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.

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Universities
Web analytics has not really become a top subject at universities yet. On one hand there are two-day courses like the ones at University of Toronto (course) by June Li and the four longer courses offered by The University of British Columbia (UBC). I took all four courses through UBC a few years ago and received their Award of Achievement in Web Analytics. I highly enjoyed the courses and was asked to become a tutor for a couple of them shortly thereafter. Unfortunately I had too much on my plate to be able to squeeze it in at the time. Sadly. I think the all star team at UBC is doing a great job though.

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.

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I’ve created Digital Days Stockholm, a nonprofit initiative. For four days this September, the capital of Sweden will host a number of events gathered under the Digital Days Stockholm umbrella.

Anyone can hold an event and be included on the Digital Days Stockholm website as long as the event is related to the Internet in some regard. It does not cost anything to be listed on the Digital Days Stockholm website.

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, Search Marketing Expo (SMX), and Nordic Telecom Summit are all part of Digital Days Stockholm. Expect many more conferences, seminars, and other events to be added the next few weeks.

Detailed information about each event is available on the website.

Read more about Digital Days Stockholm.

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Excellent Analytics v. 1.0.0.49 has been released. News include dimensions for AdWords, date selector improvements, filter fix, .msi as an option for installation, and improved content handling for cells.

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Excellent Analytics v. 1.0.0.48 has been released.

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

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What made you write the book “Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment”?

Social media is all the rage. It’s the Shiny New Thing and everybody is jumping up and down, saying, “It’s the most important development of the decade!” I happen to agree, but once the excitement is over, once one understands the principals of being sociable online, the question remains: How do I measure the value that my social media efforts bring to the organization?

For the individual, the payback is clear: Ego pumping, respect building and friendship embellishment. But for a brand, a product or a company, we need to focus on how to measure the results of a business investment.

Who’s your target audience?

Marketing people. Social media experts will look at this book and think, “Yeah, that makes sense. I knew that.” For the other 99.99% of marketing people on the planet, this is an introduction to the business logic of social media. For those who are excited about social media, this book gives them the ammunition they need to explain their desire to spend money to others in their organizations.

Isn’t social media just a buzz phrase created by consultants? Others just call everything “Internet”. I mean, why is it important to talk about social media measurement specifically now that it’s is such an integrated part of the web?

The “World Wide Web” is just that piece of the Internet where websites live. Email is separate from the Web. Newsgroups and discussion forums are different animals. Blogs, video sharing, tweeting and more are all on the Internet but are not of the Web. So why not just talk about Internet measurement? I prefer to talk about marketing measurement.

We used to talk about marketing as being Above The Line (advertising, branding, positioning, etc.) and Below The Line (marketing brochures, seminars, face-to-face sales calls, etc.). Both of those still happen on the Internet. Social media is a new animal. So while we have the old metrics of reach, frequency and attitude above the line, and various measures of engagement in the sales pipeline and business outcomes below the line, we now have a means of listening to people talk about us out there. Measuring overheard public opinion is different from “market research” which is measuring what people tell us directly.

Can you name the three best success stories of data-driven social media initiatives that you are aware of?

This is all evolving so fast that examples are old before the end of the sentence. Amazon succeeded so well because they invited people to write and post book reviews in their online store. That was social media before we knew to call it social media.

Companies have been asking for feedback from the start. But when Dell (Idea Storm), Starbucks (My Starbucks Idea) and Pepsi (Pepsi Refresh Project) turned over the ranking of that feedback to their customers that things really took off.

What’s the best social initiative? Depends on what the organization’s goals are. What’s the best data-driven initiative? Any program that actively monitors their result and adjusts their strategy and tactics in response.

Every time something new and fresh comes around there’s a risk that we enter geek mode and start measuring things that don’t really matter—do you think many organizations have lost themselves in pointless metrics rather than what drives revenue up, costs down, and increases satisfaction?

I think early adopters are guilty of getting lost in pointless metrics just because there’s data.

“Oh look! There were only 3 “u”s in the previous sentence but more than 10 “e”s. How does that compare to writings from all our other customers?! What might that tell us about Jim’s propensity to buy??”

But these are early days. Many companies are taking their time and deciding what counts rather than simply look at what can be counted.

What would you say to those who have number of followers on Twitter as a KPI?

I’d say, “Gee, you must be the most popular kid in school.”

Engagement: metric or excuse? Final verdict?

Engagement is a very real metric but it’s not a standard. A kilometer is a standard. Effort, drive, ambition are all critical and relative, but they are not numerically comparable.

You can find Jim’s book on Amazon or through your other reseller of choice.

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I made a video to inspire businesses to achieve more. Enjoy!

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I’ve written an article about measuring online content for the latest issue of Website Magazine.

A teaser:

“Many editors feel that once content has been created and uploaded, their job is done. That’s not true. If you don’t measure, you can’t analyze. If you don’t analyze, you can’t improve. And the easiest way to analyze is by implementing Google Analytics. It’s free, so there is no excuse not to use it. And, yes, it works for intranets, too.

Using Web analytics, you can measure the effectiveness of content. It is possible to measure how well the content is performing even for purely informational websites, including intranets, that are not supported by advertising or product sales.”

I suggest six things to measure in the article:

1. Readings per writer and writer impact
2. Page impact
3. Satisfaction
4. Time spent writing vs. reading
5. Unread pages
6. Cost per reading

Read the article online or purchase the printed magazine to continue reading.

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I made a podcast about web analytics in Europe back in June 2007. I now figured it was about time to ask three experts about the progress made since then. After all, nearly three years have passed.

The experts whom I’ve interviewed this year:

• ¤ Dennis R. Mortensen. Entrepreneur, Author and Director of Data Insights at Yahoo!
• ¤ Steve Jackson, Author and Director of Business Insights, Kwantic
• ¤ Aurélie Pols, Senior Partner, Web Analytics Demystified

This time all interviews were carried out through the use of e-mail.

Do you think that the challenges businesses are facing have changed since 2007?

Steve: The speed of technological innovation has been and continues to be the biggest challenge in my view. Marketers were just getting their heads around email and search engine marketing. Now because of the way social platforms have matured for example digital marketers have to get ahead of another learning curve.

The paradigm has changed, businesses need to connect with consumers on their terms. Pushing offers no longer works the way it used to work. If a direct mail piece lands on your doormat or into your inbox while you may read it just like you did before you now have the ability in less time than it takes to make coffee to check out if your friends are recommending similar products/services from anywhere in the world. The speed of this change is what I see being the main challenge today, it’s taking a while for many marketers to catch up and learn about digital marketing in the 21st century.

Then comes the measurement promise related to digital. If you believe vendors it’s all 100% measurable. In theory it is but in practice it rarely works like that.

Dennis: There is little doubt in the circumstance that, any business that has a for them significant online presence, has become more data driven. And being data driven online today, will for the most part equal the use of a Web Analytics product or more broadly, a set of online business optimization technologies.

What used to be neat, nice to have and a bit adventurous back in 2007, from a data point of view, is now not only expected as ordinary online business practices, but more aggressively, a direct company disadvantage if not applied. There is not one serious online marketer who would dare to run an online campaign without a data output.

So have we changed? You are damn right! And the challenge that came with that transformation was the assignment to do, as a minimum, a proper web analytics deployment. From collecting data on- and off site, to report well defined key performance indicators to a large set of stakeholders and to continuously derive new insight from the data and be actionable on them. You must do this today and if you don’t, I believe the smarter folks in the organizations out there understand that a negative spiral is forming.

Aurélie: Today, there is no real discussion about the need for web analytics, or site centric measurement as the audience measurement guys like to call us, so that’s a big difference. As budgets are shifting, there is an increased need for accountability.

As budgets are shifting and more is being measured, it also means that companies are facing a multiplicity of data and risk getting locked into the accuracy debate, induced by a lack of trust in the differing numbers.

This reality is often addressed in our industry by a “get over it” attitude, which is totally defendable but does not fly within larger organization. One should therefore make sure that best practices are being used when it comes to measurement and quality control will have to become part of the processes. The numbers will certainly continue to differ, as it’s inherent to the technologies used, but at least measurement will be done in the best way possible. It sounds silly but this makes a world of difference when you stand in front of a boardroom and have to defend your work.

In terms of vendors, players more focusing on data integration such as Unica or SAS but also Teradata and MicroStrategy, are looking at owning a slice of the digital cake. We’ve seen an increase of APIs being available. The question is not anymore where the data should sit but how to give business users access to it in order to support their decisions and act upon the findings.

Enough has been said about the lack of action, despite multiple communications about successes due to optimization. Lack of action is inherent to an organization’s structure and will change once there is a clear and fundamental monetary need for it.

From a human resources perspective, ubiquity of information is pushing companies to rethink how they’re using data, and who gets access to what.

It used to be very limited as those DW projects where expensive and slow moving.

This is not the case anymore: data is becoming ubiquitous and access needs to be granted. Technology and data are playing larger parts in our daily lives, just look at Nike+ and how many people actually track their performance, comparing and sharing it with others!

This means that, even though employees are certainly less loyal to a company than some decades ago, they will, in some way, need to be granted access to a company’s data in order to perform better, and make data driven decisions. That allows companies to compete on this last frontier of our globalized world as data needs to be linked to a company’s overall strategy.

Will we see Chief Data Officers, next to Data Protection Officers, reporting to Chief Strategy Officers?

Will it be, as The Economist claimed some time ago, that companies will be looking to evolve their infrastructure to allow for “a CIO who guards stable information platforms & a CTO who cultivates data-handling talent in the open market”?

I don’t know. Bob Dylan just keeps singing in my head about change.

What’s the biggest difference in Europe now as compared to then?

Steve: I’d love to say that businesses have stopped focusing on eyeballs and are focusing on conversion but it still hasn’t happened. I’m still working on that!

Social platforms in 2007 were altogether much less mature than in 2010. We’ve also seen a recession in which many businesses were forced to assess what they were spending their money on.

A good thing in my opinion. You could also say that the 3rd screen (the mobile phone) is about to explode as a marketing medium. The biggest difference to me, however, is that now you have to market to the individual rather than the crowd. That is a huge challenge for many businesses and the ones that learn how to start compelling conversations with people will be the ones that are successful in the next three years.

I believe we have the tools to measure the level and type of conversations going on but it’s going to be equally challenging to measure social interaction as anything else. The bigger challenge is whether businesses make the cultural change required to shift their marketing strategies from marketing to many to that of marketing to one.

Aurélie: Of course the financial meltdown comes to mind in the first place but let’s be honest, it’s not as if this was totally unpredictable! It drives me totally crazy when I witness what’s been going on in Spain since I moved there, as the government just didn’t want to acknowledge it for a very, very long time!

So budgets have shrunk but this serves us well: they are moving to the digital space. When you look at countries such as the UK where digital ad spends have surpassed TV spends, at least for a quarter, you can clearly feel that we’ve moved beyond the Internet boom & bust fear of the beginning of this millennium and that the digital space can’t be ignored anymore.

The second evolution is the introduction of the iPhone, supported by stronger regulations from the EU when it comes to mobile access and the commitment of the EU to support economic growth through innovation and broadband access: “a Digital Single Market based on ultra fast internet. All Europeans should have access to high speed internet by 2013″ (source).

Competitiveness in terms of productivity remains is a huge problem in the EU. I live in Spain..

Getting back to the iPhone, when you look at mobile penetration, compared to the Internet, it’s clearly going to be a huge catalyst as well for digital usage, not only in terms of basically browsing a website but also when it comes to specific applications that will change companies’ ways of doing business.

Look for example at Nationwide Insurance and how they’re using an application to change the way their claims department can now digitally handle requests. It’s a huge step forward. Disclosure: I used to work for Swiss Life so the costs related to inefficiencies in dealing with claims for insurance companies is a business issue I’ve been familiar with since the beginning of my career.

And this is just one example on how technology can induce change. We need creativity and understanding of internal processes in order to define how technology can serve companies more efficiently.

Looking more at the web analytics industry, both Google Analytics and Omniture have left their impact on the market, particularly in Europe. It’ll be interesting to see how Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture will impact the industry. Given that Omniture’s been present in Europe for some 5 years, it’ll also be interesting to see how their continuous relationship with existing clients will develop.

Getting back to free tools, thanks to Google, there has been a proliferation of technical support, pushing prices somewhat down in certain markets. With some 150 GAACs worldwide, it’s now a lot less difficult to get help when it comes to picking up and canning web analytics data. Other vendors have also done tremendous efforts to train people, either for free or for a fee, so that professionals with a couple of years experience can be found somewhat more easily.

Data integration between, for example, content management systems and web analytics tools have evolved quite positively compared to some years ago. Omniture’s Genesis effort goes into that direction. Vendors have also been integrating with other tools such as Voice of Customer (Foresee, OpinionLab, etc.), optimization tools (think A/B and MVT) or targeting tools, so this is a good evolution: integration is happening and more and more APIs are available as well.

While data integration remains one of the focal points, it has, however, been overshadowed by social media measurement where certainly integration plays a part. Think Radian 6 for example. Other types of tools like buzz monitoring, through solutions such as Attentio, are also starting to get some serious grip. These tools seem to talk to a broader audience.

How do you think the European use of web analytics compares to the other continents now?

Dennis: Europe has for the most part been in the forefront and most sayings about the US or North America being a year ahead are just coming from opinionated industry folks, not actual research or qualitative surveys concluding so. Am I biased? Perhaps, I am European, but I do live in the US though. However, beyond just providing yet another opinion, I would like to reference an actual study I did on the subject:

Web Analytics Industry—International Pulse (US vs. EU)

Web Analytics Level of Advancement in the UK, Benelux and Scandinavia

If you are too busy to click through, the conclusion is:

In contrary to what is commonly understood, European web analysts are on an average more advanced than US web analysts. This fact is based on two fundamental conclusions; namely that European Analysts are requesting and creating more Enterprise level reporting and analysis and working less with simpler reports.

Looking at the advanced report requests usage in the UK, Benelux and Scandinavia compared to a global average – we see two distinct conclusions. That the Benelux region is the most advanced web analytics region in Europe (of the three analyzed), but more excitingly, that the advancement of web analytics in the UK is not only below the global average, but also surprisingly below US levels!

Steve: I would say that there is an improved level of awareness meaning that the adoption of analytics has greatly increased. It’s certainly much easier now to consult around analytics because you don’t have to educate as much about the tools. Generally digital marketers have made use of the free tools such as Google Analytics or Yahoo! Web Analytics, even if it is to just see the effect of their campaigns on the numbers. So from that respect I think there is an improvement.

On the other hand analytics has hit the headlines in certain countries in Europe for the wrong reasons. German legal experts claim that Google Analytics is illegally passing information to US servers while in the UK protesters got the EU involved over the deep packet inspection technology Phorm which compromises privacy in a big way.

The issues are treated very seriously in Europe and the vendors have to be very careful about what they’re doing. We could see a backlash against the industry like I witnessed when I mistakenly thought Phorm was simply another behavioral marketing system. I changed my position after double checking and realized that the Phorm technology was built on very dodgy foundations.

Aurélie: Due to my unique position as partner of Web Analytics Demystified Inc., focusing more specifically on the European market, I’ve moved from comparing projects on a pan-European level to doing so between the U.S. & Europe.

Unfortunately, budgets for tools are still far behind on the European continent.

And as we all know you need people to actually do something with the tools, the 50/50 or 10/90 rules are more than often difficult to justify. Add to that the fact that human resources usage in Europe is still less competitive than in the U.S., due to our inherent society, and you’re stuck with an interesting conundrum in these difficult times.

Companies are reluctant to hire and when they do, salaries don’t reflect the scarcity of qualified web analysts that we face in our sector. It’s one of the main reasons why we decided to set-up the Analysis Exchange: we need to train people to use the tools effectively and go beyond the pure tagging and report monkey tasks!

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel as I’m seeing commoditization of web analytics technical support, also in Europe. Fortunately also, I’m seeing online responsibilities moving up the food chain in their respective companies and being promoted to CMO for example.

A new generation is coming up but for the time being, when companies do hire, we’re not talking about senior people, who can address CXO levels with their findings in order to induce change of strategy. It will come but it will take time and varies per sector. Globalization and the deregulation of certain markets are driving change.

Think about a CMO who wants to have a better view upon what’s going on within the digital space in Europe: there is still no single pan-European solution available for audience measurement!

The fragmentation of the continent continues to handicap Europe versus the U.S., on different levels. We need standards that can be applied at least all over Europe as well as communication between those active in the audience measurement field, driving traffic to the websites at the cost of multiple euros. Using different lingo at all levels is not helping. It’s not about who’s right or who’s wrong, it’s about doing something with the findings, using those recommendations.

So, is it improving? Yes. It this specific to Europe? I’m not sure.

However, it’s interesting to note that local vendors such as Nedstat (the Netherlands), AT Internet (France), Webtrekk (Germany), RedEye (the UK), Snoobi (Finland), and Gemius (Poland), to name just a few, seem to hold their ground. There are also interesting European products out there that are adjacent to web analytics.

It partially solves localized support, even though U.S. based vendors have done part of their homework, and allows for adaptation to local needs such as multiple currencies, translation, and privacy restrictions, to name just a few.

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As a huge fan, and active practitioner of, testing (A/B and multivariate), I decided it was time to record another podcast about the subject. I invited some of the people who I think have done a lot in this area and are working with continuous improvements online.

Some of the topics discussed in this podcast:

• Where should someone new to testing begin?
• Does method matter?
• Is suboptimization a risk?
• Can we trust the statistics behind tools?
• What test result has been the most surprising?

Listen in iTunes
Or search for WebAnalystsInfo in iTunes on your device.
Download the podcast

The panel in this podcast about testing:

Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of several best-selling books: Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?, and Always Be Testing. He is also the co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Web Analytics Association. Bryan serves as an advisory board member of several venture capital backed startup companies (such as Bazaarvoice, iPerceptions, UserTesting.com, and ClickEquations) and is on the board of trustees of the Direct Marketing Education Foundation.

Lance Loveday is the founder and CEO of Closed Loop Marketing. His company has become highly sought after, serving a wide array of clients—from startups to big brands such as Hewlett-Packard, Brocade, and Lockheed Martin. Lance is co-author of the book Web Design for ROI.

Anne Holland is the publisher of WhichTestWon? and president of Anne Holland Ventures Inc, an online business media company. She is the founder and former president of MarketingSherpa, and has for more than 20 years been conducting tests and research into what works best in marketing.

Chris Goward is the CEO of WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization and an expert in website conversion rate optimization. Chris has been optimizing online and offline marketing for companies such as eBay, Epson, SAP, Getty Images, BabyAge.com, Rudder.com, Outrigger Hotels, and Google.

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