Analytics Avenue

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) ...