Analytics Avenue

My apologies for not posting lately but I am here to say that I have a good reason for that. I recently signed on to do some contract work with Yahoo in their Carlsbad, CA office and have been focusing all of my attention to my new work. As some of you may know already, Yahoo is in the early stages of releasing their new search platform to the world. From what I have seen so far, it is a fantastic upgrade to the current search product. In an effort to give their advertisers more information about their visitors, Yahoo has also ramped up their web analytics functionality. In my new position, I'll be be supporting Yahoo's high end advertisers and will be working towards bringing additional value to these advertisers through web analytics. These are very exciting times for both online advertising and web analytics and I'm very excited to be working with the Yahoo team. I look forward to helping them make this new platform transition a successful event.

During my consulting stint for an online electronics retailer, we came accross a "situation" where we needed to run an A/B test. Below is a description of the test and the results. Background The online retailer had 3 web sites that related to this case. 1. Site A - A main portal site (the branded site with the most visitor traffic) with direct links to their other sites 2. Site B - The retail site where visitors could shop for and purchase the electronics 3. Site C - The educational site where visitors could learn about the products before they made a decision to purchase In this case, the marketing team decided that they wanted to push the awareness a particular new camera product. To do this, the team created an internal banner and placed it on Site A (the high trafficked portal site). Upon clicking on this banner, visitors were sent to Site C so that they could educate themselves about the camera product in more detail. Once on Site C, if the visitor was interested in

I made this post on the Yahoo Web Analytics message board, but I wanted to post it here because I feel that it's important for anybody involved with web analytics to get an understanding of what's going on out there. There are petitions being put out by consumer advocacy groups requesting that the FTC investigate the regulation of data collection. Depending on the decision that the FTC makes, there could be a large impact on the way web analytics is used today. With that being said, I think the FTC is smart enough to see the value in web analytics and that it's not designed to infringe on a web site visitor's personal information. We all know that web analytics is designed for helping online businesses improve their site performance and marketing efforts. Anyway, here is my post. Feel free to read the article and leave me any comments. FTC Asked to Stop Microsoft's AdCenter http://www.betanews.com/article/FTC_Asked_to_Stop_Microsofts_AdCenter/1162502806 I'll bet

A couple of years ago, when I worked for a search engine marketing and analytics company, I was speaking to a potential client about his paid search engine marketing efforts. He was explaining to me how excited he was that he had just increased the traffic to his e-commerce web site by about 10,000 visitors. After listening to how he used Google AdWords and Yahoo to improve his ad rankings, I dropped a bomb on him. I explained how great it was that he was getting more traffic, but I finally asked him.... "So what's your conversion percentage for those keywords you bought?" He said, "My what?" I said, " Do you know which keywords work well and which ones don't ?" There was a pause.....he didn't know the answer. I then asked, "How do you know if the money you're spending with Google and Yahoo isn't being wasted?" He said, "Because I'm getting a lot more traffic." I then told him, "Do you realize that you can b

Today my blog surpassed the 100 visits mark. Thank you to everybody who has visited the blog, read my posts, and sent me positive emails about the blog. I tagged it with Google analytics and have been tracking its progress. According to the Geo Location report, I've got readers from all over the world! It's great to see how quickly web analytics is growing. Next stop....500 visits!

I changed my settings so that you no longer need to have a registered Blogger account to leave me a comment. Feel free to add your comments to any of my posts below. Thanks, Matt Lillig

What if I told you that I could be making $25 to several thousand dollars a month just by clicking on a bunch of online advertisements which I had no interest in? Would you care? What if I told you that some of these links I was clicking on were your links on which you're spending between $0.40 to $8.00 per click for? Let me put it this way.....I could be stealing away your hard earned money and burning a hole in your ad spend budget. I should have your complete attention by now. Well, according to the cover story in the October 2nd 2006 issue of Business Week, an investigation has revealed "a thriving click-fraud underground that is populated by swarms of small-time players, making detection difficult." And how easy is it these days to start making money off of click fraud? Too easy. A couple from Minnesota said they dabbled in click fraud last year and made more than $5,000. They employed a simple scheme in which they "set up dummy web sites filled with nothing but

I recently read a post on the Yahoo! Web Analytics message board that opened my eyes again to the pain of companies trying to forge ahead with finding a web analyst and getting involved with web analytics. In this case, the poster talked about how he had suddenly found himself as "the guy responsible for driving the web analytics strategy". Reading that quote immediately brought back memories from when I used to be an account manager at one of the web analytics vendors. I can't tell you how many times I heard war stories from employees who had received the news from their managers that they were now in charge of web analytics for the company. These clients would tell me that they were now expected to run the web analytics strategy on top of their current job descriptions. As an account manager, the first thing that came to my mind was "sympathy". Knowing what I knew about the time and dedication it takes to run a successful analytics strategy, I just couldn'

Does this scenario sound familiar??? You've got 3-5 traffic dashboards to update each week.... One major traffic presentation due each month.... 2-4 random employees asking you to pull data for their group and build a dasboard for them each week (by the way..."Make sure those reports are sent automatically").... and finally train different managers on the value of using web analytics. Sounds like a pretty busy job in itself, right? Wrong. I forgot one small part......you still need to OPTIMIZE THE WEB SITE! But how in the world is a web analyst supposed to find the time to optimize the web site when they're spending most of their time pulling data, building dashboards and reports, and training different groups of people within the company? Well, based on my experience as a web analyst, I believe one needs to work closely with their manager, prioritize their work, and be stern. No, not Jim Sterne (although, I'm sure that would be helpful in a web analyst position)

We all know that search engines (like Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search) are very helpful in bringing visitors to your site. But what about internal search engines? How valuable are they when it comes to the success of your online business? Well, they can be just as valuable (if not more) because they actually help bring visitors to your shopping cart. Whenever a visitor types in a keyword search into your homepage's internal search box, that visitor is essentially telling you, "I am interested in finding this product, I want to learn more about it, and I may even want to buy it!" But if your internal search tool can't provide the visitor with what they are looking for, then you may have just lost a sale. Beyond losing a sale, you may have also lost a potential loyal customer who (with a good first time experience to your site) might have purchased from you again in the future. So how does all of this internal search stuff relate to web analytics? Well, in order to build