Advanced Analytics

Save the best for last! Insights for Search is one of the most awesome research tools you’ll use. I promise.

We have learned how to use Trends for Websites to measure core site metrics and identify strengths and weakness of our competitors.

Google’s Ad Planner is less a competitive intelligence tool and more a tool that gives fantastic insights into understanding behavior of visitors to your website in context of the broader ecosystem.

It also helps answer critical questions that have thus far stymied Online Marketers of all shapes and sizes (especially those in charge of acquisition).

If you are on the web, or do Web Analysis, it is a real crime if you don’t tap into the reams and reams of competitive intelligence data that is available online. It is a core component of a successful Web Analytics 2.0 strategy.

If you are using a modern web analytics tool (tag based or log based) it is quite likely that it is using cookies for tracking purposes.

In my conversations it is embarrassingly common to find a lot of FUD and confusion and lack of understanding (or appreciation of!) cookies and the role that they play in any analytics done on the web.

What would make you cry of happiness in a Web Analytics report?

What would make you cry of happiness in any report / presentation that you got from a analytics practitioner or consultant or your mom?

This post attempts to sort through the good, the bad and the ugly and answer that question (except that Mom bit, that will require therapy!).

Tags, tracking advanced javascript functions, navigation summaries and exit pages, delights of benchmarking, challenges with goals and funnels, monogamy or polygamy, flash tracking and ajax, multi domain tracking, entrance paths (my favorite!), bosses and robots (is there a difference?), we tackle all these topics & more in this post.

But before all that, some context.

There is perhaps no challenge greater than tracking offline impact of your online presence (campaigns or other activity). It is perhaps one of the last few complex nuts left to crack.

Why? Because it is hard. Not impossible. Just hard. And for now it is equal parts quantitative, qualitative and faith.

This post bravely attempts to:

The original title of this post was going to be. . . .

Contest Winners: We Are All Made Of Stars.

In the last five weeks I have given 20 plus speeches between my public and private speaking engagements. And I am not done yet, this week it’s London and Amsterdam (Web Analytics Congres). Next week Barcelona (Practitioner Web Analytics).

Whew!

I write one post a week now and yet the blog is about 25 hours of work each week. Email is one big contributor. Many many of you write in with specific questions and it takes a lot of time to answering every single one with specific advise.

[Some are really tough, this is the complete email: "What are two best multi channel metrics you recommend, I have a big presentation tomorrow". (!!!)]