Measuring Success

As readers of this blog will know, I am a strong advocate of online privacy… That may sound strange coming from a web analytics evangelist. However, if we as an industry do not sort these privacy issues out, there is a real danger that web analytics as we know it today will disappear completely.

So, following the recent excellent post from Phil Kemelor on The FTC Privacy Report, “Do Not Track” Options and Web Analytics, I wanted to also add my take here…

Improving a website without web analytics may sound odd coming from a data analyst, but its quite a common occurrence for me, and in fact, part of my day job as a website performance consultant.

Following John Ekman’s guest post on the two types of personas he has observed in this industry (Conversionistas are from Venus and Metrics people from Mars), I started thinking about how best to illustrate these. I consider myself a HYBRID – part conversionista and part metrics person (may be 50:50), and this case study illustrates the conversionista side of my work…

I had an interesting conversation with John Ekman at eMetrics summit in Stockholm last year. John was a new face to me and I admit to being particularly curious as to what his title entailed – Chief Conversionista. Thirty engaging minutes later and I was much the wiser!

John has an interesting take on the different types of people involved in website performance optimisation so I asked him to share his views as a guest post here…

This a nice (though blatant) attempt from the Small Business Trends website to manipulate social network connections. Essentially, any author who has written a business book this year will obviously want to be on this book awards list. Its a great way for their website to garner a large number of incoming links and mentions on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al.

No problem with that. In fact, I wish I had thought of it….!

So while, the winner will be the book with the most votes rather than the best reviews, I am blatantly asking you to vote for me if you liked my work

I was quite surprised to find the booking engine for EasyJet flights (the UK’s most popular airline website) will not work when I access it via my Chrome browser – either on PC or Mac. So I began to wonder how much that oversight/mistake is costing them…? Here’s my calculation…