Measuring Success

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.

Privacy on the web has always been a contentious issue, as the vast majority of users wish to remain anonymous while browsing. However, little attention has been given to the privacy of mobile phone users. Hence I was interested to read the article on mobile apps from Sarah Perez: www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dear_iphone_users_your_apps_are_spying_on_you.php Compared to computer use, mobile phones have a greater potential to infringe on your privacy for the following reasons: Mobiles are registered to a unique user (legally this is very difficult to avoid) Mobiles are rarely shared (though this is more common in Asia) No such thing as “Internet cafe for mobiles”, user almost always use their own phone Mobiles broadcast their position by triangulating with transmitters typically with an accuracy of 500m radius (though with GPS enabled phones this can be much more precise). Putting the web analytics privacy debate into perspective Since Google, Microsoft and Yahoo entered the [...]

This accuracy post is an extrapolation of a section in Chapter 2 of the book which has led to a separate PDF accuracy whitepaper available to download for free. [updated April 2010 - see new post] Why is this necessary? Well, the question of accuracy crops up all the time on numerous forums and at conferences. Essentially many practitioners of web analytics worry about accuracy. Some vendors even claim greater accuracy than others (though as I explain in the whitepaper this cannot be true), and there is the inter-industry debate about whether off-site analytics (for example, Hitwise, comScore, Neilsen//Netratings etc.), are better at predicting traffic levels than on-site analytics tools (such as Webtrends, Omniture, IndexTools, Google Analytics etc.). I won’t go into that debate here, except to schematically illustrate the two different web analytics approaches in Figure 1. Figure 1 : On-site v off-site web analytics The truth is, for [...]