Measuring Success

My colleague Avinash recently presented at SES San Jose his thoughts on the current vendor space including: Visual Sciences, Omniture, IndexTools, Clicktracks, WebTrends and Google Analytics. As always, his talks are very engaging and thought provoking. For me though, one slide really stood out – the idea that a HYBRID web analytics tool can’t hunt – you need to view his presentation to follow that, but essentially the analogy is that HYBRIDs are not good as a web analytics tool. As Avinash knows, I disagree with this point of view, so I wanted to explain why here. By HYBRID tool, what is generally meant is the combination of the page tagging technique combined with logfile data to produce cookie fortified logfiles. This was discussed in a white paper before I joined Google – Web Analytics Data Sources . There are significant advantages to doing this as shown in the diagram [...]

Recently, the perception of ABCE’s role for the web analytics industry appears to have become blurred. Hence I wanted to post some comments here – these were also posted on the Web Analytics Association’s forum last month. ABC ELECTRONIC is the trading name of Electronic Media Audits Ltd. To briefly summarise from their web site: ABC ELECTRONIC is the industry owned, not-for-profit organisation that works with and for media owners, advertisers and media buyers to help them gain confidence in the data they use. The UK company performs many services but essentially conducts independent audits of client’s digital data to ensure it complies with agreed industry standards – as defined by JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland). To clarify, an ABCE web audit is NOT an accuracy report – it is a verification report for web site owners. Simplified that means ABCE auditors [...]