RSS In Online Retail

The NYTimes has a good article today on the trend toward using RSS in ecommerce applications. Check it out, and if you don't have a RSS strategy today, you'll understand better why you need one. RSS is disruptive.

Inserting RSS into your marketing and sales process requires some advanced thinking about analytics. RSS is simple. Really simple in fact! Analyzing RSS is not so simple however, mostly because there are many ways to deploy RSS, and each has its own analytics requirements.

However, you shouldn't let that stop you. Open a Feedburner account to get started at least. They have a terrific set of tools, and are building an amazing infrastructure for managing feeds. Or, you can analyze your web logs to quickly understand your RSS traffic (I know...old school...but it is still extremely useful). If you have questions on how to approach analyzing RSS, drop me a line (elbpdx at gmail) or add a comment below.

Filed in: analytics rss

WebTrends Marketing Lab Buzz

I'm going to try an experiment. WebTrends is going to release the WebTrends Marketing Lab soon. As you know, I'm in the R&D organization at WebTrends, and I definitely do NOT speak for our company, or our products. I generally do not write about our products, except to possibly provide examples, or new tools (widgets of course), and analytics ideas.

The WebTrends Marketing Lab will be very cool, but I'll let our fabulous marketing and product marketing folks give you the full story. (Ok, maybe I'll write about a few new slick features...but not until we launch it.)

What I'd like to do via this post is to see if I can capture the buzz of the WebTrends Marketing Lab as we launch it to the industry. I'll update this post with more items as I find them.

Buzz:

• The fabulous OX2 team in Belguim is getting the word out to their customers (and future customers!), noting that "we are very excited at OX2 with this new launch that will help our current and future clients to better measure and optimize their online activities."
  
• Mike Keyes has written the first post that I've come across. He says he's "looking forward to seeing more of this new version". Sweet. Thanks for starting the buzz Mike!

Filed in: analytics webtrends buzz

Google Analytics and Privacy: A Quick International Comparison

As we know, Privacy laws vary throughout the world. Companies doing business internationally need to pay attention to privacy laws to stay on top of the appropriate country-specific requirements.

As an example, take a look at the 1-paragraph Privacy section of Google Analytics US Terms Of Service document, and compare it to their 4-paragraph Privacy section in the TOS for the UK. The common verbiage is around the fact that they collect information, using a cookie as an identifier, and they do not want site operators to send them any personally identifiable information. A good idea to be sure.

There are a few differences worth noting:

1. They include a sample statement to be included in the privacy policy of the site using GA. They call out that the servers collecting the data are stored in the United States, and that they are collecting data for reports and for "providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage". Hmmm. They also note that they "will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google".
2. They have a short paragraph noting that Google may review your website to make sure you've posted an appropriate policy.
   
3. Finally, they note that they will retain all of the data.

I wonder why they don't have the same TOS for the US? It all seems reasonable and clear (except that "providing other services" stuff...). The sample privacy statement is straight-forward, and it makes sense that they would want to follow up to see if folks are actually including a privacy statement. And, we definitely know they are collecting and keeping the data...all part of the circle of analytics.

Oh, and perhaps Xavier can come out of retirement to confirm that the French version does indeed look like the UK version (it looks the same to me...but of course, I can't read French).

Filed in: analytics google privacy

More Analysis on Competing on Analytics

Until recently, I haven't received many comments on this blog. The Web Analytics Forum that EricP setup provides a terrific format for discussions in the industry (and thank you to Robbin for the nice comment!).

However, two folks wrote some nice comments on my Competing on Analytics post, and I wanted to make note of them for you to check out. Zach Gemignani is with the Juice Analytics team, and Aurélie Pols is with the fine WebAnalytics.be European Dream Team in Belguim.

Both comments are very thoughtful, and well articulated. Zach wrote a good follow up post as well, providing a deeper critique of the research.

Thanks for the notes...keep them coming!

Filed in: analytics

Measuring the Impact of Measure Map

I've been pondering the reasons for the Measure Map acquisition by Google. As we know, Google purchased Urchin back in March of 2005, then re-launched it in November as Google Analytics. It's a terrific analytics offering. So, why buy another analytics tool?

There are two compelling reasons. First, there's Jeffrey Veen and team. Clearly, they are doing some very slick, and very interesting stuff. Google is lucky to have them on board.

Second, I believe it's not about web analytics (or even blog analytics), it's about buzz analytics. Measure Map has two important analytics dimensions that distinguish them from other analytics tools: Links Out and Comments.

Links Out is a pretty easy one for web analytics vendors to solve. It requires some additional javascript, and some additional data collection. But Measure Map noted that it was a must-have feature from the start. Why? Because they get the fact that your blog is one link in a larger conversation chain. The more you understand the chain, the more you can manipulate it to your advantage.

Analyzing Comments is a more difficult proposition. It requires a better understanding of how blogs are structured, and how to extract information. But how cool is this...it gives you the ability to start to articulate new social networking dimensions, including "conversation index" values (frequency, volume, etc.), and a better understanding of those who are commenting (more than just paying attention).

One further bit of analysis on the importance of this acquisition. I'm a huge fan of memeorandum, which has featured the conversation of this acquisition as the top meme for the past day. Now, this analysis may not be totally fair as there are many variables involved, but take a look at the discussion as of this morning. Now, compare this to when Google Analytics launched. GA was a big deal at the time (remember that Urchin was a released product too), but it wasn't generating the same level of buzz (and by the next day, it wasn't even a major item on memeorandum).

It's the buzz. This will be fun to watch as it matures.

Filed in: google measuremap analytics

Google and Measure Map

Measure Map has joined the Google team today, which is fantastic news for them, and great news for the analytics industry in general. MM has been very focused on delivering smart and simple analytics to bloggers. I've enjoyed using their tool thus far, and I hope they continue to innovate (and deliver on that API!).

Congratulations to Jeffrey Veen and the team at Adaptive Path.

Filed in: google measuremap

Superbowl Analysis: Two Views

There has been a lot of analysis of this year's Superbowl...and I'm sure there was some analysis of the actual game as well. Those who watch the advertising world seemed disappointed with the ads this year. Tivo has emerged as the analysis authority on the event/game, noting in their press release that:

• Ameriquest ran two ads that were the favorite among the Tivo rewind/replay crowd
• Tivo viewers hit replay 30 times on average
• And, "A controversial touchdown call in the second quarter spurred almost as much replay and rewind activity as the most popular commercials"

What I found most interesting is that they use the data from a sampling of 10,000 households to determine this information. This is out of 4 million subscribers. That's a pretty small percentage, but it's not clear how many Tivo viewers tuned into the game, so it might be statistically more meaningful than it looks.

But I'm curious why they need to sample the data in order to pull these statistics? I believe they have full information on all of the activity of the subscribers...so why sample? Are there statistical reasons for taking an assumed complete data set, and choose to throw out a certain "random" percentage in order to make sense of the data?

Another way of looking at the game is to analyze a core human need: wings. That's right, if you're going to have a Superbowl party, you gotta have some wings. Need a recipe? Search for one, and you'll possibly end up at the best wing site on the internet: cluckbucket.com. As it turns out, many people did just that during the week leading up to big game. Scott "The Cluckbucket" Roth, notes on his blog the following terrific analysis of the week prior to the game, compared to the week before:

• Number of "Unique Visitors" - Increased 142% (from 586 to 1,422)
• Number of "Pages Viewed" - Increased 180% (from 1,661 to 4,647)
• Number of "Visitors who visited more than once" - Increased 120%
• Number of "New Visitors" to the site - Increased 153% (from 522 to 1,325)
• Number of "Returning Visitors" to the site - increased 70% (from 54 to 92)

He also provides some notes regarding his incoming search traffic.

"As usual, the big three search engines were responsible for referring the bulk of the traffic throughout the week; Google - 463 visits, Yahoo - 327 visits, and MSN - 312 visits. It's interesting to note that I do a lot better on what I consider core search phrases (like "chicken wings" and "chicken wing recipes") on Yahoo and MSN, but my phrases referred from Google seem to be more sporadic. Overall, "chicken wing recipes" was responsible for sending the most traffic to my site, to a tune of 129 visits (mostly from Yahoo and MSN where I perform in the top 5 listings)."

That's pretty impressive considering he hadn't done any additional advertising or outreach. Nice work Scott. I've got to try one of these recipes! Mmmmmm....wings.

Thanks Clay!

Filed in: analytics