This blog has moved

Dear reader,

After this blog took off as I’ve never expected , I decided to run the blog on the originial URL.

Please visit www.webanalyticsbook.com to view the newest postings and feel free to update your RSS Feed.

Thanks again for your support! Thanks to all magazines that quoted this site within the last 5 months.

Social Network Analysis (SNA)

Blog has moved to www.webanalyticsbook.com

Website audit company gets rid of page impressions

This blog has moved to www.webanalyticsbook.com

Avenue A / Razorfish releases new media analytics papers

Avenue A /Razofish released  a bunch of great insight papers in three major categories –  media analytics, Web analytics and customer relationship management. To view these papers visit Avenue A / Razorfish’s website

Just In Time Information
Joy Andrews + Carrie Cianchette, December 2006

The Collaboration Imperative
Shiv Singh, November 2006

Search is Search
Josh Palau, November 2006

Presentation Layer Best Practices
Frederic Welterlin, October 2006

 

Hitwise for sale

The Guardian reported today:

” Website traffic company Hitwise is reportedly putting itself up for sale for around £180m.

The firm is believed to have appointed investment bank Deutsche Bank as advisers, according to the Telegraph.

United Business Media and Experian are among those said to have been sent an information memo about the firm.

The company is owned by co-founders Adrian Giles and Andrew Barlow, as well as venture capital groups Insight Venture Partners and Allen & Buckeridge”

Not a bad price for a data analytics company. I believe that their numbers are the more reliable one’s. Congrats to the Hitwise team. Well done and good luck with finding a buyer

Free Webanalytics lectures

Webanalytics classes are usual expensive. Train yourself here with Ophir Cohen’s videos:

 Lesson 1: Tracking and Logfiles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQbX4Q9p4l4

Lesson 2: Javascript Tracking

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWMwllHjD34

Lesson 3: Cookies and Javascript

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfkd-KfndgI

Lesson 4: Metrics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJFifPt9rtw

Youtube numbers are fake

YouTube’s claims of serving 100 million videos per day are already proven wrong. I always wondered about high numbers like that, not only since recent controversy about Digg.com.  The number is obviously not accurate at all.

Pete Cashmore over at Mashable now proved that the numbers are fake. Pete’s fake profile currently ranks under the top 100 Youtube videos and already received more than 20000 views. He basicially uses a simple refresh trick that already worked with simple tracking tools about 10 years ago.

Not onlythe views are wrong, but also the length of the video is only 7 seconds.  So how much is a 7 second video worth in real life? 

The numbers are also fake, b/c users tend to launch a video and stop it. Like on your TV. I am not sure if Google knows about that, but it is once more proven that numbers can be easily faked.

Email A/B Testing straight from the hip

Harte-Hanks  announces the latest release of its Postfuture® e-mail messaging platform, Postfuture Enterprise Edition, Version 5.0. Harte-Hanks Postfuture Version 5.0 provides more than a dozen new or enhanced e-mail capabilities based on marketplace best practices, with the newest functions addressing e-mail testing, analytics and behavior-based targeting.

“This particular version is an analytics professional’s best friend when it comes to sizing up e-mail messages and campaigns,” said Brad Sanders, managing director, Harte-Hanks Postfuture. “Based on dialogue with our clients, and thousands of campaigns we’ve managed, we have built in automated campaign testing and best practice-driven analytics that make it routine for marketers to measure and optimize their e-mail marketing results.”

For testing, Harte-Hanks Postfuture Version 5.0’s Automated Campaign A/B Testing allows a marketer to create two or more competing e-mail versions, send them out to a portion of a list (such as 5% each), track response during a testing period, and then automatically send a composite of the best subject line and message copy to the remaining audience. Since the entire process is performed without further manual intervention, marketers readily can employ “champion-challenger” testing to maximize e-mail marketing open and click-through rates when an e-mail message is sent.

Hurry up and get Emetrics tickets!

This year’s Emetrics Summit is slated to be the biggest for the five-year-running conference series organized by industry luminary and president of the Web Analytics Association, Jim Sterne.

Registration for the first east coast Emetrics Summit broke all previous year’s records four weeks prior to the event, and the conference series is likely to see its third sold-out event in a row.

Seems like it is going to be a big event. Hopefully I will see some of the blog readers there.

Nielsen and Comscore ungergo media rating audits

According to Mark Shields over at Adweek, the Interactive Advertising Bureau is pressuring the two firms to increase their transparency and improve their methodologies—just as both prepare to undergo long-awaited Media Rating Council-led audits.

It’s been a long-standing tradition among Web publishers to occasionally gripe about their numbers. But in the last several months, what was mild grumbling has become a cacophony of complaints, as several top publishers call into question the validity of the traffic data being provided by the industry’s major third-party metrics firms: Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix.
 

Read the entire article at Adweek