"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
There’s an interesting article in Advertising Age about a new system that Starcom are deploying to build a complete picture of marketing effectiveness, including combining the effect of multiple exposures to marketing over time. The project sounds similar to one I undertook in my WebAbacus days with Eric Picard (then with Bluestreak) and Carat Interactive … Read more
A little late to the punch with this one, but some interesting numbers were released by Comscore last week which showed that MySpace has beaten Yahoo! in web traffic for the first time. The story behind the story is that Comscore’s measure is based upon page views, and the feeling is that Yahoo! has suffered … Read more
Just as I am starting to despair about what to blog about today, I stumble upon compete.com – a new competitive traffic comparison site offering a hybrid Alexa/Hitwise approach which suddenly seems to have popped up all over the web (I’ve just seen two ads for it in the space of five minutes). Reading the compete.com blog, … Read more
I learn via my friends at E-consultancy that ABC Electronic in the UK – who provide traffic auditing services for online publishers – has just ratified a change in its policy on the mandatory measures that must be included in an ABCE audit return. Starting Jan 2007, it will no longer be mandatory to report … Read more
A couple of days late on this one, but today’s (well, Monday’s, technically) market consolidation news is that Webtrends has acquired Clickshift, purveyor of paid search bid management software (as a service, natch). This acquisition nicely fleshes out Webtrends’ solution set, allowing them to compete across the board with Omniture and WebSideStory who both have … Read more
There’s an amusing graphic on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog lamenting the demise of the page view (1994 – 2010, says Steve). Steve highlights the fact that, as web applications move beyond the traditional ‘page by page’ model, utilizing technology like Ajax and Flash, the page view – which, together with the click, is the cornerstone of … Read more
We’ve been having a bit of a discussion here of late about the cost/benefit ratio of providing ‘proper’ (that is, properly and accurately calculated) Unique User (UU, or sometimes called Visitor) numbers in web analytics reports. Whilst UU numbers are useful and desirable (I don’t think anyone would argue that you can’t benefit from them … Read more
Last Thursday’s New Media Age carried a supplement about web analytics, and yours truly was interviewed by Nic Howell, talking about Microsoft’s entry into this space. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether I made a fool of myself. Plus, now you get to see what I look like!
Whilst browsing the Windows Live Gallery today, I came across a gadget from MetriServe Web Analytics which shows basic web stats in your sidebar on Windows Vista (they also have a Mac OSX widget). Gimmicky as this may seem to the hard-bitten web analytics warriors amongst you, I think this is cool because it helps to … Read more
Yesterday at the E-metrics Summit in Washington DC, Google launched a new service under their Adwords brand, called Google Website Optimizer. It’s an automated A/B testing/optimization tool for Adwords advertisers to enable them to maximize the conversion rates they get from the keyword campaigns. In essence, the system allows you to test the effect of … Read more