Category — analytics

I’ve been spending more and more of my time looking at all the data I have surrounding my life and my business. Its interesting to see whats going on at a very granular level, and then zoom out and see the forest itself.

Its also intriguing to see how other people use data. Some people use charts and graphs to tell a story that doesn’t necessarily play out with a closer look, while others take a close look and find something you wouldn’t necessarily see on the surface of the data.

Take for instance Business Insider’s Chart of the Day , they have all sorts of interesting charts compiled from all over the web. Sometimes they are completely outrageous, sometimes they are insightful (mostly they are just charts though). What is interesting is how the headline of the Chart often varies from the data in the Chart. Take this for example:

Yes the people who don't want one doubled, but the people who do want one tripled

Yes, the percentage of people who don’t want one doubled, but the percentage of people who “would like to buy one” tripled, and the percent of people who replied “No, I’m not interested” was cut in half.

Charts are fun ways to take a snapshot of some set of data and to quickly illustrate a point. But is really interesting to see what kind of crazy stuff comes out of the data, not the parts that complement the story you are telling, but the data points you had no idea you’d find.

Look at this chart comparing the last 4 weeks of traffic on one of our sites. The chart covers the exact same days of the week, from a year ago in January. There are no significant events that would drive traffic, other than a slight spike at the end from Valentines Day searches.

Look how each day lines up, fascinating to me

Look how the trend of the days of the week follows so precisely. The first thing I saw when I looked at this chart was the fact that we are down about 7% y-o-y, but then I looked closer and saw the parallel movement across the chart. Look how the dips correlate, and the spikes match up. I’m now intrigued enough to put together a chart of all the data from all our sites and see how this matches up.

I’m not sure what to takeaway from this type of find, but if you just look at the headline, you miss the real gems.

Peter Schwartz things Web 2.0 is dead. I left this comment on his article in the Huffington Post today -
Facebook’s Face Plant: The Poverty of Social Networks and the Death of Web 2.0:

You did not do very good research when writing this article:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/06/facebook-users-up-89-over-last-year-demographic-shift/
http://www.quantcast.com/facebook.com

A) The largest demographic chunk of users is 24-35,
B) Facebook reportedly operates on about $80 million/yr , meaning that $300 million in Revenue WOULD make them profitable.
C) Could you do with out your Outlook contact list? If so fine, if not then look at whats coming and see that Facebook is an excellent way to keep in touch with people you can’t see very often.

Web 2.0 isn’t dead, people who report on its death are simply on a melting iceberg looking for some more ships to sink before they go under themselves. Why do you think you guys just got $25 Million? Irony is shining here…

This guy wrote an article for a website that has comments and all types of “web 2.0″ content about the death of “web 2.0″

Get a clue. I like the Huffington Post, but its a bit early to be predicting the doom of a set of tools hundreds of millions of people use every day.

I totally agree that user generated content is not a sustainable business model for many (not all) businesses. But there are many businesses out there that are enjoying heaping rewards for allowing their users, visitors and customers to share their stories and comments online. UGC is not the end all be all of the web, but it has made the world a better place if you ask me, and its not going anywhere.

Now everyone I know seems to have seen a Sonic commercial at least once in their life. But how many of those people have actually seen a Sonic Restaurant? Chances are you have seen a Sonic commercial and live no where near a Sonic. Now I’m not the media planner for Sonic and I don’t know who is, or why exactly they buy so much advertising in the Northeast, even though they don’t have any locations here, but I’m going to attempt to breakdown the Sonic Commercial and what its doing on my TV.

On hypothesis I have is that Sonic is using this as marketing hype. It gets people talking. “Man do I want to go to Sonic, just to try it!” I’ve heard this after seeing a Sonic ad, and it has a good point. Its positive spin, its an interesting angle. But is that really their plan?

It could be but I don’t believe so. I believe that Sonic is a victim of mass media, a lack of targeting and a 20th century mentality of media buying. 

This post is inspired by this post from Darren Herman, and from a question my mother asked me - “Are you going to have those dancing mortgage commercials on your websites now?” No Mom, websites with those commercials are dumb. And I didn’t mean dumb as in bad or in a colloquial manner, I meant they are not thinking about their audience and what people want to look at. 

In our most recent meeting with investors I used this line to focus a slide in my presentation:

Targeted Visitors are more Valuable to our Advertisers

This is a key focus of our business, the level of targeting we are able to provide to our advertisers. And its not just an ability to determine who is on a given page at a given time with some fancy algorithm, its just that the vast majority of our traffic comes through a search for the information on our page. Combined with very low bounce rates on our landing pages, our content keeps our visitors online and adds value to our advertisers. People come to our site searching for our advertisers - we just connect them.  Its not rocket science, but it seems to be missing elsewhere. 

Give people what they want, and they will respond positively to ads relating to what they want. Thats my motto online, and thats what we’ve been seeing happen.

* For more on the Sonic commercials see these links (don’t miss the comments)

http://adage.com/garfield/post?article_id=119271

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2008/10/good-question-why-does-sonic-advertise-on-tv-when-theres-no-sonic-near-me.html

Why does it suck? It really is not good. Google is not perfect, but no algorithim, no matter how advanced and smart is going to be perfect. (Well maybe one day). 

Live Search is just not good. It has outdated websites, it seems to have no logical order on page one, and the font is just eeky and kind of hard to read. Even bribing people to use search doesn’t make people use it.

This post doesn’t really have any logical merit to it, I’m just wondering why it isn’t better? Well it is from Microsoft so maybe that answers the question…

Ok, anyone who knows me knows I can get pretty fired up. And sometimes in the privacy of my computer I can get a little overzealous about my thoughts/feelings, especially related to recent experiences. I am also pretty good at acknowledging these blights, and when necessary correcting them. In the past few weeks, I think I may have transmitted some of these blights into this blog, so I’d like to address them.

I have of late been very hard on the financial markets and the coverage of them RE: their view on the internet. And in fairness, I live alot of my life on the internet, I run an internet company and I know a few people who do as well. However, coming across a few data points (particularly this one from Greg Sterling) about E-Commerce having basically flat growth and a few fairly average earnings reports, I think I was getting a bit ahead of myself. I know a good bit about the markets, I know alot more about the internet, but the internet is still a small piece of the economy, and as a whole of our nation, only the early adopters are really savvy to its power and potential. I guess I just never really considered myself and early adopter.

On a second point, I recently remarked on a meeting I had a few weeks ago and used the term “don’t get it.” After reading this post from Mark Cuban, I realized that in some way I was being lazy when discussing the potential project. I didn’t drill “it” down enough for them. Although I never actually used this term with them, nor would I (it is rather insulting), it hit me that in many ways I’ve rationalized deals that never happened or meetings that didn’t go well as them “just not getting it.” The important part of this is that it made me a little better, and now I realize I have alot more work to do to get to a level I didn’t realize I wasn’t already on. If that makes any sense.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, or something like that.

Thanks to Darren for bringing my attention to this great new tool. Woopra is the latest analytical tool I’ve seen. And its wicked cool.

It has a really nice interface that allows you to see, in real time, who is on your website, how they got there, what they are looking at and where they go from here. On top of this exceptionally interesting data, compiled live and as it happens, it has an exciting feature - chat. You are able to have a conversation with the person who is visiting your website, in real time.

This really got me fired up. I was done with “work” and home with my girlfriend, and I got the invite from Woopra, set it up and as soon as I was up and running I was “wowing” every few seconds. Watching visitors come to our site, how they got there, what they were looking at and for how long, and where they went from there. It’s very interesting data, and very exciting to see happening live!

The implications from this (at least to me) are nothing new, but the fact that this is live for FREE is a great. I’m not sure what their revenue model is going to be (assuming s Freemium model of some sort), but I can see alot of value in the site. Imagine if advertisers were able to monitor this data in real time, and engage in a conversation with my visitor (yes the big guys have similar chat features…), or if I was a smaller site who could see a potential customer on our site, be able to track where they came from and what they looked at and most importantly what call to action was most, or least, effective.

Its a very fun interface to use, and its exciting to see how visitors interact with the web, in real time. It makes typical analytics look like SportsCenter compared to a live game.

After posting about the growing amount of information and its consequential devaluation, I received a chance to use and review a new service - NewsCred - All the world’s credible news, in one place, a new aggregator that allows registered users to vote on articles and choose to “Credit” the author or article, or “Discredit” the author or article. It is actually similar to my iGoogle homepage in that I can select the news sources and blogs that I want to follow, and track the creditability of. They are out to filter the “Signal to Noise” ratio…

One of the really cool things about the service is that they allow anyone to rank the credibility of an article, an author, or a source (newpaper, blog, etc) based on credibility, quality, transparency and accuracy. The voting process is compiled using their “credibility waterfall algorithm” which although, I don’t like the name (is that a technical term), is a neat concept. It allows the creditability ranking of a specific article to affect the creditability ranking of the author, which in turn affects the creditability ranking of the article’s source. Overall this will theoretically serve you the highest quality and credible news from all across the web. It seems to do a pretty good job of that.

One thing I feel the site needs to really become successful is the proliferation of a “digg” style badge. The relatively new plethora of sharing sites across the internet need a way to tout their creditability, and if the NewsCred “Creditability” ranking badge could furnish this demand, then NewsCred could truly have something remarkable on their hands.

The two largest threats I see for the site are one, reaching a critical mass where they have enough users to rank and “credit” articles which I might read or be interested in; and second, someone else doing that sooner. If the site never really catches on, I don’t really see it becoming anything special, that may go without saying, but here is another 2.0 player in need of user volume.

Its definitely a cool site, one worth checking out. They clearly have a good vision of where they want to be, and how they want to do it and I think it can be successful.

Thanks to the guys at NewsCred for working on something that might actually improve the quality of news out there.

IAC reported its first quarter earnings today, with revenue up 22% and income up 15%, you could say that they had a very good quarter considering the gloomy shadow over the economy in that period. Most of this is due to their Media & Advertising division which saw a 192% increase in income. The Media & Advertising division consists of ask.com, CitySearch and Evite along with their other online properties (exluding Match.com). This substantial growth can be contributed to a few things, but most notably I would point out this shows that the online advertising space is positioned to grow very nicely, particularly in the current economic climate.

The fiasco resulting from comScore’s under reporting of Google’s clicks was a good representation of how the internet is still new to many big players. ComScore, regarded as the primo player in online measurement published a report that tanked Google stock, sent online agencies and publishers into a panic and threw a shroud of false gloom over the entire industry.

While our company has seen a cutback in spending from some of our advertisers, and hesitancy from new clients to invest their marketing in a new space, for the most part we have seen healthy earnings growth, an expanding customer base and a large increase in traffic. A good friend of mine running a leading e-tailer of health products and services saw revenues up 38% yr/yr in Q1 of ‘08. Our company doubled revenues over first quarter 2007. Online is up and its good.

Today the US economy reported a modest .6% growth. “NOT TECHNICALLY A RECESSION”, “THE US ECONOMY SLUMPS THROUGH 1ST QUARTER”, “INVESTORS SEE RECESSION, WALL STREET DEPRESSION” - those were the various headlines across the internet. I did a quick search and found that every major news outlet had some sort of dreary publishing of this not so bad news. The Dow is up .9%, the NASDAQ is up .4% but everyone is running around declaring the bad news.

People are smarter than this (some people anyway) but its hard to ignore the warnings. I see people making smart decisions with their marketing money, which is basically me saying “I see people spending their marketing money online.” The yellow pages are dead, and even the YPs are building their online presence. Google’s huge numbers are back in peoples mind and small businesses want to be a part of that success. Money is being spent, and thus money is being made - online. Thats where the people are going and thats where the budgets are beginning to gravitate.

I saw a segment from Lewis Black last night where he was mocking the younger generations for spending hours online each day. I like Lewis Black, but he went on a rant that just was not funny to me. He sounded like someone from the Prohibition era talking about how young people spend all their time in bars, drinking. Well Lewis, its not just young people, and we aren’t just making fake friends on MySpace. We (meaning people who use the internet) are finding information, researching purchasing decisions, exploring entertainment (music, video, even TV) and building our network of contacts. I find it ironic that you can watch Lewis Black on YouTube, talking about how people waste their time on YouTube. Hey Lewis, how would you feel if I told you that 30% of the people who watch you speak, are watching you online??

Lewis Black has nothing to do with what I’m talking about, but everything. The online economy is heating up, profits are up, more people are online and more transactions are being made and researched online then ever before. The majority of these companies are seeing great profits and surging business opportunities. The old market is not what it used to be - The World is Flat and we can’t just keep measuring things they way we used to, otherwise everything will look all messed up.

Kind of like when the economy shows a better than expected growth rate, and thats a bad thing… what if we excluded all these online and new media companies from that number - how bad would it be then?

The term engagement is flying around pretty freely these days. How do we measure engagement? Can we measure engagement? What exactly is engagement? Well, if none of these people know, then how do we go about defining it, measuring it and building a model to capitalize on engagement?

My take on engagement falls similarly to what Lester Wunderman wrote about engagement. I would define engagement as: Choosing to interact or involve yourself in something. That something can be a website, a brand, a store, a blog,  or a television station. The interaction or involvement can be a comment on a blog, a post in a forum, a complaint or experience card in a restaurant, changing the TV chanel, speaking with a floor salesperson at Target. Engagement is interaction with a brand or service by choice.

The web, especially 2.0, as brought the world the ultimate (to this point) platform for engagement. People spend hours a day online, engaging themselves with different brands, different sites and people from all over the world. Search engines allow us to target our engagement even further - they bring us a higher degree of engagement, we make a conscious decision to search for a topic, and then choose to visit one site over the other and spend our time engaging that site.

I believe this engagement will soon be the best measure of an advertisers campaign online. I’m not quite sure how it will work, but measuring engagement is a great way to get a sense of if and how people are interacting with your online campaign.

Here is a “For instance”, if Coca Cola creates a virtual world, and they measure engagement by counting how many people create an avatar, and then compare that to how many of those people come back and use that avatar again, Coca Cola could then measure engagement as a function of ‘# of avatars, frequency of use, and abandonment.’ (Lets say: 1000 avatars created; 600 came back 2 or more times; 200 never came back; your level of engagement could be 600/(1000-200) or .75.) This can be interpreted however you want (in this world of spin we live in - who knows..) perhaps you could use this to say that 75% of the people who responded to your promotion where “relevantly engaged” and 20% were not. I don’t know if this makes any sense to marketers and I’m sorry if I lost you…

Or you could measure engagement by counting interactions purchases, perhaps a redemption of a coupon.

I found myself using engagement in a pitch to an advertiser today, he asked me what I meant by engagement. I said “a website visitor choosing to interact with the site or to take an action that wasn’t necessarily related to why they found themselves on this site.” (I was referring to user submissions as engaging).

After all this I think that maybe engagement is just a different way of saying Web 2.0.

Today’s post comes after a hectic week, many miles of travel and a post by Seth Godin (Silly Traffic).

His post talks about a 75% bounce rate and the value of doing the best you can with the other 25% of the people who actually stay on your site. While I agree that maximizing conversions with the bulk of your traffic is important, a believe that in this day of niche and segmentation you shouldn’t be operating (and probably won’t be for long) a website that turns away 3 quarters of your potential traffic.

We run online city guides. Naturally we target our SEO and our paid links to reach people searching for what our content is all about. For the keyword “Restaurants in Providence, RI” our bounce rate for organic clicks is 8.3% (according to Google Analytics) and our PPC bounce rate for that keyword is even lower - 4.4%. I know those are really good numbers, and we do have entry keywords that bounce 40-50% of potential traffic (sitewide the bounce rate is 38%), but our top 20 keywords all have bounce rates under 12%.

My explanation of this is targeting. While some websites might have hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of products - tons of information, our sites have specific, segmented content that is designed to reach people searching for exactly what we offer. I don’t think any lightbulbs are going off in anyone’s head here, and I’m certainly not the first person/website to target specific traffic, but what are people doing with a website that turns away 75% of your traffic?!?

If you have a site about golden retrievers, and you target your SEO keywords and placement towards anyone searching for dogs, you are missing out on your core audience - golden retriever lovers. I feel like this is right up Seth’s alley, and was I very surprised to read his last post. He brings up excellent points in the second half of his post, but he seemed to contradict himself a bit.

75% of all unfocused visitors leave within 3 seconds.

He then says that “unfocused” could mean a digg link or even a Google search, but that 75% is ok.

The beautiful thing I’ve found about the internet is that you can get people to your site, targeted, focused people, by optimizing your site for certain keywords - in other words, focused traffic. Well I’m quite sure that more than 75% of people searching for “Siberian Buddhist Colonies” would bounce if they came across my site, but why would they come across my site looking for that.

They most likely wouldn’t and if our team is doing our job, they won’t. We want targeted traffic on our sites. People searching for the information our advertisers are paying to have found. So perhaps Godin’s point is overall correct, that you need focused traffic to succeed, but suggesting that it is wise not to worry about a 75% bounce rate is contradicting the whole point of search engines - to find what we are looking for.

We have succeed by building targeted and focused traffic on our sites, and by keeping our visitors on our site longer to maximize potential exposure to our advertisers. Ultimately in our space (my thoughts), you need to build a website that gets focused traffic, maintains a low bounce rate (<20%) and retains these visitors for an extended visit session with quality related content.

Our advertisers’ success is driven around our ability to provide them with targeted leads, and focused traffic. But if 75% of our traffic left in 3 seconds, our advertisers would not be far behind.