Golden Gate Bridge

View from Presidio Park

Firstly, as a long-time supporter and exhibitor at eMetrics, Unilytics always tries to attract good foot traffic and conversation to our booth; we decided against the overused iPad giveaway with thoughts of “well, we should just give the winner of our contest cash then they can do whatever they want with it.”  Far be it for us to tell you how to spend the money or to give you a ubiquitously available device.  So we gave away a barrel of cash, literally!  It was a huge hit and by far the best prize according to many attendees.  Just ask the winner, Krista Seiden!! Essentially, the winner was determined by the closest guess to the amount in the barrel ($366).  Krista’s guess was $365, one dollar for every day of the year.  The average guess was $178.

Cash Winner – Krista Seiden

I should also mention that we got to engage in some great conversations on analytics measurement as many of the show-goers came from diverse analytics backgrounds whether in their role, their product of choice or sophistication.  Much of the talk was around adequate business analysis and ultimately arriving at the holy grail of digital analytics – optimization – rather than stopping at the requisite measurement. Something Eric Tobias blogged about here: http://bit.ly/wD6SAS.

In many of the sessions, the most common question was “do I have the right tool working for us?” We contend that the configuration of a given tool is more important than buying a specific product. All web analytics tools try to provide the same information and with proper set-up they deliver similar results. Still, there are differences in implementation and architecture and for many users there needs to be consideration given to things like:

• Do you want to host and control your own data?  If so, then having a solution like Webtrends On Premise is an excellent choice.
• Is cost an issue?  In this case Google Analytics is a viable option but remember you still need to make an investment in training and optimization!
• Are you interested in tracking users on a 1:1 basis? Then GA is out of the question.
• Is having a robust, all-in-one platform for analytics, warehousing, marketing automation, etc. significant?  Think of Adobe’s breadth of digital marketing platforms.

The point is that there are many implications to evaluate before one can say that only the concepts matter.

At the last eMetrics I attended in Toronto, the most common pain point faced by digital analytics analysts was indeed the collection and management of data originating from web analytics, databases and various internal data stores (read here: http://bit.ly/lMl9Kj). That did not change at this show. This year we posed the question, “So what takes up most of your time and causes the most aggravation in your role?” Invariably, the answer was collecting disparate data from multiple sources into one place and spending three to four business days making sense of it.  At the risk of self-promotion, we have a solution that addresses this challenge called Montage Automated Dashboards.

All in all, it was a great show in a great city.  Hope to see you at #eMetrics Toronto in a few weeks!

Since it’s important to better understand where social efforts are succeeding, web analytics must focus on tying those social media interactions to actual business value. Business value would relate to interactions that are significant and related to your business needs. (See: Unilytics KPI Karta for information about building well designed Key Performance Indicators that will provide feedback directly related to your business needs and goals.) How can we identify and segment the raw numerical data for social media and derive real value?

Your resulting reports can be configured to display a wide range of information about the direct impact of social media activities, the viral aspect of certain campaigns, the propensity for people to share your content and the ability to drill down to the lowest level of reasonable divisions.

Although this post is very high level, hopefully it will give you pause to think about how much more accurate and actionable you can be with your social media data.

Web Analytics Audits often happen because of mistrust of, or confusion in, the report data. Often organizations invest considerable resources in their web analytics system, only to find out that there are problems with the numbers. Numbers may not make sense, or can be awkward to justify. Let’s review what should happen for an audit to be effective and handle all problems.

What happens in an audit?

On the technical side:

• A review of tags are done
  • All pages are reviewed to ensure that each page contains a tag and that intermediary or third-party pages are tagged with their template.
  • Verification is done to ensure that the tags are correctly configured so that JavaScript errors or other situational problems do no cause problems with tracking.
• Session tracking verification
  • We first determine that cross domain tracking is working and not breaking valid sessions.  Attribution tracking is reviewed and verified for all entry points.
  • We check the results across other web analytics tools which may be installed to ensure that the session data matches up.
  • Verification of first/third-party cookie tracking is then done to ensure that data is not being lost or incorrectly categorized.  We also check that tags are writing cookies properly both individually and on aggregate.
• If multiple analytics tools are installed, we will verify the magnitude of metrics across multiple tools.  This includes systematic review of certain key dimensions across their associated metrics between the two tools.
• Of the analytics tool, we review the following details
  • Verify table limits – is data being cut off or discarded?
  • Verify Query parameters – are we rebuilding the correct parameters to best describe our dimensional data?
  • Custom reporting configurations – Are the custom reports setup correctly and answering the correct question?
  • Segmentation and filter review – Are the filters correct and do they represent the correct segments?  Review the content and configuration of the segments to determine that the filters are not contradicting or breaking expectations.
  • Tool specific customizations – based on the selected analytics tool, we will review the advanced configuration to ensure that each of the items are configured to support goals and expectations.

On the business side:

• Are all critical metrics being reported on?
• How are new reporting requirements managed?
• Is the information organized and accessible to decision makers?
• Does the data allow decisions to be made?
• Can the impact of those decisions be measured?

What are the results?

Once the audit is completed, we compile a list of our findings, completed configuration changes, future configuration changes, code changes, and other expectations.  The results of the audit set the stage for next step recommendations, governance updates and overall strategy for future initiatives.

Unilytics has been taking the message of optimization on the road to eMetrics in San Francisco and Toronto, Webtrends Engage, Unilytics’ seminar last week in Ottawa, and our seminar yesterday in Toronto… finally we are turning some heads!  The inspiration for our new mantra is the result of too many organizations who are merely collecting simple out-of-the-box reporting. These are the same organizations that invest a great deal of financial and internal resources on their analytics but make no business decisions, website design enhancements or marketing improvements based on their web analytics results. Paradoxically, they’ll quickly admit that online marketing is highly strategic and corporately paramount.

For those who think optimization is daunting, it really isn’t.  The first step is to build a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that address your organization’s web and business goals and objectives.  The next step is to configure your analytics reports to leverage your KPIs and to train the consumers of said reports how to apply the knowledge derived to make effective business decisions.  This step – report interpretation – is the biggest gain in successful analytics. Ongoing web optimization will require continual monitoring of your reports to ensure you are meeting your KPIs.

You can find some of this info in our slides, or you can feel free to reach out to me and I’d be glad to have a conversation with you.

The link to our slide presentations is here: http://www.unilytics.com/slides/TorontoSeminar2011-Slides.pdf

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter:  @unilytics

The good news for our attendees is we amassed a wealth of experience and knowledge in digital analytics and we were able to impart that to them. The good news for us is that we got to meet a lot of very passionate people and a highly mature audience about analytics. Analytics is growing! Our talk included an overview of the state of web analytics, log file management, SharePoint analytics, improving 1:1 marketing, social and a demo of Webtrends 10. We also discussed automated dashboards and that still grabs all analytics producer’s ears; the need to automate the collection of data from disparate sources and significantly, view all analytics KPIs in one place so they can determine how well (or not) their digital marketing is performing within 30-60s is heavily sought after. And we have an app for that!

Thanks as well to the great questions like Kerry from Irdeto who inquired about social media tracking and strategy– that continues to be a prominent topic. With a new focus on social and mobile, Webtrends 10 will allow for greater social measurement of Facebook such as tracking for pages; enhanced measurement for FB apps; and complete data from Facebook API. Now all you have to worry about is the strategy for which we can offer some helpful ideas about. On the mobile side v10 will measure and compare apps and mobile sites on all mobile platforms with plans for iTunes App Store download reporting.

We’ll be in Toronto on May 26th delivering the same talk so if you are in the area please feel free to join us: http://www.unilytics.com/seminar2011.shtml and if you are not let us know and we’ll send you the slides. Also, we’ll be tweeting from the seminar so check that out (@Unilytics) and feel free to send us your questions!

Until next time….