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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Internet Broadcasting Notes Online Traffic for U.S. Elections

...more good use of technology in politics this week!

Internet Broadcasting leveraged WebTrends Analytics™ On Demand to provide real-time analytics across its network of 79 sites. According to data from WebTrends, Internet Broadcasting’s Election Day traffic produced:

* 3.5 million unique visitors – the company’s highest day in history
* 4.8 million page views to the Politics section – a record total nearly three times larger than 2004 Election Day traffic
* 24.8 million page views – nearly 50 percent higher than the 2004 Presidential Election Day
* 50-150 percent traffic spikes above typical page view levels for top sites

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, elections

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Technology And Elections

How about an election technology discussion that doesn't include Diebold in it? :-)

Here's something very cool. Last week, Bonnie Bogle noted on the N-TEN blog that the Institute On Money In State Politics (followthemoney.org) released a public facing set of API's for accessing their incredibly rich database. Since it's election week, I thought I'd put up a web widget showing "Contributions By Party And Status For Oregon" which you can see in my sidebar, and below:

Now, how is that for a great use of technology!

Don't forget to vote tomorrow (or if you're in Oregon, by tomorrow!)!

Filed in: elections, api, followthemoney

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Measure Map Insight - Interview with Jeff Veen

If you haven't already done so, check out Brian Oberkirch's interview (mp3) with Jeff Veen (who is now with Google, formerly Adaptive Path). Jeff put together the very cool Measure Map analytics package.

About 1/3 of the way into the interview, Jeff digs into some of the history of building Measure Map. As a blogger, he essentially couldn't find a tool to help him. He notes:

"I was blogging all the time...none of us really had a sense of how well we were doing"

As is the case with many of us, he wanted to know:

"What is my connection to the rest of the community out there"..."What affect am I having"

So, unable to find a tool (or more specifically, the right tool), he set out to build one, with the assumption that with blogging tools like Blogger, MovableType, WordPress, etc.:

"You could help about 90% of the bloggers by creating a tool that integrated into just 4 or 5 products"

For sure, Measure Map is a different kind of a tool. It's specifically designed for bloggers. It doesn't even use typical jargon to describe activity on your site. Jeff notes:

"The big irony of Measure Map is that it's a web analytics tool that makes no mention of pageviews whatsoever."

And the interface is designed around blog posts, rather than URL's, etc.

"One of my first ideas when we first started talking about Measure Map was the idea that every post on your site had a corresponding page on...Measure Map"

Where the product really shines is with its visualizations. It provides simple, friendly visual representations of the data via a clean interface spiced with Flash and Ajax.

"I didn't care what we used...sometimes it made sense to use flash for a relatively complex series of animations or interactions, but the flash would then talk to the javascript, back and forth...and most people can't really tell as they're navigating through the product which parts are Flash and which parts are Ajax"

One of the things Measure Map did early on that I liked was to create feeds for the data to easily retrieve it. I use the feeds for the widget I created that pulls Feedburner and Measure Map data together.

Can you tell I'm a Measure Map fan? Thanks to Marko for point me to the interview

Filed in: analytics, measuremap, web+analytics

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Webcast - Competing On Analytics

Professor Tom Davenport of Babson College will be speaking today (10am PST) on a topic he's written on previously, Competing on Analytics Paper. The subtitle for the presentation is, "Move Faster, Accomplish More, and Avoid Mistakes by Learning From The Best". Could be interesting.

The Juice Analytics folks will be covering the event.

Filed in: analytics

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