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It's back! "Where in the Organization is the Web Analyst?" Survey July 15, 2008

Posted by debbiepascoe in web analytics.
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Many of you participated in the survey in December.  Your participation was most appreciated and provoked more questions and a spin-off survey, “What in the World Does the Web Analyst Do?”.  See the Survey Results page for those results.

If you just took it, and arrived here from there, thank you for participating.  I’m already seeing results.

This time the questions have been combined and a couple of new questions have been added, along with a few other refinements….

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ZMHnEO9H1kveqXYSYkcgig_3d_3d

The survey will be open for 7 days and is anonymous.  Just like last time, it will only take a tiny bit of your day – 2-3 minutes. Just like last time, a summary of the results and a link to the full report will be posted here on the forum.  If you take the survey and think of some glaring omission – a burning question you wish had been included, please tell me! Post your comments here.

Thanks in advance for your input and for being part of the “finger on the pulse”.

Big Week for Web Analytics News April 14, 2008

Posted by debbiepascoe in search engine optimization, web analytics, web design.
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Two big announcements in the past few days:

Coremetrics
Coremetrics just secured $60MM in new funding, then followed that up with an announcement that they will begin releasing benchmark data collected from their ~300 clients. Their announcement follows Google’s announcement about releasing benchmark data. Some interesting stats from Coremetrics:

  • 22.41% of visitors left retail sites after viewing one page
  • 51.65% got as far as a product page
  • Conversions from Direct Load Traffic – 47.89% of traffic and 67.35% of sales came from visitors who typed in the retailer’s URL or clicked on a bookmark. The typical conversion rate was 3.29%
  • Conversions Where Site Search Was Used – 14.84% of consumers used site search during their visits – conversion rate 5.60%
  • The shopping cart abandonment rate was 68.42%.

Here’s the link to the Coremetrics Benchmark page.

Yahoo! and IndexTools
Second Yahoo! announced its purchase of IndexTools – start at Bob Page’s blog post to get the industry take on what this means. Plenty of pundits have weighed in on what this means, and most of them are linked from Bob’s post. The one post worth listing here is Eric Enge’s 10 Cool Things you can Do with IndexTools. If you’re not familiar with them, this post gives some info about the solution and its reporting capabilities.

Eric Peterson suggests that “this (acquisition) is potentially the permanent game changer”. So here we are – three giants – MSN, Yahoo! and Google:

  • each providing search results,
  • each selling ads,
  • each with mass volumes of email account holders and other member-specific areas,
  • all of which result in vast volumes of data about what people do online.

Before this acquision, two of the three had web analytics capabilities, and now they all have it.

On a related note, last week I ran across a blog that Avinash wrote over a year ago – Five Ecosystem Challenges for Web Practitioners – still as relevant today as when it was written. In it he talks about the fact that web analytics is not a silo – web visitor data is tightly related to the “upstream” (tv, magazine, newspaper, radio ads), and the “downstream” (phone sales, retail outlets, other sites).

We’re all watching to see what’s going to happen to the large pure-play companies – WebTrends, Omnture, Coremetrics – each with its own expansion strategy, and the multitude of smaller players and even new entrants into the space.

UPDATE – 4/15: Dennis Mortensen posted to his blog today that Yahoo! is making IndexTools free to all existing partners and client if they accept Yahoo!’s Standard Agreement.

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