Archive for February, 2008

An interesting initiative is born last week in the world of analytical professionals. Vincent Grandville launched www.AnalyticBridge.com, the first network for analytical professionals.

Launched mi-February, it allows you to create your own group, publish your most spectacular statistical charts, contact other professionals, invite people, announce your seminar, conference or consultancy, receive technical help on various topics including computational finance, web analytics, quality control, statistical software.

The amazing thing is the way it has grown from 20 to about 400 people in just one week…

Webanalytics is all about competing. In most cases it’s about competing with yourself. In more advanced cases you can also compete agains the rest or specifically against your competitors in your industry. But in most cases, you compete against yourself.

The good thing is that against yourself you can compete as often and as hard as you want. You just have to find what measurements you want to compete with. And then you launch a campaign. You measure and you edit. You can edit everyday or every hour if you have enough traffic. And then you measure again, and again, and again.

If you win, you keep the change. If you lose, you roll back and try again. And this is the way of the webanalyst. You repeat. You win some and you lose some. In the longrun you win much more than you lose.

And as you go along, you see that new measurements are neccecary, and that your old performance levels or records are lower than today (I keep a list of records and sometimes we celebrate with champagne when we set a new record). That is called improving.

I had a pep-talk on this subject on a WebTrends seminar a few weeks ago, but Monday this week I was inspired by a speech from Mike Moran in a seminar in Oslo. I find it very stimulation to learn from the best, from people who have such a clear vision and knowledge about a subject, and at the same time the ability to articulate the message.

Since then I’ve been reading his book…

He talks about the importance to “Do it wrong quickly”.

• Just do it!
• Then measure it
• Then change it

No matter how good you are, you can still be better. The only way to achieve good results is to do it “wrong” and then improve.

Jakob Nielsen published his findings about how to write on the web in 1997, and his findings are still basic and effective tools for every web editor. If you write concise, objective and scannable people will read more of the content.

I did a small test a few weeks ago, just to test myself.

I asked one of my collegues to write a article, and then I boasted confidently that we’ll measure it, and then I’ll make it better… She wrote a very good article, so that was a challenge, but then agian quite easy when using Nielsen’s findings.

The first version was both concice and objective and also quite scannable. See picture further down. The article got 35 percent of the viewers to click on the link to the next related page - the order form.

The 2nd version of the article got more than 55 percent of the viewers to click on the link to the order form.

This is quite a big change, and 55 percent is one of the best “conversion rates” for one page to another that we have ever seen on any of our sales promotional texts.

And what was this “miraculous” change? It was only a small change… highlighting key words in the bullet points list. This is one of the very effective tools mentioned by Nielsen in 1997 as a tool to increase the scannability of a web page.

Content is till king, but so is also the mission to “do it wrong quickly”. Something good (like the first version of this article) can still become better. The tools are already there, and the changes needed are not all that big or difficult, but the results are sometimes better than you can imagine…

Good luck to everyone that takes on the task of small continous change…

For reference:

The 1st version of the text:

The 2nd version of the text:

Or when missing basic feature serves the editor.

Webtrends is one of the editor providing his web analytics software in both ASP and software mode. If a majority of companies chooses today the ASP service, for some others it is more interesting to have the software installed in house (sometimes for privacy control on data, always to save money).
Now, everybody having worked on Webtrends web analytics tool could have noticed a big weakness in user permissions management. The user access management is really basic and to be honest not satisfactory. If you can setup “view” access rights to reports quite correctly, it is not the same for “modification” permissions.
If you want somebody to be able to modify a report, you can do nothing but give him/her modification rights on all the reports of every profiles.

When you are in ASP mode, you can easily by-pass this issue because you have an additional level (account) you don’t have in software mode but when you have a group platform (software mode) running the tool for dozens of websites and profiles dispatched all over the world, you can’t give full access to each individual markets, especially when people working on the tool come from consulting agencies.

Amazingly, this missing basic feature is not a disadvantage for Webtrends, on the contrary, when clients are told things won’t change in next releases it is not rare they give the management of the reports, dashboards and other filters to Webtrends (Enterprise Proactive Services) as companies prefer to trust the editor than taking risk to give full access to several consulting companies.

It is actually difficult to have a good vision of Web Analytics situation in Europe and especially in Switzerland. This is probably because Switzerland is definitely not the most advanced country in web analytics and also because there is little literature about it on the web. Here is a small paper presenting the usage of web analytics in our country through a study of 70 Swiss companies. These companies are representative of the market in terms of size, activities and location.

How it has been conducted?
The study has been made by browsing their web sites and tracking the code of web analytics tools within the source of the web pages. Only the corporate sites —mainly the .com— have been taken into account but when interesting other web sites have been visited. Due to the process used for this investigation, having no “visible” web analytics tool on the site doesn’t mean there is no web analytics solution at all (home made solution or solution with code which can’t be identified) but according to the maturity of the market, we can assume, it is the case.

Here are the results

The repartition by sectors is as following

From Financial sector (Bank & Insurance) to International Organisations including Consumer Goods (Retail, Luxury), IT (Information & Technology), Telecom, Industrial, Basic Materials (Energy, Agribusiness) and Health Care (Chemistry & Pharmaceutical) the major sectors present in Switzerland are considered and representatives of the market.

Who is Using Web Analytics Solution?
First Observation, 41% of considered companies don’t have any web analytics solution in place.

If we look at sector by sector, no surprise to see that 100% of Telecommunications companies use a Web Analytics solution. An interesting fact to notice anyway: one of the major Telco providers in Switzerland (mobile and fix) don’t have WA on their corporate site but only on one of their secondary e-shop website. It seems to indicate that WA is only for marketing purposes for them.
The Industrial sector is also well advanced with more than 70% of implementation when the other sectors are around 50% of usage of metrics tools. Within these last sectors, only 33% of International Organisations and less than 40% in Information - Technology field use a tool.

Which Web Analytics Solutions Are Implemented?

Google Analytics is definitely Number One with 25% of market share. Then you have some major editors: WebTrends with 13%, HBX (Omniture-Visual Sciences) 7%. Xiti is a French editor largely used in France and shares an honest 7% of market at the same level than HBX. Finaly few others solutions like Coremetrics, Doubleclick, SiteStat or Wysistat are present but not significantly. This partition is really representative of the Switzerland (European?) market except maybe for the total absence of Omniture (even if they have gained market share with HBX).

Because some of the tools present in this study provide both ASP and software mode with significant differences (budget, data policies,…) it is interesting to see the repartition of companies using ASP mode versus those having implemented the software internally

6% of the companies using Google Analytics were in fact using Urchin and one of them have implemented both the Urchin tool and the ASP GA version.

WebTrends, HBX and Xiti have all three 20% of software implementation. This choice is often related to the size of the company (mainly worldwide) and a significant number of websites where the tool is implemented and therefore it is more interesting to buy the software licences and manage internally the software than having multitude of ASP licences that could rapidly be expensive on a group level and not always the best situation for data consolidation.

Which Tool for Which Sector?
Google Analytics is leading the market but what about the different sectors?

Telecom companies prefer Webtrends (75%) and HBX (25%), none of them use GA.
On the other hand, the Basic Material sector is dominated by GA with 50% and Webrends with 17%. Financial, Industrial and Consumer Goods are the sectors whith the highest diversity with Xiti (Financial & Consumer Goods) and Sitestat or HBX (Financial & Industrial) having between 15% and 20% of the market.

In conclusion, the Web Analytics in Switzerland can be better, almost half of the market doesn’t use any metrics tool.
If 100% of the Telecom companies have implemented a tool, the Financial and Information - Technology sectors and the International Organisations are far behind, probably due to the nature of their activities.
Even if Google Analytics is number 1, the choice of the tool vary a lot depending of the activity of the company and we can notice the small number of different editors and the total absence of Omniture plus a local particularity: the French tool Xiti.

The questions now are:

• how many of these companies are really doing web analytics and not only reporting?
• How many companies have put in place a Web Analytics strategy?
• How many of them have someone (not necessarily a dedicated team) to analyse their data and if so, how many take actions based on their analysis?

Good measurements on a good campaign are determined before the campaign is executed. As with all other preparations for a web campaign. At dnbnor.no/bedrift we’ve found that 80% of the work is before the campaign, and only 10 percent during and another 10 percent after the campaign.

Of course, if you forget this and start working after the campaign (has happened to me a lot, because of late involvement) you have to spend 200-300% more time and if you’re lucky you get 50% of the findings you could have with just a little bit more preparation.

But perhaps the biggest loss is that you miss out on the opportunity to alter your campaign while running. That could easily cost you a 100% improvement in campaign results…