De retour de Paris après une journée à rallonge et un retour plus que mouvementé (le progrès ne vaut que s’il est partagé par tous), je voulais vous faire part de mes impressions sur le 2ème Forum e-Marketing. Avant d’attirer des commentaires, je tenais à préciser que ce billet ne porte que sur la journée du mardi 29 janvier et ne prend pas en compte les interventions du mercredi 30.
If you haven’t read about them yet, I suggest you take a look at Anil Batra‘s interviews of web analysts.
In the latest installment, our own David “Wandering Dave” Rhee answers Anil’s questions.
Excerpts:
What are the major challenges you are facing in this industry?
I think the entire industry is at a point where our ability to analyze goes beyond the ability of the tools to deliver unified data in a cost-effective manner. In other words, we can imagine many different data sets we’d like to correlate, but only very few of us can get the various data sources to play nicely with each other without spending an inordinate amount of time, effort, and money, most of which we don’t have access to.
Beyond that, most organizations aren’t yet at the point where they know how to take advantage of the insights web analytics, or rather, an analytics-framed mindset, can offer. As a consultant, I see mos firms struggling to implement a tool correctly, and after that, maybe to figure out some truly useful KPIs, then do some basic campaign analysis. Few organizations are at the point where multi-channel measurement is common, or where web analytics is used to help allocate marketing spend most effectively, or where true ROI is being captured, and good business decisions made accordingly.
Web analytics will mature as an industry, but part of that means that the skill sets will become better defined and more widespread, so that any firm that really needs an analyst will be able to hire one. Beyond that, web analytics and business intelligence will merge in terms of an aggressive approach to data analysis being applied to many areas of an organization — not just their web site, or even their online marketing, but all of the marketing, production, sales, and other operations. It’s neither easy nor cheap to get there, but I’m sure that those firms which can execute well on an analytics vision will certainly see unparalleled success.
A few months back, during our Web Analytics Day, Eric Peterson kept me mesmerized with his iPhone and I started counting the days when it would be made available in Europe. Then again, I gave in and visited an Apple Store while vacationing in the U.S. but that’s another story 😉
Anyway, as the Apple iPhone is gradually being launched across Europe (and eventually across the rest of the world), this phone is undoubtedly positioned as an ideal high-tech Xmas present, much to the pleasure of AT&T, O2, Orange and other telcos who signed exclusivity deals with Apple 🙂
No matter the take one may have on the topic of Apple’s marketing strategy, it is undeniable that the iPhone has left its footprint in the Web ecosystem. If only to comply with the excitement/hype/craze, quite a few sites have decided to make a copy of their site available for the iPhone. The first sign of the creation and adoption of iPhone-specific content can be seen in most web analytics tools, in which the market share for the Safari browser increases… but not linked to PCs or Macs! This increase in traffic, although somewhat modest, is an indication that Time Magazine’s gadget of the year is indeed an ideal portable Internet access terminal, with high usability and user friendliness.
Another telltale sign of iPhone activity is revealed in the screen resolutions report: check for a resolution of 320×396 pixels and bam! that’s iPhone traffic for you.
As you can imagine, the integrated Safari browser provides for a totally new web browsing experience for a mobile device with one major difference with other technologies: the iPhone does not provide you with access to mobile-specific web content but rather gives you access to mobile web content. (more…)
Orange, le distributeur officiel de l’iPhone en France doit se frotter les mains car l’exclusivité qu’il a récemment signée avec Apple lui assure de faire de l’iPhone un super cadeau de Noël high-tech.
En effet, même s’il n’est arrivé officiellement en France que depuis quelques semaines, l’iPhone d’Apple a vraiment apposé son empreinte sur le Web depuis sa sortie aux USA au mois de juin. C’est particulièrement notable dans les rapports de nos outils de reporting préférés, où la part du navigateur Safari augmente… mais pas sur Mac ou PC 🙂
Après une petite pause au soleil bien méritée, notre équipe Web Analytics tenait à vous faire part d’une bonne nouvelle qui fait un peu calendrier de l’Avent: vous allez très bientôt pouvoir profiter de la version française du livre The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators d’Eric T. Peterson! Nous sommes en phase finale de traduction et son titre en français sera: La Bible des Indicateurs Clé de Performance (KPI)
En effet, grâce au fait qu’Eric est devenu actionnaire d’OX2 (en sus du partenariat avec sa société Web Analytics Demystified), nous mettrons très bientôt ce livre en version française disponibilité au format PDF et… nous vous donnerons même un avant-goût de ce livre en vous faisant partager quelques-uns de ces indicateurs grâce à notre blog d’ici la fin de l’année.
If you had it installed already, you will notice an additional drop-down menu that helps you categorize your site and eventually, the get the best KPIs for your site and to compare your site against industry peers. Also, you can now enable/disable the KPIs you wish to see on the dashboard.
I had made a comment on Rene’s thank you post but it didn’t give due credit and visibility to the different organizations, sites, blogs and other publications who were kind enough to help us spread the word and bring you to this very successful event. So here it is, thanks again, folks! 😀
“Wandering” Dave Rhee here – reporting on last Friday’s second Web Analytics Day organized in Brussels by OX2, for which I had the honor of delivering a presentation about one of my favorite subjects, Social Networks, and more specifically, analytics which can help determine the influence of individuals within those networks.
Overall, the day went really well, and not just because the venue was well-chosen and food and cocktails were great, but because we had a very large proportion of actual web analytics practitioners present, and just enough of a vendor presence to help answer the questions which inevitably arose. Although a few people had to leave in the afternoon, the vast majority chose to stay until the very end (a good success metric!), and even though the day was full of information, the attendees were so engaged that we usually ran out of time before running out of questions.
Microsoft’s worldwide first look at Gatineau was certainly a surprise highlight for most attendees, and emphasized how much Microsoft values its European audience for Web Analytics tools, as well as how highly regarded OX2 is in the global web analytics community.
Watch this space for video highlights of all the presentations, including Stephan Loerke’s opening keynote from the World Federation of Advertisers, and Eric T. Peterson’s usual brilliance in summarizing difficult concepts in a way that makes perfect sense to the rest of us. And of course, our own Aurélie Pols, whom you know from this blog, provided an overview of running a web analytics implementation project smoothly, given her extensive experience in helping OX2 Clients avoid common problems with their own sites.
I led off my own presentation in the afternoon with the worst slide of the day: a very dense table comparing several media, including press releases, surveys, blogs, audio and video podcasts, discussion message boards, social networks like Facebook or Myspace, and immersive environments like Second Life. The comparison attributes included style, “coolness factor,” ability to control your message, the value of feedback you can collect, the level of intimacy and trust possible, what resources are required to commit to creation and maintenance, the primary risk factors, and finally, the best use for that type of medium. (more…)
Now that Eric has posted about this in the Web Analytics Yahoo Groups, I can share with you that the next 14th of September, during our Web Analytics Day, Ian Thomas, responsible of the Microsoft Gatineau project, will be doing the first public demo of the Bêta version of Gatineau.
If you’re in the Web Analytics Industry, you already know about Gatineau as many Blogs (including ours) have been talking about this product these past months. If you’re not familiar with it, Gatineau is the future FREE Web Analytics tool of Microsoft. So a competitor of Google Analytics.
As I was finishing up my meetings with René in Amsterdam on Friday afternoon – we are finally back in Brussels, after 2 weeks of France & The Netherlands – I read a mail coming from Mehdi on my BlackBerry, proudly announcing Avinash Kaushik had announced his Top Ten Web Analytics Blogs for July 2007 and our little pan European effort had ranked number 5. Lou Bega started singing in my head.
Mehdi’s enthusiasm was very touching as well as he joined us a couple of months ago, as young Google Analytics Jehdi apprentice. It’s refreshing to work with Mehdi as he is curious and being a former controler, has a different perspective on things. I am happy to discuss monetization of Web Analytics with Mehdi, while he gets his technical apprentiship from master Julien. Mehdi is also a natural communicator and loves to pass on knowledge. He will thus take over Google Analytics workshops from Julien, with some more support than Siegert and I had in our early beginnings 😉
While Siegert is still enjoying the Italian country side, Guillaume came back from France to upgrade our Unica installation, allowing me to play around with it some more. Fun!
Julien took a look at a Xiti account and we further discussed our interest to meet some Xiti people…
Yes, this is an open invitation: our position remains vendor independant and we are always open to discovering new, interesting, foreward thinking web analytics tools. It’s most of all about convincing my little business unit of the interest and added value of the tool in order to answer business questions, in a return on investment perspective for a web analytics project that would incorporate processes, analysis and results.
And René is of course setting up our Web Analytics Day that is set-up to take place in Brussels, on September 14th 2007, at the Federation of Belgian Enterprises.
Between that, a couple of clients and revered partners fill my days. Eric Peterson is one of them and he has things to say about Technorati rankings, upon which Avinash’s list is partially based. (more…)
Well here is as promised a preview of the Four Gurus For You Session that took place last may in San Francisco during the Emetrics Summit. As you might know the International Committee of the Web Analytics Association organized an online event during the Emetrics Summit. This session intended to the WAA members that couldn’t attend Emetrics presented the 4 most renowned Gurus in Web Analytics answering questions from people attending the event (even virtually).
Very shortly Brian will publish over an hour of video in the WAA website. Access to the videos will be granted only to WAA members, so here’s a good reason to become a member! For about 100 euros per year, you will have the opportunity to pick the brains of these 4 Gurus and learn what are their views in Web Analytics.
On the goship side, you will see for example Avinash throwing his mobile and even hurting himself with the table.
Don’t miss this opportunity and become a member of the WAA today! And if you like this kind of stuff, please state that it was one of the reasons you joined the WAA (we’ll make some more if there’s enough positive feed-back).
René
P.S. I haven’t selected this excerpt because it was my question, well in part only 😉 ; but also because it explains the 10/20/70 rule that Eric has explained in details recently in his Blog.
I’ve been playing around with blog stats in order to gauge interest and readership of the different posts we’ve rolled out over the past year and wanted to share some reflections. These findings and ideas thus stem from a simple copy-paste of blog stats for the last 365 days of this blog. I actually did this following a question asked by Chris Gemignani at the Emetrics’ blogger table about our blogging voice and if we had trouble finding it.
I do.
Maybe because I share this blog with my husband and the rest of my team.
Maybe just because I’m not always certain what people are actually interested in reading and how I could best optimise the time they graciously share with us by reading this blog.
And certainly because there are some wonderful Web analytics bloggers out there (too many to name and please watch René’s next blog post on the bloger table to get a list of very fine and smart people talking about fascinating Web Analytics related things).
So, in order to reach out to my blogging voice (again), I fist stumbled upon a post René wrote more than a year ago intitled “Why this blog?”.
The last 2 paragraphs are of interest and actually still apply and I will not comment on my waking up my husband at 2 AM… It goes like this
“Our aim is to make the market going forward and adopt Web Analytics. The era of websites seen as purely cost centers is over. Now we need to define business objectives and measure in order to report the ROI on the one hand and optimize the online initiatives on the other to maximize the returns.
We are also conscious that the Web Analytics learning curve is long and this is why we try to feed our clients with our knowledge to help them reach self sufficiency.”
Before the Emetrics Robbin Steif launched the great idea to make a table (or more) with Bloggers on Monday the 7th, so after the keynote speaches and morning presentations, Aurélie and I went to join Robbin as promised. The table in which we sat was too small to allow all of us to be in one table, but nevertheless we crunched as sardines to allow a maximum of us to join (we were 12 in table for 8 people).
I remember Ian Thomas complaining (joking) that there wasn’t room for him, but we then crunched again to make some more room.
From my right here is the list of people that was sited on our table:
I had brought my camera with me and I did a few video of our conversations. And Chris had been doing his homework and brought questions for the rest of us. Thanks Chris, this was a great idea!
Watch the 20 minutes of discussion (uncensored!)…:(more…)
This is the blog of WebAnalytics.be, a Business Unit of OX2, a pan-European Interactive Agency based in Bussels capital of Europe.
This Blog has been created to allow our team members to share with you and the rest of the world their ideas thoughts and views on Web Analytics.
And now, an internationalized, English version of 
Après une petite pause au soleil bien méritée, notre 
I had made a comment on 
As I was finishing up my meetings with René in Amsterdam on Friday afternoon – we are finally back in Brussels, after 2 weeks of France & The Netherlands – I read a mail coming from Mehdi on my BlackBerry, proudly announcing Avinash Kaushik had announced his 
I’ve been playing around with blog stats in order to gauge interest and readership of the different posts we’ve rolled out over the past year and wanted to share some reflections. These findings and ideas thus stem from a simple copy-paste of blog stats for the last 365 days of this blog. I actually did this following a question asked by 
OX2 Web Analytics Blog 