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.

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RSS for Salesforce.com

I've been following Charlie's development of the Spanning Salesforce tool for awhile now. He visited Portland last year and a few of us got together with him to talk RSS geek talk. Charlie has a very compelling story. Using RSS to follow salesforce data more closely. Check it out if you haven't already.

Today, NewsGator and Spanning Salesforce announced a partnership. Great news...congrats to both teams. Wider consistent adoption of RSS across the enterprise is an important concept, and this is a good example of an important marriage to help that adoption.

And in unrelated, but very interesting news, last week NewsGator announced their On Demand service for RSS. Very smart.

Filed in: rss, salesforce.com

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Engagement and Machine Tags

Note the 8th item on Fred's list of things learned from Flickr:

8) Engagement metrics like comments, favorites, views, can and should be used to drive discovery (the most interesting algorithm)

I'd love to hear more about "discovery" as an engagement metric. Perhaps EricP can mull this one over a bit.

The other item on his list that is very intriguing to me is #10:

10) Machine tagging (autotagging) is the next big thing in web 2.0

Machine tags sound like a very interesting next step in tagging, and a smart extension to the tagging process. More good consumer generated content that seems quite ripe for analytics tools to leverage to better understand visitors. Great stuff.

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Tagged - 5 Things

EricP tagged me over the holidays to share 5 things about me that you may not know. Although I hate chain letters, I appreciate Eric very much, so here goes...

1) I have 4 amazing children who are already way smarter than me. I've kept a journal of funny things they have said over their short lives which has turned out to be a wonderful collection of endearing moments.
2) I'm an alum of UCSC (Economics), the home of the mighty Banana Slugs (tshirt anyone?).
3) I started out as a computer science major. One night (or rather, early morning), I looked around the dark, fuggy computer lab where I was working on a program (to automate a traffic light I believe), and realized that I definitely did not want to spend the rest of my life around computer geeks. So, here I am...a computer geek.
4) I've written, recorded and performed songs live...not well mind you...but I enjoy it! (no modesty there...I'm really not very good...but I do enjoy watching live music a great deal and am still to this day a fan-club-card-carrying Plimsouls fan).
5) I've written a children's story for my kids that I'd like to make into a book someday.

Analytics Tools In The News

A couple of newsy items in our analytics space:

1) Martin pointed me to the news that WidgetBox has released an analytics tool for WidgetBox customers. This is a smart idea, and very helpful for those using WidgetBox. From their post on why analytics matter:

With our Syndication Metrics, you, the widget developer, can assess the popularity and effectiveness of your widgets at a very fine level of granularity. We think it¹s like Google Analytics but for widgets. Now, you can track the spread of your widgets across the Internet and identify your biggest users are as well as most influential. You can also figure out the external triggers driving subscriptions, and make adjustments to maximize your widget’s exposure. You can identify which sites are driving the most traffic through your widget and forge strategic relationships. For the first time, the fog will lift and you’ll clearly be able to see which of your widget efforts are truly working.

2) The fine folks over at Performancing have sold off their analytics tool to PayPerPost. I really like the Performancing analytics tool. They were the first to put out a simple RSS feed of analytics data that was easy to use. Here's how my data looks in an RSS feed if you're interested.

I'll be interested to see what happens with this. PayPerPost definitely needs analytics data to provide to their customers, so it makes sense they'd pull something together.

Performancing keeps their ad network and PFF (performancing for firefox), which are terrific assets. PFF is now ScribeFire, the ad network will be renamed soon.

Update: The deal is off...wow, what a turnaround...Nick notes that they can no longer run the metrics tool and that the code will be given to open source. Best of luck to the Performancing team!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, performancing

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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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