June Dershewitz on Web Analytics

Flickr Has Stats! One New Way to Measure User-Generated Content

Photo-sharing site Flickr has launched a great new feature: detailed web activity statistics for photos.  Check their FAQ for activation instructions. 

As individual participants in user-generated content sites we want to measure the attention we get.  You know it's true.  How are people interacting with our content?  And how do they find us in the first place?  Flickr Stats has the answers.

Viewing, commenting, favoriting - such activities can be used to gauge the relative popularity of photos.  It has been possible to get this information all along, but now it's in a central location and available as time series data (in a very Google Analytics-looking interface).

In addition to content interaction data, Flickr Stats exposes, for the first time, referring URLs and keywords that bring people to photos.  This is where I think the real benefit will be seen.

Keyword reports give content owners new insight into the relationship between tags and image searchability, in turn encouraging photo SEO.  If someone wants their images to be found they will spend more time creating meaningful tags, and better tagging means better metadata for everyone.

So thanks, Flickr, this is great!  Just one more reason for me to justify that $25/year pro account.  I hope other user-generated content sites follow suit and expose measurement, too.  There's plenty of room for meaningful metrics wherever individuals are sharing content.

More Data Integration in the Cards for Google Analytics?

I want to see everything all in one place.  That's the mantra of data integration.  That's also been the theme of 2 interesting blog posts in the past week, both with a focus on Google Analytics.

First up, Justin Cutroni of EpikOne speculates on the future evolution of Google Analytics.  A good chunk of his discussion covers the integration of advertising cost data from various sources in Google's sphere of ownership.  AdWords is the shining example; it's already there in Google Analytics and I believe it's a big selling point for the product.  [um, can I say "selling point" if the product is free?]

SEM cost data is just the beginning.  Justin thinks we'll also see print ads and audio ads and banner ads and whatever else Google decides to sell also show up in Google Analytics before too long.  His vision involves the automatic creation of offline advertising vanity URLs so they'd be tracked - snap - just like that in Google Analytics.  It's already possible to do this manually but automating it would definitely take some of the mystery and confusion out of the process.  Plus the cost data would be integrated, and that's the whole point.

My main takeaway from Justin's post was that if Google owns it, Google can and should and will integrate it into Google Analytics.

So is Google the center of the universe?  Maybe.  Does Google own all the data we could ever hope to integrate with with our web activity?  Absolutely not.  In the end, I believe Google will be able to provide seamless, foolproof tracking for whatever slice of the universe Google owns, but there's certainly the potential for further data integration beyond what Google officially offers up.

Case in point, Michael Whitaker of Monitus, who just this week wrote about his own Analytics Fox extension for Google Analytics.  This product uses keywords as the integration point to pull extra search data into Google Analytics; the integration happens in the browser, not at Google.  It is meant to be used just by people who operate Yahoo! Stores - obviously not Google property.

What do you need to integrate?  Could you hack it with Google Analytics and a display-level mashup?  If so, could this be a lightweight alternative to Omniture Genesis?

In conclusion I believe the future of Google Analytics data integration is twofold: officially, Google will give what Google deigns to give, and unofficially, third parties like Monitus will continue to develop useful extensions of Google's offering.

Ask Semphonic Q&A Webinar on Dec 11

Join me on Tuesday, December 11th, 11:00-11:45am PDT for a free Q&A webinar: Ask Semphonic.  The topic of the day is Omniture's recent acquisition of Visual Sciences.  A whole gang of Semphonic analysts, myself included, will be on hand to field your questions. 

If you're reading this you're invited.  In order to participate you will need to 1) RSVP here and then 2) submit your questions to analytics@semphonic.com.  The RSVP part is mandatory, the question submission part is optional - but I really do encourage you to send in some questions.  The better the questions, the better the answers, the better the webinar.

I'm looking forward to it and I hope you can attend.