"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
There’s a lot of chatter on the wires here (ooh, I make it sound so glamorous and newsroom-y – it would be more accurate to say there are a lot of e-mails going back and forth) about Comscore’s press release about cookie deletion. It makes for somewhat alarming reading – according to the report, 31% … Read more
Apologies for the rather slower pace of posts of late, but life has been a little busy here, what with moving house in Seattle, taking a trip to London to attend E-metrics, and succumbing to a nasty cold this week. Hopefully this post, the latest in my ‘mini-series’ on online marketing measurement techniques, will make … Read more
Well…. no. Okay, that’s not true. Just fancied writing a sensationalist headline after a day at E-metrics London. But Gatineau did get a mention at the recent WebGuild event on Web Analytics at Google’s offices in Mountain View. Paul Botto, head of enterprise sales for Google Analytics (and formerly of Urchin), said that “the race … Read more
My colleague Justin attended an interesting meeting yesterday where one of the subjects of discussion was how transparent Microsoft can (and should) be about its business models, particularly as they relate to subsidized or free products for consumers. According to Justin, the mood in the room was divided, with some participants favoring openness as a … Read more
Good luck, Avinash. I think this is a great move – it’s only a shame you’re going to be working with the competition. 🙂
I got the following e-mail in my (personal) inbox today from JobServe, a UK recruitment site: Dear Ian For the last 18 months JobServe have been researching and developing a new type of searching technology that will provide superior candidate matching to recruiter’s vacancies. Just like other recruitment websites JobServe have offered the recruiters the … Read more
For part 2 of this n-part series on marketing measurement techniques, we’re turning our attention to the methods employed by web analytics tools to capture the source of an inbound click and turn that into a report about whether marketing is working for you. Bye bye, Referrer Back in simpler, more innocent times (i.e. up … Read more
The inestimable Avinash Kaushik has done me the favor of sending more traffic the way of my blog, by excerpting some answers he gave to Jeff Lawrence of Sonicko Consulting in a recent interview on Jeff’s blog. In his answers he lists four things he’d like to see in Gatineau, our forthcoming web analytics tool. … Read more
It goes without saying that measuring the effectiveness of online marketing is web analytics’ #1 ‘killer app’. But how realistic a picture of the value of online marketing can a web analytics deliver? Come to that, is there any such thing as a true picture of marketing effectiveness? The short answer to the above question … Read more
A colleague brought to my attention the dubious practices of LogStats.de, a German provider of free web analytics. LogStats is a typical teeny-tiny provider of free web stats, using a JavaScript-based tag for data collection. Free web stats is a pretty thin business to be in these days, what with behemoths like Google and us … Read more