General

Another X Change has come and gone.  This year’s conference at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco was even better, I think, than last year at Napa.  The huddles were more focused on sharing practitioner knowledge, ideas, and best practices, and I really liked that. 

I’ve been thinking a bit about targeting, and how we in the web analytics industry have just a ton of visitor or segment-level data that can be used for targeting ads or content, but most tools don’t let you use the data or easily feed it to other systems to do any targeting.  It’s rather odd, don’t you think?   Even Omniture Test and Target isn’t using, as far as I’ve learned, a single data model or the data collected from their behavioral tools, like HBX or SiteCatalyst, for targeting.  All their data models and thus, their data, are unique to the

Alright, I had to have fun with the title. :) We’re about 4 weeks ago from the newest and most unique analytics conference on the scene: X Change, hosted this year by Semphonic and Web Analytics Demystified. 

If you missed the first year in Napa, you gotta head to San Fran this year!  Allow me to explain how X Change differentiates as I see it:

The  well-researched answer is “no.”  The AVG LinkScanner Bot appears to prefetch the js and the gif (and pretty much everything else on the page), which for certain tools and their tag configurations generates false page views and visits (and the derivatives thereof), just like it’s “legitimate” traffic. 

If your tag configuration is set up with noscript tags, AVG will fetch the content in the tags, including the gif, which means that:

Back from another excellent eMetrics.  I’m a very big fan of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit…  Props go to Jim Sterne for growing this event from a little seed into an incredible, blogworthy blossom.  How involved is Jim in eMetrics?  I’d say he’s completely immersed in every little piece - he even came up to me at the SF WAW (way to go June D!) to find out about th

Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are critical for breaking through the dataglut spewing forth from your web analytics tool.   I mean there’s a just a ton of data in web analytics, and the majority of it tends not to be very useful or applicable for improving your business performance.  While it’s wonderful to have a tool that lets you cut, cross, and slice loads of data every which way but loose, its can be a real challenge to frame the data or put it in context in a way that helps your business optimize the web site.   That’s why I like KPI&#821

Next Sunday afternoon I am moderating a panel at eMetrics San Fran.  The panel is called ”Web Analytics -vs- Audience Measurement.”  Andrea Hadley at NetSetGo was the brainchild of this panel idea (and yes that is her picture on her site :).  In fact, I was a panelist on the same panel at eMetrics Toronto, filling in for my friend Marshall Sponder.  Since he’s going to be in San Fran, I yielded my seat 0n the panel and decided to stand up at the podium.   Other panelists include

Wow!  It’s been a few weeks since I’ve had any time to blogviate. 

Hello good readers!  Every month I write a column for MediaPost’s Metrics Insider.  Here’s my most recent one:

The infoglut in web analytics is enormous.  So much data.  Companies report that 69% of all people who consume the data don’t understand it.  How does a business go about making sense of it all?  Formulating a comprehensive KPI (Key Performance Indicator) strategy is a big part of differentiating signal from noise and directing appropriate tool usage.  We’ve all heard about KPI’s before.  They are ratios or derivatives of metrics that pinpoint critical, business relevant web performance.   My good friend, Eric, even wrote a book (