"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
Yet again I have to apologize for not posting more frequently. In lieu of a proper, substantive post about a weighty topic, here’s a collection of tidbits from the industry and blogosphere: Another civilized spat has broken out about the merits (or otherwise) of Technorati rankings for assessing a blog’s popularity, spurred by Avinash’s latest … Read more
Eric Peterson has published a report which draws on some of the data he got from his web analytics practitioner survey a couple of months back to highlight that organizations who use free tools tend generally to be: Small Less committed to web analytics Less strategic in their user of web analytics Newer to web … Read more
So, some screenshots of the interface for beta 1 of our web analytics product (codenamed ‘Gatineau’) have slipped out onto the web, courtesy of Dave Naylor. Dave attended our adChamps briefing in London a couple of weeks ago where he saw a demo of the software and spoke with my colleague Justin (who did a sterling … Read more
A bit late to the punch with this one (as ever), but Comscore have published a white paper which contains more detail about the methodology behind their recent study which showed that both first and third-party cookies are deleted more than we thought (or at least more than we hoped). It clears a few things … Read more
If you’re a big brand advertiser and you need to get your high-up marketing execs excited about web analytics, what can you do? Well, one thing you can do is pay someone to build you a really funky interface for your web analytics data: Much in the vein of 3D Site Stats, this type of … Read more
In another interesting post on his blog, Avinash questions the conventional wisdom about “Enterprise Class” software, specifically web analytics software. The post made me smile because of Avinash’s hyper-cautious preamble about how he doesn’t set out to be contentious, but sometimes he just has to speak his mind, yada yada yada. I had a mental … Read more
Here at Microsoft, we like to listen. We also like data (and not just so we can ignore it). And whilst work on Gatineau is already quite well advanced, we’re still keen to learn what folks out at the sharp end of web analytics actually want to see in a product like this. So to … Read more
I knew that in my haste to get a post out yesterday I’d forget to mention some things: Many congratulations and best wishes to Eric Peterson on his new venture. For reasons which may become apparent in the fullness of time, I had a little advance notice of Eric’s intentions, so I’ve been spending the … Read more
So I’m back at my desk after a hectic E-metrics in San Francisco, and now I have a whole bunch of posts backed up that I need to write, whilst also addressing the three-day work backlog that’s built up in my absence. But here are a few lightning thoughts about this year’s conference – actually … Read more
When I first came across 3D Live Stats my first reaction was to groan at yet another over-wrought method for conveying (I use that term loosely) web analytics data. The conceit here is that your traffic is shown as rays of light emerging from a rotating globe, whilst your search keywords float across the screen. … Read more