SEM and Analytics Example

This is an interesting example of how important it is to understand your analytics data to make sense of unusual activity. From the PepperjamBlog:

"One of our clients spends about $2,500 per day on Yahoo Search Marketing. In this particular instance, the client is opted into the Yahoo Content Network and spends about 20% of their daily budget or $500 per day in content. One of our senior SEM’s was reviewing daily click activity and noticed that the account, which the previous day was funded with $10K was offline and the entire available balance depleted. After further investigation we found that two particular keywords within the content network accounted for almost the entire $10K previous day deposit in less than 12 hours (rough estimate of time)."

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, search



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Microsoft's New Homepage - and AJAX Analytics

After a lot of very hard work by many folks up in Redmond, Microsoft has released their new homepage design. From their FAQ:

"On December 14 we introduced a new home page for Microsoft.com. The new page incorporates months of research, testing, customer feedback, and refinements. We hope the new page makes it easier to find what you’re looking for on Microsoft.com, and that you find new items of interest along the way."

The new site is very sophisticated, as is the push for analytics behind the scenes. If you like to see how sites are leveraging analytics to track AJAX navigation, use your favorite HTTP debugger (Fiddler is still my fav - thanks Eric L) and see the analytics data sent to the Microsoft team for analysis (via m.webtrends.com). Specifically note how the AJAX menu (reached through the menu in the upper right hand part of the homepage) tracks each "event" (clicks mostly in this case) inside the menu, including which "view" (upper right) you choose.



Also note how each AJAX event in the menu references navigation structure ("ngn" parameters), and utilizes an event handler parameter WT.dl to define the type of event. These are a couple of examples of methods for tracking more sophisticated Web 2.0 events to provide rich analytics on the backend.



Congratulations to the team at Microsoft!



Thanks William...nice work!



Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, microsoft, webtrends



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WebTrends and ClickShift = WebTrends Dynamic Search

We announced this morning that WebTrends and ClickShift have joined forces. From the release:

"The acquisition will strengthen the company's existing product family, WebTrends Marketing Lab, with the addition of WebTrends Dynamic Search™"

This is excellent news for both companies. ClickShift has created an excellent product that fits perfectly with the expanding WebTrends Marketing Lab environment.

Congratulations and welcome to John, Leo, and the rest of the ClickShift team!!!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, search

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