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Everybody agrees to say this is the biggest financial crisis the world has ever known. Even worse than the big one of 1929. And they are probably right.
I won’t do a long analysis of it here as lots of bright economists do that much better than me but honestly, what better times than a financial crisis for a web analyst?

Of course, crisis means recession, investments will be freezed or at least will slow down, non-necessary activities will see their budget aborted, probably very few companies (except the pure internet players) will spend money to improve their internet solutions and web analysts will be amongst the firsts to suffer from the situation.

But don’t you think this crisis can be a good opportunity to improve the internet presence of any company willing to have the best return on their online investments?
Times are difficult?
Budgets are smaller?

Let’s optimize the investments done in online marketing and communication!

It’s time to optimize (or put in place) the necessary mechanisms to measure the effectiveness of our web sites in order to better target our audience, to better understand our visitors and to refine our web sites to ultimately better serve (and satisfy) our customers.

The next months will be difficult for all of us, it is time to work on tools and process which will give us the necessary competitiveness and will help us to minimize the effects of the crisis.

Yes, definitely, times are not so bad for web analysts.

…was held last Wednesday.
30 participants came for an afternoon talking about Web Analytics.

This half-day sponsored by Sogeti started with a short introduction to the Web Analytics Wednesday concept and the Web Analytics Association followed by an excerpt of the Outlook 2008 survey report conducted by the WAA end of last year. This gave to the audience a good overview and a better understanding of the context of Web Analytics all over the world and the possibility to better position themsleve in this new field.

Then Julien Coquet, the new Country Manager France for the Web Analytics Association, talked about the KPIs in a presentation that have been much appreciated by the audience.
We had then a small presentation about the different profiles you can face to when you work on an Web Analytics project and the necessity to introduce and set up processes. The afternoon ended with a buffet where participants were able to continue discussion around a glass of wine.

Unfortunately, we were not able to have a testimony of implementation and use of web analytics on a real case (Nestlé) as planned. And according to the feedback we had, this was missing to the majority who would have like to talk about a real case study.

I voluntarily wanted this first edition a little bit more formal in order to emphasize the message about necessity to build a community around Web Analytics in Switzerland, however 46% of participants would like more interactivity and 38% suggest discussion and sharing about real case studies for the next sessions.

Finaly,

So, let’s meet on the next Web Analytics Wednesday in Switzerland.

The first Web Analytics Wednesday in Switzerland will be held in Geneva on 23rd of April.
This half-day will be the opportunity to meet people interested in Web Analytics in Geneva area. We plan to have one hour presentation including testimonies from practitioners and then two hours discussion and networking.

Join us for this first edition of WAW in Switzerland.

Registration form here

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.

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’s a BIG difference in how you should use banners for external marketing and banners on your own web pages.On other people’s sites you don’t really have to worry that much about it, just measure and optimize and you’re good. But if you forget that effect and use banners on your own sites, you’re sure to be in a mess…

I think Jakob Nielsen was the first one to address the effect of banner blindness. In its original form it said something like “people see it, but don’t recognize it” and it relates to banner on a website. Later the theory has evolved, by whom I’m not sure, to say something like: if you use banners that are “selling” something, and if the user recognizes this, the user will reduce the area of the screen to scan. The user will see less of your site’s content.

In essence… if you use banners that are “selling” something, if you use animations or sound, the more visible the banner is, the less visible is the rest of your page. It’s very difficult to see this effect if you don’t look for it, because the banners itself are clicked on. And it’s usually the most clicked on object on your site. But the fact is that those clicks are fewer than what you would otherwise receive…

I haven’t seen this hypothesis tested, but since it seems like a plausible theory, I decided to do my own test. At dnbnor.no/bedrift we did the following test, and found that the total number of click was reduced by 20% when using an animated banner on our site.

On test day #1 and #2 we tracked the following page, with four different objects. The top object is an animated banner with the three selling points numbered 1, 2 and 3 bouncing all over the place. The wanted effect was to attract the attention of the users:

On test day #3 and #4 we tracked this page. It was the same page, less the banner, with only three objects.

After correcting for general volume of traffic, we found that the total number of clicks on days with four objects, including the banner, was 20% less that the total number of clicks on the days with only three objects, and no banner. We believe that this is a practical case of banner blindness in a broader perspective than the original findings.

As a consequence…
We have reduced the use of banners to a minimum on our sites. In the case where we still use it, we try to minimize the appearance of the banner in such a way that it blends in with the general background and design of the site. The only reason we have found to use banners, is when we need more freedom and flexibility than our CMS system can give us, in cases like tests/quizzes, calculators or product navigators - when it comes to complicated products.

If you have any ideas or experience with banner blindness or the use of banners on your own sites, please feel free to share your wisdom, with comments to this article.