour profiles

    • How to take action and target segments with relevant content

    • Extending analytics to target both online & offline

    This event begins at 8:30 with breakfast and runs until 12:00 noon. Space is limited, so reserve your seat at this complimentary event today. Register now

  2. Market to Max – SDMA Conference, Seattle, March 11th
    Future of Web Analytics – Measuring in the Web 2.0 World – I will be moderating a panel to discuss the future of Web Analytics. With the growth of rich media applications, mobile browsing, and social sites, web analytics is more interesting and more confusing. Industry insiders will share their views on the future of web analytics in the web 2.0 world and beyond, plus opportunities and challenges of tracking in this frontier.

  3. OMMA Hollywood, Hollywood, CA March 23-24th
    Defining Engagement: Moderated by Jim Sterne, this session is a must for any marketer that is preaching engagement. The term is often used and rarely defined, so let’s define it. We will debate the merits of view-through, action attribution, time spent, and other interactive measures to demonstrate how a campaign can be evaluated beyond clickthrough. How does a marketer truly measure performance of their efforts?

  4. WebTrends Engage, Las Vegas, NV, April 7-9th
    WebTrends Enagage is WebTrends User conference. Plan for three days of interactive learning at WebTrends Engage 2009, filled with practical, solution-based ways to improve your digital marketing and get even more out of your WebTrends investment. If you are using webtrends or evaluating web analytics tools then you must attend this conference.

  5. eMetrics San Jose, CA, May 4-7th
    eMetrics – Marketing Optimization Summit does not need any introduction. If you care about increasing your ROI on the web then you must attend this conference. You will find everything you need to know about web analytics and optimization at this conference. This conference is attended by the “Who’s Who” of Web Analytics and Optimization experts, and all web analytics vendors and experts from various industries. In this economy, if you only get approval to attend one conference then this is the one to attend. I will be speaking on “Advanced Behavioral Targeting”.

    Bonus: If you want to attend eMetrics in Toronto or San Jose, use Promotional Code: BATRA10 for a 10% discount. Why should you attend eMetrics Toronto? Here’s why in Jim Sterne’s words:
    “Sears, Bell, Travelocity, AdMonsters, Rogers, IAB, CBC, Quebecor, Shaw, Aeroplan, Tribal DDB, Overstock, Microsoft, Canoe and a whole bunch of really smart consultants and tool vendors all sharing how they optimize online marketing? What could be better?”

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
Sr/Lead Analytic Warehouse/Java Engineer at Saas Company In the SF Bay Area (Emeryville, CA)
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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
Filed Under: behavioral targeting, Speaking Engagement, web analytics

Adding Twitter Search to Google Analytics

February 25, 2009 By 3 Comments

Recently WebTrends blogged that Twitter search will now be listed in the standard search engine and keywords report in WebTrends. Omniture has also blogged about integrating Twitter search data into Site Catalyst.

As Twitter increasingly becomes a tool that people use to find information it is really critical for companies to know how people are finding their sites on Twitter. Doing so will allow them to incorporate that learning into future marketing efforts on Twitter as well as other sources (e.g. Google etc).

Since Google Analytics does not yet recognize Twitter search as a search engine like WebTrends or Ominiture does, I will show you how you can do it easily with one line of code.

However, keep in mind this solution only works when the search originates on Twitter (i.e. http://search.twitter.com). 3rd party tools like TweetDeck, those will not be captured in this solution (nor will it, I believe, be captured in WebTrends’ solution). Use this information to understand general search keywords being searched on Twitter but do not get caught up in actual number of visits that your Twitter efforts are driving.

So how do you capture searches conducted in Twitter?

GA provides a few functions to allow you to add your own search engines to the list of search engines that are already tracked by GA.

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)

You simply call this function right after var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-X”); This functions to track any custom search engine.

Twitter uses “q” as the querystring that contains the keyword. So in this case our search engine is search.twitter.com and newOrganicKeyword is the value in query string q

So you code will look like

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._addOrganic(“search.twitter.com”, “q”)
pageTracker._trackPageview();

(Note: pageTracker._addOrganic(“twitter”, “q”) will also work)

What will the reports look like in Google Analytics?

Note: For some reason I cannot get Twitter search to show up as Twitter in Google Analytics Search Engines report, it shows up as “search”(Maybe it’s a bug in GA? If anybody can provide pointer that will be a great help). However, for now this works fine as long as you know what “search” means in your search engine report. I am playing with filters and if I get that resolved I will post the fix or if you know the fix please email me.

Search Engines Report will show the following:

Drilling down to keywords will show the keywords on Twitter Search.

Looks like Twitter Search brings me repeat visits and more engaged traffic.

Comments? Questions?

My other posts on Twitter:

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
Sr/Lead Analytic Warehouse/Java Engineer at Saas Company In the SF Bay Area (Emeryville, CA)
—————————————————————————-
Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

Filed Under: search, SEO, twitter, web analytics

Things I have been working on

February 18, 2009 By 1 Comment

There has been a lag in my blog posting lately, and it’s gone on longer than I like. Lately, things have been hectic at work leaving very little time for blogging. Any time left has been consumed the following activities:

  1. Working on my Site, AnilBatra.com
    1. Ask an expert – I started a section for you to ask questions on Web Analytics, Behavioral Targeting and Web Analytics tools, particularly Omniture, WebTrends and Google Analytics. The questions will be answered by one of the people who have volunteered, one of my team members at Ascentium or me personally. So if you have a question please go ahead and fill out the form and someone will get back to you within 48 hours. If you would like to be one of the experts please email me a brief description about your skills and experience.

    2. Twitter – Google Analytics URL Builder – Nothing fancy here but a tool that allows you to create short URLs that you can post in Twitter and track them in your Google Analytics. It allows you to create short URLs for both your internal links (links to you own site) and external links (links that reside outside your site).

    3. Calculators – I am working on some basic and advanced calculators related to Web Analytics and Online Marketing. So far I have added a CPM, CPC, and CPA calculator (will be adding few more optional fields to it). More calculators will be added to this one. If you have suggestions on what calculators I should add then please send them to me.

  2. Industry Average Bounce Rates – I conducted a survey to understand what Bounce Rates to expect for various types of sites. I added a pdf that shows the results of this survey.

  3. Google Analytics Session for Seattle Tech Startup Group – I, along with Loren Bast, conducted a Google Analytics training session for the Tech Startup community of Seattle. Download the Seattle Tech Startup Google Analytics Presentation.

  4. Future of Web Analytics Panel at SDMA – I have been busy putting together a panel for the Seattle Direct Marketing Association to be held on March 11.

  5. Preparing for Breakfast Event in San Francisco – Gary Angel, Akin Arikan and I will be speaking at a breakfast event in San Francisco on March 9th. You can find more information and registration on my site.

  6. Neel – Neel is the name of my 5.5 month old son. He is growing and getting more and more active every day and needs more of my time.

I expect to resume my blog writing schedule very soon.

—————————————————————————-
Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/

Sr/Lead Analytic Warehouse/Java Engineer at Saas Company In the SF Bay Area (Emeryville, CA)

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Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
Filed Under: bounce rate, google analytics, web analytics

Social Network in Action: How Twitter Helped Me

February 9, 2009 By 1 Comment

Twitter has become a tool that I have come to love. It has provided me a way to connect with people I have never met, and it has helped me find information that I might have missed otherwise. A recent experience on Twitter showed me how this tool can be used to gather customer feedback and also to collaborate with others to solve a problem.

Last week I wrote a small tool to help me create short url’s with Google Analytics Tracking embedded in them. This tool allows me to create short URLs for links that are both external (not residing on my site) as well as internal (residing on my site). The tool is open to the public so please give it and try and send me your feedback. It is nothing fancy but something that I needed for my own use. (More on this in another blog post). (Also see, Twitter Analytics and Google Analytics Twitter URL Builder)

At 11:04 p.m. on February 5th I tweeted about this tool.

Within minutes I got my first feedback in a direct message (also called “DM” in twitter language).

Yes, I had not tested the tool in other browsers and O/S but my Twitter friends came to my rescue and provided me valuable information. Several other people jumped in and provided feedback. I immediately jumped into action to fix this issue. Had it not been for Twitter I don’t think I would have been able to get such feedback so quickly.
Next I was able to isolate the issue, which was a JavaScript problem. The JavaScript I had on the page worked fine on IE but not on Firefox. Since I am rusty with my JavaScript I had 4 options

  1. Search on a search engine and try to sort out all the content and find what I was looking for.

  2. Call one of friends/colleagues/Freelancers who are JavaScript gurus

  3. Buy a JavaScript book and try it on my own

  4. Try to find if my Twitter friends (people I might not have met in person but are following me on twitter) will help again

Given that it was late, I went to bed and thought about fixing the JavaScript issue the next morning. The next morning I decided to give option number 4 a try, and posted the following message in Twitter:

I posted the message on Twitter at 7:25 a.m. and within minutes I got reply from my Twitter friends, who helped to debug or find a solution for me.

Isn’t Twitter a powerful tool for feedback and collaboration? Despite all the noise that happens on Twitter, it can be a very valuable tool, as I have found it on several occasions.

Following are my Twitter Friends, who provided me the valuable feedback, helped with the javascript issue and/or help spread the word via their ReTweets (Thank you all).

Comments? Questions?

—————————————————————————-
Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?

Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
—————————————————————————-
Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

Filed Under: google analytics, social networking, twitter, web analytics

ReTweet Demystified

January 26, 2009 By 3 Comments

Last week I wrote a blog on Twitter Analytics. In this post I am going to talk about a ReTweet, a Twitter action and a KPI that I mentioned in my previous blog posts on Twitter.

ReTweet is when someone takes your tweet (a post on twitter) and tweets it again so that his/her followers can read it too. ReTweet is where the true power of a network like Twitter emerges.

For example if you have a network of 1000 followers then you are only reaching 1000 people. But if those 1000 (or subset of them) people take your message and ReTweet it so that it is broadcasted to their followers that’s when the message begins to extend beyond its original reach. If the message is compelling then it will be ReTweeted by your followers and their followers and their followers and it will go on.

ReTweet Best Practices

  • How to ReTweet

    You like a tweet and decide to send it your followers. You generally do it using RT, R/T, ReTweet followed by a blank space, the symbol @ and the username of the person who tweeted it and then the tweet. Keeping up with spirit of Twitter, RT has the least amount of characters and is the best way (in my opinion) and the most common way to retweet.

    Example:

    RT @anilbatra Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of #twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover? #wa
    (I know this is more than 140 characters but that’s the not the point).

    Here again is the format of ReTweet RT @username [tweet]

  • Proper ReTweet Attribution

    Since the real power of ReTweet is that it propogates the message byond direct followers so what is the right format of ReTweet when you get a message from JohnDoe that was a retweet of a message of JaneDoe? Should you ReTweet it as a message from JohnDoe or JaneDoe or both?

    The correct way to RT, in my opinion, is to always credit the original tweeter and if you still have room left to add more characters in your tweet then credit the person who sent you the tweet.

    Example:

    AnilBatra Tweets: Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of #twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover? #wa

    JohnSong takes this message and RTs: RT@anilbatra Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover?

    Aaronlovelace gets this tweet from JohnSong, he should credit this tweet to anilbatra and if there is still space for more characters then he can RT with johnsong

    Aaronlovlace tweets: RT@anilbatra RT @johnsong Working on a post on ReTweeting to continue my series of twitter posts, http://cli.gs/6tgAUT. Anything that you would like me to cover?

    The main thing to keep in mind is to credit the original Tweeter first and then the person who passed the tweet to you.

    According to a tweet from @agray, you should not add the hashtag (#) again if you are not adding any new insight in the RT. (see the example above, where a hashtag was removed from both twitter and wa).

Why Should You ReTweet?

RT also help you in gaining new friends and followers.
ReTweeting helps you propagate a message to your followers that is relevant to them but might have missed since they don’t follower the original tweeter. They might rely on you as an expert in certain area and it becomes your obligation to your followers to keep them updated on the tweets in your area of expertise.
If you take someone’s message and RT then you are sending a message to that person that you are an ethical ReTweeters and genuinely following that person (and BTW: pay attention to my tweets and return the favor by ReTweeting my messages).

ReTweet as a Measure of Success

As I wrote in my previous blog post, ReTweet is one of the KPIs you should use to measure your Success on Twitter. ReTweets is a measure of how good your tweets are. If you send a message and nobody ReTweets then possibility is that the message was not compelling enough for people to ReTweet or you have followers who really are not paying attention to your tweets. As I said before the ReTweet propagates your message beyond your direct followers. This allows you to reach people who might not have otherwise followed you.

For ReTweets to work we all need to follow the ReTweeting best practices I outlined in this post.

Comments? Questions?

Other Related Sources:

—————————————————————————-
Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board
—————————————————————————-
Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/anilbatra

Filed Under: KPIs, social media, social networking, twitter, web analytics

Twitter Analytics

January 19, 2009 By 7 Comments

There is a lot of discussion recently about how to measure authority, influence etc. on Twitter. There are a lot of tools popping up which claim to give some kind of score to help you measure you (or anyone else) against everybody else. This post is not about those tools and which ones I like (more on that later). This post is about things that we can track for sure.

There are millions of Twitter users who are tweeting every day, hoping and assuming that there tweets are being read by their followers. We can’t track all tweets and find out if they are being read but if you are one of those who post a link in your tweets then you are in luck. This post will show you how to track URLs posted in your tweets so that you can determine for sure if anybody is reading those tweets and also what kind of tweets from you are getting the most attention.

There are two types of URLs you post in Twitter

  1. URL to your site
  2. URLs to third party sites

  1. URLs to you site – When you post a link to your site on twitter, you can treat it as a campaign just like a banner or search campaign. Add the campaign tracking codes compliant with your web analytics tool so that you can see the visits, page views, conversions and other web analytics data when a visitors clicks on your tweeted link and arrives on your site.

    Example:

    I use Google Analytics (GA) and you wanted to post a link to http://AnilBatra.com/, instead of just posting http://AnilBatra.com/ in my tweets, I add GA campaign parameters to the URL being posted.
    utm_campaign, utm_medium and utm_source are three query parameters that GA uses for campaign tracking.

    Link to Be Tweeted: http://AnilBatra.com

    Adding GA Parameters: http://AnilBatra.com/?utm_campaign=watweets&tum_medium=twitter&utm_source=011909tweet

    Now when I use WebTrends for Web Analytics then I use something like

    Adding WebTrends Paramater: http://AnilBatra.com/?wt.mc_id=011909tweet. Where WT.mc_id is the Webtrends campaign tracking paramter.
    You can use which ever web analytics tool you like, the key is adding the campaign tracking parameters the URL to be tweeted. It is that simple.

  2. URLs to third party sites– Quite often tweeters post links to sites for which they don’t have access to the web analytics reports. For example, you posting a link to my blog http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/, you don’t have access to my Web Analytics Reports. As a results you have no idea how many people click though to the link that you tweeted.
    For such tracking I like a utility called CLIGS http://cli.gs (Note: I have no affiliate with this tool). This tool creates a short URL for any URL that you want to tweet. It than also provides you the clicks on that links as well as other stats such as
    • Geo Locations of visitors

    • Social media monitoring Cligs keeps track in real time of who tweets your link, who shares it on Friendfeed, who links to it, who blogs about it, who writes a blog comment about it, and more. Not just that, Cligs does that for the destination URL too!

For the sites that I have access to the web analytics data, I create a tracking url as I showed above (1) and then use CLIGS to shorten the URL (2), this provides me both CLIGS and Web Analytics data for analysis.

Apart from tracking on links the other ways to determine if your tweets are getting attention is to see the number of Retweets you get, direct messages and @replies you get. I will cover those in my future blog post.

Comments/Questions?

—————————————————————————-
Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board
—————————————————————————-
Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/anilbatra

    Filed Under: online marketing, twitter, web analytics

    5 Best Practices for any Campaign

    December 30, 2008 By 3 Comments

    Burger King recently launched a TV ad that directed visitors to WhopperVirgins.com. I learned about this on AdAge.com which wote:

    “What if you don’t remember the exact Web address and Google it? You still better remember the domain name. While WhopperVirgins.com ranks first in Google for “whopper virgins,” it’s invisible when you omit the plural. “

    AdAge writes further:

    ”This is a major missed opportunity. Google Trends shows that recently, the volume of searches for the singular and plural versions have been nearly equal. “Whopper virgin” searchers must either go to an intermediary site or refine their search. Why can’t consumers ‘have it their way’ and get to Burger King’s site even if they’re off by a letter? This multimillion-dollar branding campaign could have covered all its bases with a $10,000 search marketing investment. As it stands now, Burger King risks frustrating consumers instead of serving up one whopper of a video.”

    AdAge listed following three areas of neglect:

    • The domain: WhopperVirgin.com is a parked domain filled with ads for Burger King store listings, Virgin Mobile gifts, Virgin Atlantic flights, Virgin Islands vacations and Virgin Mary checks.

    • Search engine optimization: The microsite doesn’t appear on the first three pages of Google results for “whopper virgin” searches.

    • Paid search: While reviewing Google’s listings over several days, there hasn’t been a search ad running on “whopper virgin” queries.


    In addition to above another area which was partially neglected by Burger King was Web Analytics. I found two main issues with the web analytics

    1. Web Analytics Tool Implementation – This site did not have any web analytics code implemented on the landing page. However the video does start as soon as user lands on the site which then fires WebTrends code. With this implementation I am not sure if they are getting an referring site or search engine information.

    2. Data Analysis – Clearly Burger King is using web analytics tool. I am sure they were passing the web analytics reports around but I am assume that they were not doing any meaningful analysis. If they were doing any analysis at all they would have uncovered the SEO/SEM issues listed by AdAge.

      3. Simple keyword analysis using their web analytics tool would have helped them uncover these issues. (Lesson: If you are spending millions of dollars on the campaign you should also keep aside few thousands for deeper analysis. Just passing the reports around is not enough).
      It is very common to report on top 10 -20 keywords but these keywords alone don’t tell the whole story. Yes they can be good ego boosters but you have to look beyond top keywords and analyze the keyword that are either in the long tail or are not driving any traffic at all. Doing some basic analysis on search engine keywords would have shown them that they were not getting any traffic (or are getting very little traffic) from “Whopper Virgin” or “Burger King Virgin” keywords (I am sure there are more variations).

    I hope Burger King learned its lesson and will be smarter next time they run campaign. (Note: All campaigns, offline or online end up having an impact on the site, search engines and online media)

    Below are the 5 lessons that all marketers can learn from Burger King Campaign and apply to their own campaigns in the future:

    1. Search Engine Optimization – Make SEO an Integral Part of your any micro-sites and campaigns (offline or online).

    2. Paid Search – Plan to spend few thousand dollars from your campaign budget to SEM to augment or fill any gaps in SEO.

    3. Web Analytics Tool Implementation – Plan to spend few thousand dollars from your campaign on Web analytics tools (which they did). Make sure the tool is properly configured to capture the accurate data. As I mentioned above, it appeared that the site did not have any code on the landing page, which means they were missing a lot of data and hence not getting the whole picture. Conduct an accuracy audit of the tool implementation; it can potentially save you millions of dollars by providing you data beyond click-throughs.

    4. Data Analysis – Analysis is different from reporting. Web Analytics tools and SEM reports just provide you a view into the data. You have to conduct a full analysis to understand what the data means and what actions to take to generate a higher ROI from your campaigns. Plan to conduct an analysis on all the data you collect from various tools. Learn from this analysis, it will tell you where you are wasting your money and what’s working for you. Use the insights gained from the analysis and take appropriate actions to improve your campaigns.

    5. Online Reputation Monitoring – Monitor news sites, Social Media (conversations/actions that happen away from your site) etc., look at what people are talking about your campaign and your brand. Learn from it and take appropriate actions. A simple tool like Google Alert can provide this to you this for free. I believe Burger King did pay attention to what was being talked about and as a result now you can see Burger King’s Paid Search campaign for “Whopper Virgin” and “Burger King Virgin” keywords.

    Comments? Questions?

    —————————————————————————-
    Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
    Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/

    Latest Position: Director, Analytics at Resource Interactive (Columbus, OH)
    —————————————————————————-
    Site: AnilBatra.com
    Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

    Filed Under: online advertising, online marketing, SEM, SEO, social media, web analytics

    My View on Twitter

    December 18, 2008 By 10 Comments


    Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

    I heard about Twitter from few friends of mine who could not stop raving about it. After initial skepticism about how useful it would be, I joined the bandwagon and started twittering (Micro blogging on Twitter is called Twittering). I post about 1 tweet (post) per day on Twitter. There are some people who tweet all day long (I’m not sure if they do anything else).

    From my experience so far I can tell you that it is a pretty good tool to learn things you normally would miss, things that you care about.

    There are a number of people in the Web Analytics, Online Marketing and Advertising space that I follow and I’m always adding more people to follow. Following someone can provide you insight into what they are up to, what are the cool things they read or have come across, and what business challenges they are facing and trying to resolve. You can even learn how they solve these business issues.

    Occasionally you will see people who tweet about their daily life. Their tweets looks like “I am sipping a cup of Starbucks mocha”, “I am walking into my apartment”, etc. But if you ignore such noise (unless you find it informative) you will find lots of useful information too.

    Personally, here is how I have used Twitter so far:

    1. Find new articles/blog posts : There are so many articles published every day and it is hard to keep track of everything. However, people I follow on Twitter bring that information directly to me via their tweets

    2. Ideas for Blog Posts: Other people’s tweets have provided me with ideas for my own blog

    3. Get Answers: I have asked questions and have gotten answers from people who follow me on twitter

    4. Find new people to follow: I have found new thought leaders to follow, which in turn helps me with number 1 and 2

    What does it mean to follow someone on Twitter?
    Following: Following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates.
    Followers: Your followers are those who have elected to receive your tweets.

    Someone mentioned awhile back about how to measure the success of your twittering. In his opinion the KPI for measuring the success of twittering is the number of followers/number of people you follow. The higher this number, the higher your success is on Twitter. What he was basically saying is that you should write great stuff so that people want to follow you but you should not follow anyone else because your KPI will drop. I don’t agree with this point of view, in my opinion, the KPIs for twittering success are :

    1. The increase in number of followers

    2. Number of Re-tweets/Tweet. Re-tweet is when someone takes your tweet and tweets it again so that his/her followers can read it too

    3. New things you learn (hard to quantify but you know when you learn something new)

    Other KPIs could be

    1. Increase in your brand awareness (both personal and corporate)

    2. Increase in any site side conversion (you will be driving users to your site/blogs etc.)

    Who should you follow?

    It really depends on your interest. I started with few people in the web analytics field and my coworkers. Now, I also look at the original tweeters of the re-teewts that come my way and if the person meets my interests, I start following them. I also follow people who are following me if they tweet about the stuff that interests me.

    If at any point you don’t like what a person is tweeting about then you can just stop following them, it take one click to stop following them.

    Here are some Web Analytics and Online Marketers that you might start following:

    I got this list from the Web Analytics Yahoo Group. Please let me know if I missed your name. If you would like your name to be added to this list then please leave your name and twitter username as a comment and I will update this list.

    If you are already on Twitter I would like to hear your opinion about twitter. Do you think it has helped you personally or in business or is it a distraction?

    —————————————————————————-
    Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
    Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/

    Latest Position: Director, Analytics at Resource Interactive (Columbus, OH)
    —————————————————————————-
    Site: AnilBatra.com
    Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

    Filed Under: KPIs, social media, twitter, web analytics

    Google Analytics: Creating Advanced Segments and an Issue

    November 12, 2008 By 5 Comments

    Last month Google Analytics released Advanced Segmentation functionality. I am very impressed with it so far, however this functionality is still in beta, which means it could potentially have some issues. In this post I will show you how to create an advanced segment and one issue that I found with it.

    Business Problem: I want to see all the data for visits that originate from Google.

    Solution: Create an Advanced Segment that will have all the visits that has the source as google.

    Let’s see how to create such a segment. (Not this is a very simple segment but the same steps can be used to create more complex segments).

    Creating an “Advanced Segment”

    1. Click on the “Advanced Segments” link on the left navigation bar under the “Settings” section.

    2. In the next screen you will see all the “Advanced Segments”. In this screen you manage all the advanced segments. Google Analytics has predefined some of the segments and they are grouped under “Default Segments”. The segments that you create will be listed under “Custom Segments”. To create a new segment, click on the “Create new custom segment” link on the top right hand corner.

    3. The next screen is where you create the segment. The segments can be created by using one or more dimensions and metrics. On the left hand side you have 2 sections “Dimensions” and “Metrics”. I chose a dimension of “Source” listed under “Traffic Source” as I wanted to see all the visits which originated from Google (i.e. the source was Google). I chose “contains” as the condition as I wanted to get all the visits that originated from anything that contained Google in the source. Finally I entered the word “google” in the value.

    4. Click on “Test Segment” button to do a sanity check and see if the segment size is as expected. Once you are satisfied with the segment, give it a name in “New Segment” filed and click “Save Segment” to Save the segment.

    5. Once you the save the segment you will be taken back to “Mange Segments” where your new segment will appear. See below, a new segment called “Google Visits” show up. The new segment is now ready to be applied to various reports.

    So far so good. However, I found one potential issue with the data.

    The Issue

    I applied this segment to one of the pages in my Content Report (see below) and chose the date as Nov 3rd.


    As you can see my “Google Visit” segment is reporting 328 pageviews while my “All Segments” is reporting only 175 pageviews. That does not seem right. Similarly Unique Views is 112 for “All Visits” while 201 for “Google Visits”. As you can also see from the graph, “Google Visits” are higher than “All Visits” on several dates not just November 3rd. Has anyone else seen something similar? Am I not reading these reports correctly?

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    Site: AnilBatra.com
    Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra
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    Filed Under: google analytics, Google Analytics Tips, web analytics

    Mobile Analytics

    October 8, 2008 By 5 Comments

    According to Nielsen Mobile the adoption of the mobile web has reached a critical mass. Nielsen says that, as of May 2008, 15.6 percent of mobile subscribers in the US make regular use of the mobile Internet on their devices, totaling some 40 million subscribers. This is just a subset of the 95 million US mobile subscribers who pay for access to the mobile Internet (through data plans or some other setup) but don’t use it quite so regularly.

    Despite such a surge in mobile internet usage business are lacking in measuring the mobile traffic. A recent survey by Omniture found that 71% of businesses are not measuring mobile traffic to their sites. It also found that 50 percent of businesses do not even know how many unique users landing on their sites originate from a mobile device.
    Measuring Mobile internet traffic, also called “Mobile Analytics” is not easy, we are still dealing with the accuracy issues with web analytics and now Mobile analytics provides its own set of unique challenges.

    Judah Philips in his post on Metrics insider covers a comprehensive list of challenges that Mobile Analytics faces.

    Some of the key challenges he lists are

    • Data Collection –JavaScript is the most common way of collecting data for web analytics, but not all the mobile browsers execute JavaScript.

    • Unique visitor identification – due to lack of cookie support and the changing of IP addresses it is a challenge to uniquely identify a user.

    • Traffic source detection – Determining the source of traffic, such as search, email, direct entry, RSS feeds, and marketing campaigns can be challenging in the mobile space.

    • Geographic identification – Where are the visitors viewing your site coming from? But not all devices enable geographic detection because the gateway’s IP address is used, not a GPS signal.

    Mobile Analytics Solutions

    A lot of Mobile Analytics solutions have sprung up in past year or so and more are coming up (See my prediction for 2008). Some of the established web analytics vendors are also now offering Mobile Analytics solutions. These solutions widely differ in their technology, process and capabilities. Which solution will work for you will depend on your needs (In future I might compare some of these vendors on this blog, but meanwhile if you would like help in evaluating a solution you can email me at batraonline at gmail.com). Below is the list of current mobile analytics vendors that I am aware of.

    Other Resources you might be interested in

    Did I miss any tool/solution? Email me at batraonline at gmail.com

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    Site: AnilBatra.com
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    Filed Under: coremetrics, mobile analytics, omniture, web analytics
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