Analytics Avenue

Updated Note (11/20/2008): The post below dicusses the analytics found in the Yahoo! Sponsored Search interface (known as 'Conversion Only' analytics and 'Full Analytics'). It does not discuss Yahoo' s new web analytics platform called Yaho! Web Analytics. Information about Y!WA can be found by visiting: www.web.analytics.yahoo.com Yeah, you read it right. Yahoo has web analytics. And I'm not talking about just good old conversion tracking either. With the introduction of Yahoo's new search marketing platform (a.k.a. "Panama"), high end Yahoo advertisers now have the choice of choosing from two analytics options. The first option is the more traditional conversion tracking analytics. Or what Yahoo refers to as 'Conversion Only Analytics". Just like in the past, pay-per-click advertisers can place a java script tag (Conversion Tag) onto their confirmation page to help track form completions or shopping cart purchases. This conversion inf...

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