Analytics Avenue

I had a comment on one of my posts about the Assists report that I wanted to share because I think it's a good one to discuss. It read: "I have a question, normally the assist counts are bigger than conversion, why is this happening?cause I bet assist would be counted in a case conversion happens, so the counts of conversion and assist would be same or conversion could be bigger." For those asking the same thing when looking at your Yahoo! Analytics reports, here was my response: Good question. Sometimes you might see 2 Assists and 0 Conversions for a campaign and wonder, "How can this be?" This happens because the Assists are being attributed to other campaigns and not necessarily the campaign you are looking at. For example, let's say I'm looking at the data for Campaign A. Over the past two days I see that it has received 0 Conversions (meaning visitors clicked on the ad for Campaign A, visited your site, and never converted). Campaign A does however ...

Every month there is a comparison report released by ComScore that discusses the paid click search engine battle between Google and Yahoo!. For example, you may have recently read a headline titled, "Google moves further ahead of Yahoo in paid ad clicks". The press simply eats these reports up because they enjoy writing about the big battle between Yahoo! and Google. But if they ever took the time to break the data down and really analyze it, they may be surprised to see that while more clicks mean more money for Google, it also may mean a higher CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) for their advertisers. So are these reports really valuable to advertisers? Should advertisers think that just because Google drives more paid clicks that they should only use Google (because a lot of advertisers do think this way)? Since those writers don't have the time to sit down and actually analyze the real data, I decided I'd do it for them and help answer these questions. So here it goes (No...

Seems as though there's been a lot of talk in the web analytics industry these days about 'visitor engagement'. What is it? What isn't it? How you define it for branding purposes? How do you define it for other purposes? How do you measure it? I'm seeing it being discussed in many blogs and the topic came up many times while I was attending the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco last month. It's a good topic and it got me thinking about how visitors engage using online advertising efforts (search, display, email, etc). And in thinking about online advertising engagement, I started thinking about the value of the Yahoo! Analytics' Assist report. Here's a simple explanation what what Assists are: "Assists are campaigns that helped contribute to the conversion of another campaign". For example, let's say I'm in the mood to buy a laptop. I click on a Sony display (banner) ad and reach the SonyStyle.com site but do not buy. I come back 30 days...

I'll be at the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco from May 5th -7th. Hope to see some of you readers there. For more information about this large web analytics event, please visit: www.emetrics.org Matt

While many of you know that I support Yahoo!'s current web analytics products called 'Conversion Only' and 'Full Analytics', many of you don't know that I also support two other products here at Yahoo!. One product is our Sponsored Search API while the other is what we call SSP...or Search Submit Pro. What is SSP? Well for those that have worked hard to manage their SEO (free or organic or algorithmic) listings to meet Yahoo!'s web crawler needs, SSP is a paid inclusion program that allows you to easily manage those organic listings without having to tweak your backend system (meta tags, etc). Many of you may not know that you can use Yahoo!'s 'Full Analytics' product to track the performance of your SSP listings.....from click to conversion. You can even get ROAS (return on ad spend or ROI) data for e-commerce sites that pass us revenue information. But before discussing tracking of SSP using Full Analytics, let's discuss what value SSP brin...

As many of you have already heard, the next big web analytics consolidation purchase took place on Tuesday with the announcement that Yahoo! has picked up the industry respected IndexTools. This is very exciting news for me because I have first hand knowledge of the IndexTools product and I support Yahoo's current web analytics products. A few years ago I worked for an SEM agency in San Diego called EngineReady ( http://www.engineready.com/ ). By the time I got there, EngineReady had already made the smart move of partnering with IndexTools so they could take advantage of IndexTools' web analytics product and include it as part of their SEM consulting services. I say "smart move" because EngineReady was one of the early SEM agencies to understand the value that web analytics had on helping online (pay-per-click) advertisers' improve their CPA and ROAS goals. As part of the EngineReady/IndexTools partnership, my role was to help IndexTools improve their US presenc...

For those who couldn't get enough of the last Full Analytics video, Eric has created another training video based on one of our external training decks. Sit back and listen in as Eric walks you through Full Analytics for Yahoo! Search Marketing. http://eham1906.blogspot.com/2008/02/yahoo-full-analytics-overview-by-eric.html