June Dershewitz on Web Analytics

Teaching Dad about Web Analytics

If you're a doctor, friends and family want you to diagnose their ailments.  If you're a mechanic, they'll describe their car problems.  If you're a web analyst, they want help with Google Analytics.  Am I right?

Over Thanksgiving I went up to Oregon and visited with my father, who has recently retired from a long career as a database administrator and systems architect at Intel.  He does web development work for kicks; right now he's building a web-based tool for viewing livestock pedigrees.  That's what happens when you're a farmer and a programmer. 

There I was at the farm, taking a break from work, and my dad says, "Hey, tell me about this Google Analytics thing.  I have it on my web site."  So I sat down and gave him a little lesson on web analytics. 

We talked about entry pages, bounce rate, referrers, keywords, popular content, etc, and how he might use this kind of stuff to improve his site.  He has a site search but he's not yet tracking it in Google Analytics (he'll do this); he wanted advice on how to redesign his home page (I showed him Site Optimizer).  I got on his case about the godawful color scheme he's chosen for his site; I can criticize like that, we're family. 

Eventually he made a run for it under the pretext of having to go "rake leaves."

I do most of my work in web analytics with big clients - large complex web sites with many different data consumers.  My clients often need more flexibility than they can get out of Google Analytics, so they use commercial web analytics applications like Omniture and WebTrends.   Sites like my dad's are a novelty - a single stakeholder, simple architecture, no politics. 

It's good to see [literally] mom-and-pop sites like this just for the sake of perspective.  And it reminds me why I like this work in the first place - I enjoy helping people understand the value of web measurement, with the hope that they will make their piece of the web just a little better.   That much is true regardless of the tool, regardless of the traffic volume, regardless of whether it's for-profit or just for kicks.

Web Analytics Careers: 4 Great Blog Resources

Career chat has always interested me.  When I was a new college grad I spent a fair amount of time in my alma mater's career services office, getting advice as I prepared to make a start for myself.  I'm glad I did it.  The career counselors liked me enough to use my resume as an example for other new grads, and I managed to land an internship at a multimedia CD-ROM publishing company (which, back in 1995, was so totally cutting edge).

After more than a decade out in the workforce I feel like I've learned a great deal about my strengths, preferences and motivations when it comes to my career.  But I also know that career planning didn't end when I left my college campus - it's something I must always keep in the back of my mind.  I like hearing about how my peers are handling their own career choices, and I think it's a productive thing for us to talk about with each other.

So I'm planning to write about career-related topics, now and then, in this blog.  Before I get started I'd like to acknowledge 4 fellow bloggers who've already written some great web analytics career-related material:

1. Alex L. Cohen
   I appreciate Alex's enthusiasm - right now he's doing an interactive marketing tip-a-day for the entire month of November [really, Alex, even on Thanksgiving?].  Occasionally he writes about career-related issues, including this piece on how to write a good web analytics resume.


2. Stephane Hamel
   As Stephane was contemplating his own impending career move he wrote this very compelling post on the importance of doing regular career self-evaluations.  I liked it so much I wound up using it in my presentation on career management at eMetrics.  Neither Stephane nor I can fly a kite too well, but luckily that's not a requirement for our line of work.


3. Avinash Kaushik
   Oh, what's not to love.  I wouldn't say Avinash has written about careers, though, so much as he's written about the flip side of the coin - hiring.  I thought this post about whether to hire fresh blood or old hands was especially good, and you can see from the comments that many of his readers turned it around and talked about the issue from the job candidate's perspective.


4. Anil Batra
   Anil has compiled a whole collection of interviews with web analysts; as of this writing he's accumulated 32 career-related posts.  I've really enjoyed reading the interviews - just to get a sense of who "we" are - but I think they could be equally valuable to someone who's contemplating an entry into web analytics.

Read what these fine gentlemen have to say, and read my blog, too.  I think there's still more we can and should talk about when it comes to careers in web analytics, and I aim to be a part of that conversation.

Take this Survey, Please

It's that time of year again.  Eric T. Peterson would like you to participate in his latest survey; he's interested in your organizational use and satisfaction with web analytics tools and processes.  Be honest, it's completely anonymous.  Eric promises to make the aggregated survey data freely available in January, 2008.  Your input matters - so take this survey, please!

Rants and Raves about WebTrends Visitor Intelligence

Three weeks ago I attended the WebTrends Engage conference; not long thereafter I wrote this chatty post about the great party, my penthouse suite, and then a little about one of the new WebTrends products, Score.  Here it is, 3 weeks later, and the commercial web analytics vendor world has undergone a major upset - WebTrends has given 4 top execs the boot in the wake of Omniture's acquisition of Visual Sciences.  It will take a while for the dust to settle.

Current drama aside, I'd like to share my thoughts on WebTrends Visitor Intelligence (VI).  At Engage I sat through a couple of hours of live demos as well as a small-group private session.  Overheard while I was there: 

"Most marketers wouldn't know what OLAP was if it jumped up and bit'em in the butt."

Is that so, marketers?

VI is an OLAP tool.  More precisely it's a browser-based drag-n-drop reporting interface for visitor-level web activity data stored in a relational database, aka WebTrends Marketing Warehouse. 

If you choose to integrate external customer-level data into Marketing Warehouse you can pull attributes like gender and income and age - and whatever else you know about your customers - into VI.  Can you imagine being able to easily drag gender or income or age into any web activity report, either as a dimension or as a filter?  Can you imagine being able to easily drill all the way down to the visitor level on any report?  Isn't this flexibility something we all want?

The VI and Score live demos at Engage were packed to capacity, even at the end of a busy conference day in a city full of recreational distractions.  Based on that observation I'd say, yes, there's considerable interest in a) WebTrends' new products, and b) visitor-level web activity data in general.

Queryable visitor-level web activity data is nothing new.  As an industry we've been doing this for years, but it's been the exception rather than the rule.  If there's any hope of bringing visitor-level detail into mainstream use, I think WebTrends has made a valiant effort with VI.  If, it turns out, it's simply too expensive and too cumbersome to ever gain traction, why on earth do we keep trying?  When are we ever going to get it right? Answer me that, vendors (when you're not busy cannibalizing each other).

Although I don't want to go too deep into the nitty-gritty details of VI, I do want to mention a few likes/dislikes:   

Like

• Available as both on-site and hosted solutions.  If you've got privacy concerns, great, get the on-site solution.  If you lack IT resources, great, get the hosted solution.
• Relational database back end, making external data integration possible.
• Simple Excel export from VI - no SmartReports.  Right on.  SmartReports aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

Dislike

• WebTrends Analytics will continue to exist in parallel with VI.  There are some reports you can only get in VI and some reports you can only get in Analytics.   Sounds confusing.
• I don't believe VI will meet complex segmentation needs, especially when it comes to path-based questions like, "Give me the visitors who did x and then later did y."
• SDC page-tagging is a requirement for VI - so VI is not an option if you use logs as your data source.

VI is a great start; I would love to see it get adopted and successfully used.  My fellow bloggers Jacques Warren and Anil Batra also attended Engage and have posted their reviews of VI.   Aaron Gray and OX2 have both mentioned involvement in VI proof-of-concept projects; I look forward to hearing more about their experiences.