Tell those who, unlike me, don’t know you a little about yourself.

It could be a long story! I started nearly 25 years ago as a software developer, analyst, system administrator and DBA for a research project—with access to the Internet. When the web came out, I had the chance to install a server so we could document our research, and I naturally looked at log files—just like any other IT system.

Be it in my days at the Montreal Stock Exchange, at Softimage, a break-through 3D animation software company, at Bombardier Recreational Products manufacturing, or Desjardins financial & insurance services, and many others, I gained experience listening to business requirements and striving to come up with original, yet optimal and realistic, solutions.

To strengthen my skills I completed an eBusiness MBA, and on top of my role as Director of Strategic Services at Cardinal Path I also teach a graduate-level course on digital analytics from a managerial perspective, have been tutoring the UBC web analytics program for years, do R&D on both the technical and conceptual aspects of web analytics: WASP (now owned by iPerceptions), gaAddons, the Online Analytics Maturity Model (OAMM for short)… I served on the Web Analytics Association board of directors, I’m quite active in the web analytics community on Twitter, Google+ and locally.

You’re going to talk about your Online Analytics Maturity Model. What compelled you to create it, and why should organizations use it?

It was a coincidence based on two things: first, there was a debate amongst my peers about whether web analytics was hard or not—a topic that surfaced again in the last couple of days! Second, I was completing my MBA and was looking for a good topic. At first, the University asked me if I could create a course on web analytics, but I asked to spend more time and looked into why so many organizations are failing at web analytics while some of them really become analytical competitors, as Tom Davenport would put it. I did interviews, leveraged my own experience as a practitioner and consultant, looked at other disciplines such as marketing, finance, business analysis, business intelligence, etc. It turned into a much better course and a proposal for the OAMM.

Models are no magic, they are imperfect and evolve over time, and that’s OK. That being said, OAMM is an incredible opportunity to take a step back and think about your, and your organizations’, strengths and weaknesses. Lots of people would like to use it as a benchmark, but I recommend doing an introspection before looking at others. Engage your managers and business stakeholders in the process, and use it as a change management tool and a great way to spark discussions!

Who should listen to your presentation?

I would be tempted to say “everyone”! From junior analysts, to senior executives, the concepts exposed in the OAMM will help web analysts better understand how they are contributing to the overall business, and executives will get a better grasp on why the web analyst role is really one of change agent.

What role does eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit play in the field of web analytics and testing?

eMetrics is the must attend event for anyone in the field. eMetrics is our de-facto industry event, and the official event of the WAA where practitioners, consultants, vendors and anyone gravitating around our field get together. I first attended in 2007 and I’ve since been every year, speaking over 15 times in San Francisco, Washington, Toronto, London, Paris and for the first time, Stockholm!

At eMetrics I met people who inspired and helped me in my crazy projects: Jim Sterne, Avinash Kaushik, and Bryan Eisenberg. I met people who I’m now closely involved with at Cardinal Path: John Hossack, Alex Langshur, and Justin Cutroni. I met some of the 700+ students I tutored at UBC over the years, and I met clients and prospects. In fact, I’ve met so many people that I should stop here!

You have spoken at eMetrics in many locations, and been a key driver for eMetrics Toronto. What do you hope to get out of eMetrics Stockholm?

The challenges we face in our web analytics practices are pretty much universal. Sharing my work in Stockholm is a great opportunity to continue to gather feedback from the field that will contribute and encourage me to continue working on this long and tedious project. Of course, in the same vein as the previous question, I’ll get to meet people I’ve only met virtually and renew with old acquaintance: yourself, Brian Clifton, Steve Jackson, and many others.

So, once and for all, is web analytics hard or easy, and should we talk about marketing optimization or business optimization?

Building a cathedral during the middle ages was hard, landing on the moon was hard and complex, resolving the economic crisis is pretty darn hard… Running a business is hard. As analysts who are supposed to measure and optimize; analyze a complex business environment and processes, we’re not very credible if we keep running around complaining our job is hard! Go ahead, ask anyone at your workplace if their job is hard—any disciplines—from the guy sweeping the floor at night up to senior executives. Guess the answer! (Hint: if they don’t say it’s hard.. they should be fired!)

Yes, indeed, web analytics is hard when we don’t address and keep a balance between the six critical process areas exposed in the OAMM! So, is web analytics easy? Maybe not, and that’s why our field is so interesting! Stop complaining and do something about it today! Register for eMetrics Stockholm!

Marketing optimization or business optimization? I believe our job as analysts is to understand a business context, get the facts— the data, understand the process, and come up with the most optimal and realistic recommendations (and yes, creativity plays a role in here too!) That begins with our ability to understand our own job and the process of doing analytics. Next, you’ll certainly agree marketing is a process..

Voilà! I prefer to think in terms of business optimization just as much as I think of analytics rather than the more narrowly focused “web analytics.”

Believe me, the future is bright for analytics and business optimization!

What are you going to talk about?

Jim Sterne: Social media metrics are the mechanistic tabulation of online activity in a realm that is more social than it is media. Not only are we trying to capture numbers about human interactions, we then have to present those numbers to other people in a meaningful way. Both of sides of this equation requires a great deal of human understanding.

Brian Clifton: A couple of areas this time: “What GA can and cannot do”, and “Measuring Success in Social Media” (with Google Analytics). I am also interested in discussing the issues raised by the new EU Privacy law that came into effect on May 25th. This has a huge impact on how website owners handle visitor privacy, yet many are either unaware or confused with the poorly worded guidance issued so far by the privacy bodies of the EU member states.

Steve Jackson: What I’ve learned over the past 2–3 years and about how my role has changed since 2000. In the early days it was about improving the campaign funnel from acquisition to sales. Now it’s about learning about the whole customer life cycle and the variety of touchpoints (social, search, display, e-mail, SMS, MMS) in order to predict what the best channel is to attract the most loyal customers. I am now either developing or utilizing RF & RFM models on a daily basis across customer data as well as applying predictive analysis to plan marketing activities. It’s not about any single tool (like web analytics) anymore, it’s about being able to adapt and integrate a wide variety of tools and present information that works for the business.

Who should listen to your presentation?

Jim Sterne: Anybody who is engaged in social media for business and everybody who is trying to quantify the results of their social media marketing efforts.

Brian Clifton: Clearly my focus is on Google Analytics, though my methodologies for social media tracking are applicable to any web analytics tool. Historically, there have always been two types of people involved in web measurement—implementers (webmasters, developers) and end-users (marketers, PR professionals, content creators). What I attempt to do is bridge that gap by getting end-users to provide the direction for the implementors, i.e. work with them so each can make informed decisions. Not as easy as it sounds. Essentially, I am saying both types should come along and listen in!

Steve Jackson: Anyone who is struggling to make sense of multi channel and wants to answer the question “where is my marketing effective and why?” 

What role does eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit play in the field of web analytics and testing?

Jim Sterne: While social media lets us all engage from all over the world, meeting face to face is the heart and soul of human interaction. For many years, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit has been the gathering place of people interested in improving their online marketing—and now all of their marketing—through measurement. It’s the marketing analytics watering hole of record.

Brian Clifton: The key for any conference series in this field, is education. People, including myself, want to learn and grow their knowledge. From best practice tips and tricks, to learning by other people’s mistakes (showing mistakes as a learning aid, something that is often underrated by speakers, perhaps for fear of looking dumb—but it shouldn’t be). For new people to the web measurement industry, it’s often about being able to understand and set their own expectations. For example, what does a tool cost, how long does it take to install, what training do I need, when can I start getting insights, can I do this by myself or do I need a team? So it’s all about the learning..

Steve Jackson: For me it is the only event I regularly learn from in the industry. New ideas are presented here. New perspectives from strong practitioners who understand what they’re talking about. I have yet to see a presenter at the eMetrics flap over or avoid a question, there is always some form of answer, and if it’s not right there from the podium it is discussed in depth from the networking. Other events in my mind don’t hold the same form of prestige from a speaking perspective. From a learning perspective I would say the summit has a major influence worldwide on what is adopted and what goes by the wayside in terms of analytics and testing. 

Register now!

(the discount code INUSEINSIGHTS011 will get you a 15% discount)

The agenda for eMetrics Stockholm has been released and you can get the super early bird rate until July 15.

Read about pricing or register. You can buy a combined ticket if you want to attend more than one conference.

Expect presentations from the following people on this year’s agenda:

• Jim Sterne
• Brian Clifton
• Steve Jackson
• Jiri Brazda
• Mia Jung
• Predrag Nikolic
• and many more

You’ll also find case studies from Hurtigruten, FINN.no, SoundCloud, Yle.fi, Hi3G, Operation Smile, Doctors Without Borders, Web Guide Partner, and more.

eMetrics Stockholm is held entirely in English and is focused around web analytics, testing, marketing optimization, and continuous digital improvements. Its target audience consists of web analysts, CMOs, marketing managers, sales managers, CEOs, etc.

I’ve spoken at eMetrics Stockholm 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. There will be a presentation by my company inUse Insights this year as well, but it’ll be held by Antoaneta Nikolaeva (Web Analyst, inUse Insights) instead. inUse Insights has done some great work for several organizations. It’ll be great!

I’m also Chair of the advisory board, gold sponsor, and blog partner.

You can watch a video from previous eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits below.

>> Buy your ticket now to get the lowest price possible! <<

(the discount code INUSEINSIGHTS011 will get you a 15% discount)

Don't miss Web Analytics Wednesday after eMetrics.

At one point this blog was one of the voices of the industry, now others have surpassed it. This blog was born roughly at the same time as Avinash’s blog. Needless to say his blog has been a resounding success, and maintains its focus to date. Mine has room for improvement!

I would like to apologize to you, dear reader, for the low activity rate on this blog. I still enjoy going back to it though.

Web Analytics Wednesday Stockholm 2007

This blog is somewhat of a museum of web analytics. You’ll find web analytics memorabilia, old web analytics vendor comparisons (find interviews, screenshots, facts, and comparisons of tools that no longer exist as well as ones that are still going strong—I challenge you to search for any tool on this blog), the first eight Web Analytics Wednesdays in Stockholm (2006-2007), information about web analytics around the world (Australia, China, Korea, Thailand, Singapore, India, Brazil, Japan, etc.), countless of interviews with the CEOs and rock stars of our industry (including Avinash Kaushik, Eric T. Peterson, Dennis Mortensen, Bob Page, Jim Novo, Jim Sterne, and Seth Godin), old predictions (including my own crazy predictions and dubious observations), early mobile analytics, and more.

Other posts have ranged from free KPI development for a specific website to more hardcore GA API stuff to vendor research to broader concepts to comparing you to monkeys and my mom, and a lot more.

I’m particularly fond of some of the podcasts that I’ve made, like Web Analytics in Europe 2007 (widely appreciated), and the Roundtable Podcast on Testing.

eMetrics Stockholm 2007

If tools like Offermatica, Visual Sciences, ClickTracks, ClientStep, Optimost, and Widemile sound familiar to you, then you’ve probably been around the block for some time as well.

Over the years I’ve been instrumental in the release of a free Google Analytics addin for Excel, and the free code for a GA app for iPhone.

I’ve worked for Satama, started Digital Days Stockholm, and helped organize Internet Marketing Conference in Stockholm, Vancouver, and New York.

I’ve written articles about web analytics for several large Swedish publications as well as for the American Website Magazine (10 Terrific Testing Tips and Evaluate Editorial Impact Using Google Analytics), and been interviewed on WebmasterRadio.FM.

I’ve also spoken at numerous conferences, and helped make the program for eMetrics Stockholm 2010 and 2011. I took Web Analytics Wednesday and Web Analytics Association to Sweden.

What I’m most happy about though is taking the step I did last year. I had been thinking about what to focus on, how great team members are found, and how to build something where I can give something back. Well, in 2010 I was instrumental in founding two new web analytics companies: inUse Insights and Ampliofy. The former is a web analytics services company, and the latter is a product company working on four products based on Google Analytics. Being based in Sweden seemed like a good idea.

I’ve always wanted to build a company the way it should be built. It should consist of skilled, fun, helpful, and innovative people. If you think you can do things better, give it a shot. If you never try to do it, don’t comment on what others do. My goal is not only to grow the business, but to do so with generous employee benefits, and the ability to contribute to the community (both to the web analytics community and to greater good).

Ampliofy’s (the name is a combination of the Latin word amplio and the English word amplify) products will add data to Google Analytics, and show data in new ways. We have also developed a better, more advanced, professional version of Excellent Analytics. It has been coded from scratch to be more efficient. Keep an eye out for it! The open source version will still exist, but the pro version will add more power to businesses and organizations.

inUse Insights has been profitable from day one, we’ve recruited several people, and we have given away hours of work to charities.

If you e-mail me I always try my best to take my time to respond. I have never said no to meeting students interested in web analytics, I’ve found many people work (not only for my own company), and I’ve given plenty of free support for Excellent Analytics. Don’t hesitate to ask anything. I’m very busy, but I try my best to help. Just don’t take advantage of it by trying to get free consulting for your business.

See, I’m not dead. I’m just very busy! Once again, my sincere apologies for this blog being so dead. I hope to find time to change that!

Though I have that book I’ve promised to write too..

In the meanwhile, check out the Swedish blogs I’m a frequent contributor to:
Webbanalys.nu
inUse Insights’s blog

It’s an initiative by me and Christoffer Luthman. The Analytics Manifesto was developed to unite all stakeholders in web analytics about some core principles.

• People over Tools
• Change over Condition
• Actions over Reports
• Tests over Assumptions

Have a look at the manifesto, see if you agree, and like it on Facebook if you do. Go to the page, read the manifesto, scroll down to the bottom, and “sign” if you agree.

If you don’t measure, you can’t analyze. If you don’t analyze, you can’t improve. Get Google Analytics if you’re not already using a tool. It’s free, so there is no excuse not to use it. And, yes, it works for intranets, too.

One of the first things you need to do—a step that is easy to miss—is to make sure you filter out writers and editors from your stats. Otherwise you’ll get inaccurate data.

You are not allowed to store personally identifiable information (such as social security numbers or names) in Google Analytics. You may, however, store data that can group visitors together in different clusters. For intranets that may be things as divisions and departments. For websites it could be consumers and businesses. By using custom variables to group visitors together, you’ll be able to analyze how different groups of visitors behave.

Keep in mind that file downloads are not automatically tracked by Google Analytics. If you want to track, say, PDFS, you need to trigger a virtual page view when a visitor is clicking on links to them.

Six measurements to maximize the impact of your content
Here are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) you can track to see how well your information is performing. There are many different things that can be measured—which KPIs are best to track varies from company to company, site to site. If you feel uncertain, talk to a web analytics consultant.

Too many pages and don’t know where to start? Prioritize which pages to optimize by looking at such things as bounce rate, read rate, $-index (monetary or goal value contribution) and satisfaction. Also check page view volume (tells you something about impact) and number of entrances (tells you how relevant the bounce rate is). Some of those metrics require additional configuration and JavaScript code on your website.

1. Readings per writer and writer impact
Find out how many times articles by a particular writer are being read, the number of conversions that happened during visits where the writer’s content was read, how long those visits lasted (best measured in intervals, use the Length of Visit report under Visitor Loyalty), and more. This is done by segmenting and creating custom reports based on a custom variable, as described below.

How to measure it: You need to edit the tracking script on your website that is used by Google Analytics. Trigger a page-level custom variable after a certain number of seconds on a page. Base the timer on a reasonable amount of time it takes to read an article. Add the name of the writer to a custom variable and the URL + “(read)” in _trackPageview(). This will result in the writer’s name being tied to the page and the page being marked as read. In “Top Content” you’ll have two entries for article1 looking like this: “/article1/index.php” and “/article1/index.php (read)”. You can filter the Top Content report by “(read)” to see how many times different articles have been read. If you only want to look at articles by a specific writer, use an advanced segment based on the custom variable containing the writer’s name.

Keep in mind that triggering an extra page view, as will be done above, will affect other metrics such as number of page views, page views/visit and bounce rate.

2. Page impact
If you have configured goals, you can find out how frequently visits, during which a certain page was viewed, led to goal completions and what the total goal value was for those visits. How well have those visits performed compared to other visits?

How to measure it: Create an advanced segment including only visits during which a specific page, or a certain group of pages, has been viewed.

3. Satisfaction
Measuring visitor satisfaction per writer and page adds an important extra dimension to your analysis. Imagine if you could find out how satisfied readers of specific writers are? Well, you can!

How to measure it: There are two ways. You can incorporate the possibility to give a rating for an individual page, or you can trigger a survey after the user has done certain actions, spent a certain amount of time on the site, or left the site. The key is to store the grade in Google Analytics. By combining behavioral and attitudinal data in Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see how frequently certain pages, or writers, have been involved in high and low satisfaction visits. Survey data can be stored as custom variables or virtual page views depending on what works best for you.

4. Time spent writing vs. reading
This measurement can tell you if there are pages that readers spend less time reading than the writers and editors spend creating. It is particularly valuable for intranets or websites with low traffic. If you spend a lot of time on an article and few people read it you’ve either failed at marketing the article or it’s simply not appealing to readers. Besides learning what content works best, this KPI will let you know how well writers are spending their time.

How to measure it: This requires a CMS hack.

Caveat: It will paint the true picture only if all writing is done directly in the CMS.

5. Unread pages
Pages need to generate at least one page view to be included in Google Analytics. Pages with no views won’t be listed. If you do not track unread pages, you won’t be able to accurately measure the average amount of page views per article or the average amount of readings per article. Both of those metrics are valuable to look at to evaluate content.

How to measure it: To find out which pages did not generate a single page view or reading, you need to match a list of pages from your CMS with page view data from Google Analytics. I recommend using Excellent Analytics, a free plug-in for Microsoft Excel, when combining data from Google Analytics with data from other systems. You can download it for free from: http://excellentanalytics.com/.

6. Cost per reading
Some organizations have goals stating that writers need to produce a certain amount of articles per week. I believe that it is more important to measure the impact of a writer’s articles.

How to measure it: Cost per reading = writer cost/number of times the writer’s articles have been read.

Better articles should generate more readings. Writers should strive to achieve a low cost per reading and a high satisfaction score.

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, at the end of September.

At eMetrics you’ll be able to listen to speakers like Vicky Brock, Brian Clifton, Steve Jackson, Erick Barney, Kristoffer Ewald, and Oliver Schiffers. There will be nearly 20 speakers during the two days the conference lasts. Yes, I will speak too. Have a look at the rest of the agenda.

On the evening of the first day of eMetrics there will also be a Web Analytics Wednesday.

Both events are part of Digital Days Stockholm.

Use the discount code WEBANALYSTS010 when registering for eMetrics Stockholm to get a 15% discount.

You can also become a blog partner if you’d like a link to your blog from the eMetrics website. If you’re lucky you might also get some free tickets.

Dissertation
A new dissertation about web analytics by Antoaneta Nikolaeva, a student at Stockholm University, became available for download this June:
A study of change management implementation in the context of web analytics

If you’re new to web analytics you’ll learn why continuous improvement should be the goal of web analytics.

Improvements:

• Get goal starts, completions, and value for all 20 goals
• Get name and value for all five custom variable slots
• Select time period (week, month, quarter, year) or make a custom selection
• Sort by a metric or dimension (ascending or descending)
• No more trailing rows from the last time you ran the query

Read more and get the new version