Flash Tracking (and good music too!)

The creative folks over at Coke continue to innovate with their web properties. They are very heavy into Flash, and as usual, have some very fun marketing programs in place (check out the Virtual Thirst campaign which has been using MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Second Life to reach out...wow!).

They have a music player featuring "fresh new music" with some great tunes. The Flash-based player (which undocks from the site so you can continue listening if you leave their site) is instrumented to send analytics data for various activities (start, pause, next song, song rating, etc.). Very smart use of analytics.

Disclosure: Coke uses WebTrends for analytics...but I haven't been a part of their implementation...I just stumbled on their site while looking for something else!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, flash

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Open Web Analytics

I just came across this wiki, and blog, documenting "Open Web Analytics". The site bills itself as the "open source web analytics framework". The content is a bit fresh (read: some of it is clearly in development), but it looks like there could be some good useful stuff in the works.

Is anyone using this tool?

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Non-Profit Year 2 - New and Improved Analytics too

Last week we put the finishing touches on our updated online "store" for parents to buy school supplies for their child(ren) through Schoolhouse Supplies. This year we added 5 more Portland Elementary schools to the program. We made a few important modifications to our site to accommodate the additional schools, plus we're now offering a method for parents to donate directly to Schoolhouse Supplies if they'd like.

As I've noted previously, we are taking advantage of some great technology to pull this together. We're using .NET on the front-end, with credit cards processed directly through API's setup by AuctionPay, then each order is stored (as a closed opportunity, with account and contact records added) in Salesforce.com. Of course, Analytics and Marketing Warehouse data brought to you by WebTrends. All of these tools are provided free to our non-profit...many thanks to these companies!

We also made a few analytics changes this year. We updated our collection of WebTrends data to include:

• Capturing form information
• Capturing button selections to give us a better feel for usage of some of the features
• We changed around our tracking of scenario steps for more streamlined reporting in the WebTrends Warehouse
  
• Capturing the Salesforce Contact ID value we create for each customer when we add the customer into Salesforce, and collecting it

That last item is particularly slick. After a successful credit card authorization, we insert records into Salesforce, then query back out the new Contact ID and place it in a meta variable for our WebTrends javascript to pick up on the confirmation page. Now we can easily pull our WebTrends Marketing Warehouse data and Salesforce data together for some slick reporting. Cool!

More to come on this as the orders start coming in!

(side note - many thanks to Nate, Anu, Mike and Jeff for their volunteer hours on this!)

Filed in: analytics, salesforce.com, nonprofit, web+analytics

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Converted

Nothing to do with analytics...I bought a Mac (MacBook) this weekend. I've never used a Mac before. What a great experience. I turned it on, answered a couple of questions and I was connected and on my way. The kids love it...and I do as well.

I'm trying to figure out if I should get a .mac account, or just use Yahoo or Google for everything. Anyone have any preferences?

Filed in: mac

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Attention Metric from Compete

Compete has just launched a new Attention metric, defined as "The total time spent on a site as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users". They now have daily updates, measuring the "velocity" of change in attention as well. It's an interesting view of overall traffic, and the tools provided by Compete are pretty cool.

The WAA has a research committee focused on measuring "new media", providing useful methodology and best practices that is also worth checking out if you're interested in more specifics on this topic.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Video Advertising

Picked up this info from MarketingVOX. This is pretty cool advertising built into a video. Check out this Kohl's ad, and look for the rectangle overlays on the video. Clicking on one of them pulls up the product you're viewing on the Kohl's site.

Think of all of the placement advertising possibilities!

The analytics behind the scenes are interesting as well. MSN looks to be tracking whether you mouseover the product (the rectangle). Nothing is sent to Kohl's, so they must be relying on MSN for in-video analytics for now. When you click on an item and visit Kohl's directly, the referrer is the MSN video site, but they don't look to be sending the specifics about the ad placement (for example, the same item shows up in different scenes...I'm sure the folks at Kohl's want to know which scene had the highest conversion).

Cool stuff. Congrats to Kohl's and MSN for putting this together.

Filed in: advertising, analytics, web+analytics

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More Thoughts On Page Views

Steve Rubel continued the discussion of the replacement of the Page View as the metric of choice in our industry. He suggests that Events, Unique Visitors and Time Spent are likely candidates for replacement metrics (with Events and Time Spent as the two likely leaders).

The article is worth a read...as are the comments.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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