"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
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
Yahoo has put a funky name to their targeted ads service – SmartAds, and has added some extra juice. Yahoo’s been strong in demographic and behavioral targeting for some time – they have a significant team working on it – but SmartAds is new for a couple of reasons: It allows targeted ad delivery based … 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
I know we’ve had some rocky times together, but you can’t just walk out on me like this. Was it something I said? I know that at times I disapproved of your relationship with Avinash, but with a relationship as long-standing as ours, a little jealousy’s going to set in eventually. So where will you … Read more
I’m a sucker for a nice little TV short, and this amused me at the same time as giving me that glow you get when the behemoth of a company you work for does something cool: The Break UpUploaded by geertdesager My favorite line from this is when the guy says, “Know you? Sweetheart, I know everything … 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
TechCrunch is carrying an (apparently authoritative) story that Google is to buy Feedburner for an amount estimated at around $100m. It’s not quite $6bn, but it’s a healthy amount. This is another smart portfolio move from Google, though few companies could justify paying so much for the opportunity to monetize RSS feeds. In Google’s case, … Read more
$6 billion is a lot to pay for any company, particularly when it’s about five times as much as you’ve ever paid for any previous acquisition; it’s even more impressive when you consider it’s a cash deal. But those are the table stakes to get into (or stay in) the online advertising business these days; and … Read more