"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
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
So, a mere five months after announcing it on this blog, I’ve finally made it to Seattle with my family. Appendicitis, last-minute dramas with mirrormirror, and even having my car towed in London the night before I was due to sell it (I got it back, fortunately, but am now £200 lighter for the experience) … 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!
As you probably know, Internet Explorer 7 is out in the wild. It’s a big improvement over IE6, but I am a wee bit disappointed that it doesn’t offer a bit more finesse in the cookie management department. There’s a new feature to delete all your cookies (separately from other temporary files), but you can’t delete the … Read more
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
Via a post on Stowe Boyd’s blog, Genius.com‘s SalesGenius is brought to my attention. At first glance, I thought this was just another bulk e-mail marketing tool with post-click web analytics built in, but they’re doing something slightly more interesting here, by tracking the clicks from e-mails sent by company sales reps and then presenting … Read more
You be the judge. But here are my grievances: Ridiculous amount of wasted space Terrible visual clutter – users will get bored of the faux-steering wheel within about 10 minutes; everything else is squashed together as a result Overarching metaphor puts users into the wrong mindset to make sense of the data – people are … Read more
You remember I mentioned in my first post about Web 2.0 that I was preparing to deliver a presentation on the topic to some folks at McCann Erickson in London? No? Ah. Well, I was. And I promised to post the presentation on this blog. So here it is, courtesy of slideshow-hosting site Slideshare, which … Read more
Following on from my lengthy post on the topic of what the heck Web 2.0 actually is, an excellent paper on Web 2.0 [PDF format] has appeared on Pew Internet’s website. It draws on Hitwise data about the growth of usage of certain “Web 2.0” sites (such as Wikipedia) compared to the stagnation of “Web … Read more