Measuring Success

I have been following some interesting posts on the recent IBM acquisition of Coremetrics. The following three are from respected sources that all glow positively about the potential upside of the deal - Econsultancy, Eric Peterson, Stephane Hamel. However, I am not so convinced that the deal will lead to great success for IBM, or is the start of a coming “revolution” for the web analytics industry… and here’s why. Whilst the deal makes perfect sense – its a logical and smart with obvious synergies, remember that in 2006 IBM *sold* their commercial web analytics tool, Surfaid, to Coremetrics in the first place (though Coremetrics only used the WebSphere client base and not the technology). Clearly IBM did not understand the significance of web metrics in 2006 and nothing makes me feel that they do now… For me, the success of the web metrics industry today is due to the “simplification” that Google [...]

Collecting data is very straightforward – you simply paste a few lines of JavaScript to your pages and data will start to stream into your account. I am specifically referring to Google Analytics here, but the principal is the same for all the main web analytics vendors. Superficially that’s all there is to it. If you just wish to view visitors and pageview counts you don’t need an analytics specialist to help you – all you require are basic webmaster skills. However, products such as Google Analytics have 100+ reports so that you can analyse much more than these – in fact, regardless of how much traffic you receive, those can be covered in a handful of reports. So why do you need so many reports…? If all you require are traffic volume graphs and a site-wide conversion rate (i.e. the number of transactions divided by the number of visits), then you [...]

It never ceases to amaze me how much emphasis organisations still put on measuring website volume – “How many visits (or conversions) did our last campaign generate?” It surprises me because volume metrics are a very useful guide to failure – but not success. That is, low traffic and conversion numbers tell you that something went wrong. For example, wrong message, wrong audience, wrong timing, or a landing page error – but they are a very blunt metric for success. A key meaning for measuring success is knowing which visits and conversions are your high value ones. In other words, which visitors are the most profitable to acquire. This can be measured directly if you are a transactional site, or indirectly as new leads/contacts/advocates. That is the principal behind optimisation – focusing your efforts on attracting/converting your most valuable visitors and pages. Dave Chaffey is a SEO expert, distinguished author, active blogger, Google Analytics [...]

For those that are interested e-books (great for copy & pasting code) there is a PDF version of the Google Analytics book – Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics book, purchasable from Wiley.

I first wrote about web analytics accuracy in 2007 while working at Google. At that time numerous clients (big spending Google advertisers my team helped) were contacting their Adwords account managers asking why Google Analytics numbers did not match their AdWords click-through reports, or for that matter, match the other web measurement tools they were using. These of course are legitimate questions. However there are a multitude of possible answers – not what you want to hear if you are the end-user trying to interpret your visitor reports! The original accuracy whitepaper (published in Feb 2008) explained all of the possible accuracy considerations I could think of at the time. It was a vendor agnostic accuracy check-list to help the end-user, and those that you report to, get comfortable with the data, its limitations and how to mitigate these. Two years later and things have moved on. Accordingly I have [...]