Visitor Insights

Hi everyone, this is Olivier. I wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that I’m running for the Web Analytics Association Board of Directors.

For those who read this blog, I would like to explain briefly the reasons behind my nomination and why I’m asking you to vote for me (weird feeling now… requesting your vote! I feel like I’m entering into politics).

Anyway, I have presented my candidacy because I feel that our industry needs as much help and support as we can provide. And having been in the Web Analytics and Online Optimization space for more than 10 years now, I felt it was time for me to give back to this industry that has given me so much. My objective with the WAA if I have the chance to be elected is to put much effort in helping web analytics and online marketers solve the challenges of spending more time on what matters. For the past 10 years, and everywhere I go, it’s the same challenge.

What matters is the analysis, the interpretation, and more importantly the actions/recommendations/changes we can make base on the data that has been collected. Testing new marketing or web design ideas, improving the user experience, watching the online conversion rates increase, that’s what is fun and rewarding.

But unfortunately, most people are bugged down with data accuracy, implementation challenges, best practice measurements, etc. Too many individuals are spending their time trying to reconcile numbers, understanding and explaining why A and B don’t match as they should, figuring out the best way to measure specific web content (i.e.. flash, video, Social Media, mobile, offline data, etc.), and finally coordinating efforts with IT to implement (or re-implement) their web analytics tags for the 10th times to capture all this. There’s got to be a better way. And that’s the challenge I would like to tackle with all the players in this industry if I’m elected.

I really think that the WAA could be more proactive as an organization. Look at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and how they create web standards ahead of time for everyone, especially for technology vendors to follow. As a WAA director, I would love to list all the key challenges expressed by the WAA members (some of them listed above) and figure out proactive standards and best practices for measurement and implementation with all the key players in this industry so that WE (all of us) get to spend more time on what matters.

For more information about my candidacy, you can visit the WAA site.

I appreciate everyone’s support, and I wish you all a successful 2009.

Web Analytics online marketing, SEM, Web Analytics, web analytics conference, web analytics consulting

The new beta version of the Safari 4 browser is jam-packed with new features: 150 according to Apple. One of the most appealing features is called “Top Sites”, which is the ability to have your favorite sites shown as graphical previews, as shown below.

What’s so special about Top Sites? Besides the fact that it provides a nice graphical view of your favorite sites, it lets you know if they’ve also been updated since your last visit. That’s right. Safari automatically fetches for new site content in the background and lets you know (using the blue stars in the right corner) that your top sites have been updated.

While this is very convenient for the user, it introduces new challenges for web analytics practitioners. Primarily, the inclusion of your site in your visitors’ top sites means an increasing amount of artificial traffic. Primarily, if you’re in a situation where users of Safari place your site in one of their top sites and don’t end up visiting your site, the traffic will likely show as bouncing traffic. This results in an increase in your bounce rate even though the visitor never entered your site.

We have tested the inclusion of a number of sites in Top Sites and have seen the traffic registered in web analytics even though we never visited the sites.

Safari 4 is currently in beta, so only a small percentage of your audience is exposed to “Top Sites”. Once generally available, this is sure to cause an increase in bounce rates for some popular sites. More importantly, the Safari market share has been on the rise, according to the figure below by Market Share. The latest figures show the market share at 8%. This means that as Safari continues to gain traction, this problem is bound to get bigger.

So as you’re analyzing your data, keep this trend into consideration as it could impact your overall bounce rates.

Web Analytics, Web Analytics Reporting kpi, Web Analytics

In a recent post we covered a comparison between social media and pay-per-click traffic. We covered the fact that social media was almost as effective as PPC advertising. This post provides an update on the study, with additional data collected since.

The finding: Online PR has a long tail.

Here’s the analysis. At first glance, online PR has a short lifespan. Consider the figure below, which shows the traffic as a result of PR and blog coverage associated with the release. We can see that as expected, the site gets the majority of its traffic immediately after release, with residual traffic afterward.

However, the one thing that you don’t want to do is to stop the analysis shortly after the release. Based on our findings, the long tail of online PR matters. In this specific example, over a 30-day period, the PR traffic during the peak period accounts for 41% of the PR traffic. This means that the long tail accounts for 59% of the PR traffic.

Now let’s take this to the next level and look at the KPIs for the PR campaign. More specifically, we’re interested in cost per lead associated with the online PR campaign. For benchmark purposes, we’re going to compare these numbers with our PPC programs in place. This is shown in the figure below.

In this graph, we also see the impact of the long tail on this KPI. By looking at the data for a short period of time, we see that initially online PR is not as effective as PPC advertising. However, over time, online PR turns out to be a more cost-efficient method for lead generation than PPC advertising.

The conclusion is that online PR has a residual life that when taken into account makes it as cost effective a medium as PPC advertising. So when it comes to PR measurement, make sure that you take the long tail into consideration.

PR Measurement, Social Media kpi, online marketing, PR Measurement, social media measurement, Web Analytics