Official blog for the book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton
If you have an interest in measuring the success of your website and you have heard of Google Analytics, then this blog, the Google Analytics book and the supporting services are aimed at you. Measuring Success - also the title of the first chapter in the book - is about using Google Analytics and other complementary tools, to measure the success (or not) of your website and how to optimise it.
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…
Predicting the future invariably means you will be wrong most of the time. However, it is an interesting process to go through as even getting just one prediction right can have a significant impact – to me personally, my business or my client’s business. So I was honoured when Daniel Waisberg asked me to look into my crystal ball for what may happen in the world of web analytics in 2011. Here’s the summary of my predictions:
Germany is an interesting market from a web analytics perspective. The government their is pushing the privacy debate (and the boundaries) on how visitor data can be collected, what constitutes personally identifiable information (PII), and what control the actual visitor has over the whole process of collecting their visit history. I am a strong online privacy advocate, so I welcome the discussion.
When it comes to tracking offline marketing campaigns, many marketers are unaware of the potential of using their existing web analytics tool to measure success. Typically, the reliance is on traditional, imprecise data such as print distribution figures (a.k.a. readership numbers), viewing figures (TV audience metrics), or footfall metrics (“20,000 people walk pass this sign every day”).
However, none of these metrics can provide any indication of success. That is, was my print, TV, or radio ad successful? Yet, if these readers, viewers or listeners visit your website as a result of exposure to your offline campaign, you can access a rich stream of success metrics. This whitepaper is a how-to guide to track your offline marketing efforts.
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 Read the full article…
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