After Geneva in April and Zürich in June, the next WAW in Tour Edipresse will be the opportunity to share about KPIs for non-ecommerce websites (corporate website, non-profit organisations,…) and a big part of the session will be dedicated to discussion with and between attendees.

You will be in Lausanne area the 3rd of December, come and join us for great discussions around Web Analytics.
You can register on the official site.

Then while surfing with my new little darling… some pages did not look very good.

People it’s about time to test your websites from a PC with Firefox.

In his post Dennis explains that this re-branding […] also includes the launch of a new website and changes to the analytics product itself (sic) including support of Yahoo! Store, Yahoo! Developers and Yahoo! Head Advertisers.

Unfortunately, as anticipated in April, this is not a free-for-all-come-and-get-it launch, but a carefully planned controlled access launch only for former IndexTools customers.

You can see few screenshots on the official Yahoo! Web Analytics  website.

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.

SOGETI, sponsor of this second event, will welcome Web Analytics specialists and pratictionners in the St-Gotthard Hotel - Bahnhofstrasse 87 - 8021 Zürich.

Thanks to the feedback of the Geneva session, the Zürich session will leave more time to the networking and exchange between people, the agenda is:

1. Welcome words.
2. Introduction WAA / WAW to participants.
3. Networking : getting to know each other.
4. Discuss WAA activities in German Speaking area of Switzerland and in other parts of Switzerland.
5. What’s next

You are in Zürich on 25th of June?
You want to talk and share about web analytics with people working in the same field?

Register on WebAnalytics Demystified website and join us in St-Gotthard Hotel.

See you there.

Few hours later, I received a new email, indeed the same one with a note apologizing on behalf of the team for the unavailability of the registration process. Things started really badly…
Add to this the very mixed opinions of the lucky people having accessed to the tool before me, I’m not in any hurry to look at this new tool.

Well, of course I will look at it, and right now, at least to make my own opinion after so much wait.

I must say that it was a valuable week, and I recommend this to all WebTrends users out there. I’ve done WebTrends courses before, sp a lot of the things covered were known, but still it was a great benefit.

After coming back home, and been working a few weeks, I finds myself spending less time doing more. Everything just seems easier.

I find that the solution works faster, and I don’t feel the hassle I’ve felt plenty of times before. At the same time it feels like all the limitations are gone. WebTrends is still the same, but perhaps it’s me. It feels like I’m a new man.

Somehow I now seem to find the right solution right away. I feel I know webanalytics pretty well and have for quite a few years. Before it was often that the numbers decided what we could analysze and dig into. Now the tables are turned. I can focus on what to analyze, I can spend time on what to conceptualize, knowing that I will find the numbers neccecary. The fuss about finding the numbers is gone. It’s now right down to business.

I can really recommend the certification program, and enclose links to the next to opportunitues for you, in June in both London, UK and Portland, USA.

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.

Yahoo! expects that the IndexTools’ technology platform will provide [their] customers the opportunity to more quickly uncover and act on these insights, enhancing Yahoo!’s status as a partner of choice in online marketing and the must buy for the world’s advertisers.

Yahoo! Indextools to compete Google Analytics and Microsoft AdCenter Analytics?
Read E. Peterson vision about it.

These kinds of sites are not destinations. They are not like Facebook, MySpace, recently acquired Bebo, or any other of the burgeoning Web 2.0 communities. Visitors are not onsite for the heady sense of self-casting that Web 2.0 purveys; rather, they have come with the intent of doing something. They have taken time out of their busy days for very specific reasons, and they are undertaking very precise tasks. The most critical challenge as a site owner in such a situation is shepherding people to the completion of these tasks. If websites are to be held accountable as mature interactive channels, then this maxim must ring true.

If visitors’ tasks are not complete, it is of little value if they are left feeling engaged or if the site managed to monopolize a sizable chunk of their time. For these sites to operate at optimal efficiency, buyers must be buying, support seekers must be obtaining support, content creators must be creating, and learners must be learning.

This is not just a deep rooted belief of mine; it is also a contention based on a solid bedrock of evidence. Consider the following results, taken from iPerceptions’ automotive industry database and covering the period from June 2007 to January 2008, inclusive. Task completion was a tremendously strong ROI predictor among visitors with a purchase horizon of 3 months or less—even stronger than overall site satisfaction. Close to 70% of respondents who completed their onsite tasks also expressed an increased likelihood to purchase a vehicle further to their website visit. This share fell to 63% among visitors who reported that their overall site satisfaction was “Good” or better. These findings stem from a dataset of more than 15,000 respondents; therefore, the sampling error is negligible.

Task completion is a sensible, simple, and powerful metric. Most importantly, it ties back to hard actions taken by visitors. While respondents can be more forgiving when reporting their satisfaction with a website or their loyalty patterns, often opting to cling to a safe, noncommittal response, when they are asked whether they completed their tasks, it’s a cut and dry equation—they either did or they didn’t.