I’ve spent a good chunk of the last three days at eMetrics at it’s been – as usual – rewarding. It’s great to see everybody, get a chance to chat, and hear about what’s going on: from both speakers and attendees. Yesterday I did my presentation with Russ Rueden (Kohler) on Use Case Analysis. As a presentation, it’s a very practical, hands-on look at several different real analysis projects all of which spent some significant time focused on specific use-cases. From that, we drew some lessons about use case analysis in general and why it’s one of the easiest and most impactful types of real-world analysis project there is.

For me, the biggest take-away from eMetrics is how much new and interesting technology has come down the pipe recently. Some of this I was already aware of and some it was new to me. But it feels like a host of new tools are emerging. I’m not thinking about tools around new areas like social and mobile – of course there is rapid movement there. What impressed me is how many new tools targeted at either broad web analytics or industry-specific web analytic problems that I’ve seen leading up to and at eMetrics.

I’ve seen very cool stuff from CalmSea, ClickTale, EasyAsk, iPerceptions, Quantivo, Scout, Tagman, Truviso, and WebTrekk (and I’m probably forgetting some). That seems like way more interesting new technology than in years past – and that doesn’t even count stuff like MongooseMetrics or Codebaby that were interesting but somewhat peripheral to our main focus.

I’m going to write about some of these in more detail and I wanted to start with Truviso. Full disclosure here – Truviso has been a client of Semphonic – they actually paid us to help them understand the web analytics marketplace and they’ve asked us a whole load of questions about what people need to do better measurement.

What’s cool is that they clearly listened pretty closely. Truviso was a technology company looking for a solution – they’d built a powerful complex event processing (CEP) engine that was ideal for working with large streams of real-time data and doing segmentation and event-driven analysis and processing. Sound like familiar problems? It’s really no wonder that they honed in on the web analytics space as a potential vertical.

They’ve gone “live” at eMetrics (VIA is the product name) and I got my first chance to see the initial version of their release. It has some striking, original and cool features. Their tag-line is “Measure People not Pages” and the product is heavily focused on exactly that – delivering advanced segmentation to web analytics.

At its heart is a powerful two-level segmentation strategy. The product includes a set of Lifestage segments that are customized to the client on implementation. These Lifestages are meant to pre-build key customer segments around core problems like Engagement, Social Interaction, eCommerce and Registration/Subscription. Each Lifestage group represents a complete set of segments that classify every visitor to the site along the dimension.

The essence of this concept is shown in the transition diagrams the help you understand and monitor the flow between segments within a Lifestage:

 

This is powerful and beautiful. With so many segmentations, the really important question is “How good is our site at moving visitors up the food chain?” That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer with traditional segmentation but Truviso’s VIA makes it a centerpiece of their reporting.

Pre-built Lifestage segments are an excellent idea. But we all know that most analysis is driven by highly customized segments. They didn’t shirk here either. VIA delivers unlimited segmentation (with no dimensional cardinality limits) and has what looks to be one of the most powerful and elegant segmentation builders anywhere:

 
Here’s a couple things to note about this screen. You can attach a time period to your criteria – allowing the analyst to do sequential segmentation and build cohorts not just filter driven segments. The lack of this feature in pretty much every web analytics solution on the marketplace has been a pet peeve of mine for years and the Truviso segmentation builder gets it right.

And note the distribution chart at the bottom. One of the hardest tasks you face when building segmentations is figuring out where to set the filter limits. This plagues segment builders in every analytics product except Omniture’s Insight (which is entirely built around that idea and is one of the main reasons that analysts can be so passionate about it). Truviso’s segment builder is more traditional (and in many respects more powerful than Insight) but it includes this excellent concept. By looking at the behavioral distribution, you can pick exactly where you want to set your filter thresholds. They’ve even included some statistical measures (shown here) to help you figure out key data breaks. That’s terrific.

Truviso has also come up with some elegant and interesting ways to view segmentation and create new segments visually. I particularly liked the Venn-Diagram approach:

 

With this view, you can cross-tabulate any of your segments or Lifestages – and see exactly how they intersect. You can even track the behavior of any sub-group (like Multiple Social & Influencer but not 3+ trips) or save any subset as a new segment. So if you want to create a segment of Multiple Social, Non-Influencers who Book 3+ Trips, it’s just a click away.

I was particularly taken with the visual representation of each subset – the clarity with which the Venn diagram carves up the intersection and makes cross-tabulating segments a snap.

Of course the tool also provides many of the standard reporting features that are common across web analytics solutions. And there are some pretty nice ideas there too. One feature I particularly liked was a “comparison” view of campaigns modeled on the “Compare Products” functionality common to many sites. The essence of campaign analysis is comparison and VIA makes detailed comparison of campaign performance within the interface remarkably easy and efficient.

 
This view shows detailed performance and usage data for two different campaigns plus it clearly marks the channel average to provide a visual baseline. That's very similar to the ideas I've been exploring in my posts on segmentation profiles and it works well in this context too.

There’s another very useful presentation that combines the traditional recency and frequency reports into a single view:

 


Very nice. Notice at the bottom how you can carve off each of these quadrants as a new segment – allowing you, for example, to target visitors who are going (but aren’t quite) dormant.

The target audience for this tool is obviously pretty sophisticated. Given the engine’s pedigree, Truviso says they are focused on sophisticated, high-volume web sites. Truviso’s still in the early stages of delivering on the full promise of VIA and I’ve never been deeply “hands-on” with it. Plus there's quite a bit of customization required in any implementation. I don’t know what’s missing or what’s broken. And I don’t know exactly what market niche they will find. You can’t judge a car by its looks or even its spec sheet. You have to drive it to really know how well it handles. But VIA looks to me like a Ferrari : a tool that I (and I suspect any serious analyst) would dearly love to take for a spin!

Those who move their ecommerce systems to cloud computing typically take that path for the cost efficiencies and the on-demand scalability. Moreover, the hype is deafening. It almost feels like there’s a party going on and you weren’t invited.

While there are certainly benefits to move to the “Cloud,” there are also threats to your cloud computing implementation. It’s helpful to consider those threats before you journey into the cloud.

Threat 1: You’re way over budget.

Recent analysts’ reports have pointed out that cloud computing can provide significant cost savings to some organizations, but can actually cost many organizations more than their traditional on-premise or third party-hosted systems. The reasons for this will vary, but in most instances the cost of migration to the cloud and the ongoing operational costs were much higher than expected.

Threat 2: You get arrested.

One would think that moving to cloud computing is a technical challenge versus a legal challenge, but in many instances there are very strict laws as to where the data can reside and how it’s secured. In the world of ecommerce, you need to consider the laws around customer data and financial data, which cannot reside outside of the country in some cases, and has to live up to a certain security standard. Same goes with systems that interact with government systems, health care systems, and many banking systems.

Threat 3: You are hacked.

Cloud computing often gets a bad rap when it comes to security. However, there are many more security threats that must be considered when moving to the cloud since cloud computing systems are going to be easy targets for hackers. This was best demonstrated with the recent Gmail attacks that came out of China, where some mailboxes where compromised. The reality of cloud computing is that many cloud providers don’t have the degree of security required to protect your data for the existing, and more importantly, emerging threats.

Threat 4: You are locked out.

In most cases, companies will not find that they are harmed by hackers, but harmed by the cloud computing providers themselves. Just as you’re at the mercy of your cell phone provider around service cancellation policies, your cloud computing provider could consider a missed payment, or a spike in processing load, as an excuse to cancel your service. You need to consider all policies going into a relationship with a cloud computing provider, including what can cause you to be locked out. Moreover, many cloud providers will have new owners in 2010. In many instances you could find your new cloud landlord has new rules and policies, and lockouts could be more commonplace.

While it’s not a good idea to become paranoid around the use of cloud computing for your ecommerce systems, it’s definitely a good idea to have a healthy understanding of the existing threats and how to circumnavigate them.

This post was contributed by guest columnist David Linthicum. David is a cloud computing and SOA expert and author of several books on Information Technology.

Mouseflow Analytics is a fairly new in depth website visitor tracking software available. The amount of information that you receive through a Mouseflow report far exceeds the basic numbers reporting that you get through similiar tracking software. You will be able to see exactly how visitors behave when they visit your site, down to the movement of their mouse and the amount of scrolling they were willing to do. Here some of the functionalities:

Replay a Visitor Session

When someone visits your site, Mouseflow Analytics will record every second of their viewing session (similar to Robotreplay and others). Once they have navigated away from the site, you can access the record and watch exactly what the visitor did while they had your site open. The live stream option will even allow you to keep track of a visitor while they are currently on your site. This feature gives you immediate information about how users are viewing your site and how they behave while they are visiting.

Heatmaps Provide a Visual Report

The visitor heatmaps are excellent tools for a quick overview of your site’s most popular features. What a heatmap does is create a color coded image that shows you where people are clicking on your site. You may discover that visitors are clicking images that don’t contain links, which may lead you to create a link on those images to keep customers engaged. You can also view heatmaps that have color guides of where a visitor’s mouse moved and hovered on your page the most often. The heatmaps collect information from several different visitors and combine that information to give you a complete overview of the site’s effectiveness. You can compare heatmaps from different time periods to see if changes to the site have drawn attention toward the site areas that you most want visitors to notice.

Viewport Feature Gives Visitor Scrolling Information

It can be difficult to gauge the impact of scrolling on your website. Most web tracking tools don’t have any way to measure scrolling activity, so developers and designers have had to create sites based on their hopes and expectations rather than factual research. Mouseflow Analytics includes a feature that will give you solid information about how visitors treat the pages of your site that scroll. It will tell you how far down visitors scroll on average, and whether they bother to scroll at all.

See Your Site the Way Visitors Do

Mouseflow Analytics provides you with information from a visitor’s perspective. You can look at load times on different types of connections and computer browsers. You will see how often visitors receive bounces instead of loading your site. You will also discover whether visitors spend time reading and scrolling on your site and the amount of interactivity that occurs in a general visit. The page analysis tools give you an authentic way to analyze your site’s appearance and reliability from the perspective of someone visiting from a remote location. Once you know how the site is being perceived by others, you will have the power to adjust the site to meet the needs of more visitors.

Summary:
Mouseflow is a unique product in the web analytics space: It not only records, but also lets you live stream user behavior on your website.
A must-have for any data driven organization and a great feature set for most webmasters.

Earlier this week, I got what I perceived to be the strangest survey from Intuit.  The survey was about their online backup service.

They asked me questions like, “Please rank which of these four features factor into your use of our backup service.” And then they named all these strange services that I didn’t even know they had, like disaster recovery, or fixing things up once your employee messes up your accounting data.

Finally, I wrote, “I use your service because my jump drives always broke or got too full.” Simple. Easy.

The problem we (like Intuit) often have is that we have super duper services and special features, and we think that our customers care about them, when in fact, our customers might not even know about them. (After all, we spent a year and a lot of money on that Super Duper feature, and now we want to write about it on our websites, no?)

All of which gets down to why qualitative data — surveys and user testing — are so important as we learn to create better websites.

Robbin

Why we ignore our customers is a post from: Increasing Your Website's Conversion Rate

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Today at Emetrics, Brett Crosby announced a number of new features and recapped some recent changes to Google Analytics. Here’s a quick video recap of the announcement and some thoughts on the changes.

Specific things that Brett talked about:

The rebranding of Google Analytics consultants as Google Analytics authorized partners.

This was announced on the AdWords blog and on the Analytics blog. Google is unifying their partner programs. The GAAC is gone, now partners are Google Analytics Certified partners. This should help differentiate partner companies from individual passing the GAIQ exam.

The formal launch of the new Async tracking code.

It’s been out for a while but this was the official coming out for the new version of the tracking code. I wrote a about how the async code works and if you should switch. The async code will now be the default for tracking. Check out the blog post for more information about how it works.

The introduction of the Google Analytics Apps Gallery.

Google is creating a place to showcase apps built on the API. I’ve long felt that the marketplace can innovate more than any Analytics company. GA has more or less become a giant data collector. The gallery should help push more development of analytics tools.

The addition of the AdWords ID to the GA API.

It is now possible to pull actual ad and search query information via the API. This is huge, I think it’s going to lead to a lot of innovation in the search tool marketplace. Vendors like ClickEquations can now connect what happened on a visitors site directly back to the AdWords search query and ad variation. Pretty cool.

New AdWords reports.

Google also announced the addition of new AdWords reports to Google Analytics. I think we all agree that the previous reprots were less than good. The new reports offer additional data, like the actual search term, that was not previous available in Analytics.

Brett also spoke about the recently introduced AdWords Search Funnels. This is Google’s crack at AdWords campaign attribution. My buddy Nick dove a little deeper over on the WebShare blog.

While some might look at this list and shrug that there’s not much new I think these changes hint at things to come. Specifically I think the AdWords API announcement is huge. This tells us Google is pulling more and more data into Analytics. How long before we get DoubleClick data and other types of data in Analytics? Or when will they let us import data into Analytics, like cost data?

Overall, a nice little treat for us analytics users. Thanks to the Analytics team and great job.

As always, I welcome your comments!

Google Analytics Launches new AdWords Reports & Other Goodies is a post from: Analytics Talk by Justin Cutroni

We are going to be unveiling our new and improved Google Analytics Training in NYC, June 8-10.

Here is the problem that trainers have when they teach about any technical topic — different attendees are at different levels. We used to get this feedback in the evaluation forms all the time. Some attendees would write, “Over my head,” and others would write, “Too basic.” Then we started to segment the first day (marketing/analysis) by user level, and our ratings went sky high. (See, when they tell you that segmentation is the heart of web analytics, they don’t just mean the tool you are using….)

In NYC, we’ll be having three days of training: Google Analytics 101, 201 and 301. The first day is for beginning marketers (or those analysts who have never worked with GA before.) The second day is for advanced analysts. We get questions related to this problem all the time, “How do I take my analysis to a new level?” And the third day is for techies.

It’s $499/day, with a $50 discount when the same individual attends two days (and $100 off for three days of attendance by the same individual), with lots of Google goodies, lunch, etc.

Click here to learn more or to register.

Robbin

Google Analytics Training in NYC: June 8, 9 and/or 10, 2010 is a post from: Increasing Your Website's Conversion Rate

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I’ve been working through one of the truly fundamental tasks for any web analyst – producing a rich descriptive profile of a visitor segment. I’m using Unica’s NetInsight for this just as a change of pace from all of the Omniture Discover and Data Warehouse examples that I’ve done in the past. In my last post, I started off building a profile of a particular group of product-interested users on a financial website.

The first variable I chose to profile was visit source – and right away I found a fairly significant difference between the target population and my chosen control group.

   

As you can see, my target population is much more likely to come Direct, from Yahoo and from key Financial sites than is my control group – and much less likely to come from Google. At the end of my last post, I made the point that the profile isn’t like a report – it’s more like a mini-analysis. This Yahoo discrepancy, in particular, begs explanation and so I wouldn’t leave it as is. I want my profile to explain how we're getting these visitors and the numbers about Yahoo and Google are far from self-explanatory.

So my next step in building out this profile is to drill-down on the Yahoo numbers. In NetInsight, you can easily add a dimension to any report. I had this report which shows more Yahoo traffic than Google traffic:

 
By adding the Campaign Channel dimension, I get this report which shows almost no Yahoo campaign traffic:

 

NetInsight's handling of missing values in sub-dimensions is confusing. When you add a dimension, missing values from the sub-dimension are simply eliminated from the whole report. So instead of seeing a line-item under Yahoo with no campaign channel, I see the Yahoo number reduced to the visits that have a campaign channel assigned. I sure don’t love that approach. But for our Profile, the important point is that it isn’t a known campaign driving the Yahoo traffic.

That’s puzzling.

So I went back to the original report and drilled-down to get the actual referring URLs. In NetInsight, I get this break-down just by left-clicking on a line-item.

I’ve blurred the actual lines here but what’s important is that 75% of the traffic came from a single page and the rest came from a long-tail of pages and Yahoo searches. So I clicked over to that page and lo and behold, I found a large featured ad for the product in question driving directly to the content I’m analyzing.

It’s a campaign after all!

It’s just not properly tagged so NetInsight isn’t recognizing it. Yes, it’s true: half (at least) of all the interesting findings in an analysis turn out to be data quality problems. But at least by drilling down, I’ve made sure my profile won’t reflect those issues.

My next step was to check those financial sites and see if a similar issue existed there:

 

It didn’t. These links from the #1 financial site were mostly long-tail news articles. There wasn’t one dominant source and there was no campaign.

So for my Profile, I classified the Yahoo traffic from the key page (only) as a sponsorship campaign and turned my attention to the Google numbers.

My first question about the Google numbers was simple – were they really lower than average or was the pie getting distorted by the Yahoo campaign. Look at it this way: suppose that for an average visitor in my control group, 35% are sourced by Google. Now suppose that my target group is completely identical in sourcing but I add in a bunch of additional people from the Yahoo campaign. My percentage from Google is going to fall in the target group and it will look as if visitors are less likely to source from Google. So I quickly re-calculated my percentages after taking out the Yahoo campaign:
 
Taking out the Yahoo campaign reduces the other Yahoo traffic so that the Target looks exactly like the Control. But Google is still way below average and Direct and Financial sites both well above average. We’ve learned that the Financial number is real and seems to be driven by long-tail news linkages to our product area. Score one for good PR. But what about the Google numbers?

To check Google, I looked at Google PPC sourcing for my control group. In that group, 14% of the traffic was sourced by paid ads. I did the same check for my target content visitor segment and found that only about 7% of the group was being sourced by paid ads. What about organic? Well, 25% of the control group visits were sourced by natural search on Google but less than 4% of our target group were sourced this way. A quick check of the relevant terms confirmed the problem – my key pages for this product are very poorly indexed on Google.

Here’s the final version:
  
At this point, I feel like I’ve built a pretty good profile of sourcing for my target population. This compact little section tells my audience how we’re getting visitors to the target area, how sourcing for these visitors compares to my broader control group, and even includes some built-in actionable directives. I’d have to eliminate those directives to fully automate this report. But if I’m preparing a profile for a presentation, this is what I’d like to have to describe where my target visitors come from.

There are a couple of points worth making about this exercise. First, building a profile takes work. I’ve only done a small part of it here but you can see that building a good profile of a visitor segment isn’t a cookie-cutter activity and it can’t be done well in five minutes. What I’ve done here is more valuable, more accurate, and more interesting than the original referring domain report. It's also, and this is at least equally important, much less likely to be misunderstood or misused.

But to get to this point, I had to do a fair amount of slicing and dicing in NetInsight. That’s why those slicing and dicing capabilities are important in a web analytics tool!

Second, everything I’ve done is in comparison to the control group not the total site. That’s vital, and it makes the whole profile vastly more interesting.

Finally, when you do a profile well, it will be no surprise if you can start to suggest actions and insights right away. I picked this target area of our client’s site at random (truly). But in the course of building just the sourcing part of the profile I found one data integrity issue and came up with at least three reasonable improvement opportunities for the product manager. Pretty cool.

Done well, real analysis is a powerful thing. And good segment profiles are a powerful tool for good analysis.

Well folks, it’s that time of year again. The winds are dying down and the flowers have all started to bloom so it must be time to make our annual pilgrimage to San Jose to bask in the glory of Jim Sterne and the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit! As usual I will be there and have the honor of sharing a keynote slot with my long-time friend and uber-optimizer Bryan Eisenberg!

• Emetrics Keynote: Wednesday at 1:00 PM in the Grand Ballroom

Partner John Lovett will also be there, basking in his own glory on the heels of his Web Analytics Association victory … and taking the WAA’s new Certification test. I haven’t really had much time to think about the Certification yet but will be interested to hear what John and others taking the test have to say.

I also have the rare honor of presenting with Brett Crosby, Group Product Manager for Google Analytics and one of the nicest guys in the entire industry, hand’s down. Oddly he and I are presenting IMMEDIATELY AFTER his “What’s new from Google Analytics” pitch on Tuesday … but to compensate we’re gonna try something new and have a very loose “conversation” about web analytics that is more similar to an X Change mini-huddle than a traditional presentation.

• Talking Analyics: Tuesday at 2:00 PM at The Conversion Conference (co-located w/Emetrics)

Finally I will be sharing the stage at Web Analytics Wednesday with Adam Laughlin from the nonprofit Save the Children. We will be talking about our respective community education efforts — his “Web Analytics Without Borders” WAA initiative and our own Analysis Exchange. I will be making a few exciting announcements about The Analysis Exchange next Wednesday so if you cannot attend Web Analytics Wednesday please watch my blog or follow me on Twitter.

• Web Analytics Wednesday: Wednesday at 6:00 PM at the Fairmont in San Jose

That schedule again:

• Tuesday, 2:00 PM at The Conversion Conference with Brett Crosby (Google)
• Wednesday, 1:00 PM at Emetrics with Bryan Eisenberg (Emetrics Keynote)
• Wednesday, 6:00 PM at Web Analytics Wednesday (The Fairmont Hotel, Market Street Foyer)

Thanks to Coremetrics and SAS for their generous support of Web Analytics Wednesday at Emetrics, by the way. Great companies like these are what keep WAW events around the world free and open to everyone!

See you in San Jose!

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