Meet the Web Analytics Players: Vendors from major web analytics services each cover different metrics challenges plus answer questions about measuring success and their tools in general.
Moderator: Frank Watson, Head Search Marketing, FXCM
Speakers: Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Omniture, Inc, Thomas Grant, Director – Internet Marketing Solutions, Unica Corporation, Kristen Nomura, Sr. Account Manager, Google Analytics.
Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Omniture, Inc was the first on to speak, he went on to describe six types of analytics as they’ve grown more and more important over time.
Traditional SEM: Impressions, clicks, and conversion.
Making use of modern analytics entails mixing the traditional with newer analytics such as impression, click, site interactions with content with content, and conversion.
Universal Metrics: Bounce rate (those who leave after 1 page), time on the site per visitor, page view per click, “metrics, analytics,” “success events, or “KPIs” refer to the same things.
Conventional Retail Metrics: orders, revenue, conversion rate (orders/clicks), cost per order (cost/orders).
Modern analytics: Technology has led to the advent of analytical measures such as Average order value, visit yield, average retail, cart creations, cart conversion rate, cost per cart creation, checkouts, checkout conversion rate, cost per checkout, monthly unique visitors, average time on site, days since last visit, return visit frequency, advertising cluck rate, revenue per page, ad impressions, ad clickthrough rates, and subscriptions.
Lead generation metrics: leads initiated, total leads completed, lead conversion ratio, lead completion ratio, and cost per lead.
Financial vertical metrics: Applications initiated, applications saved, applications completed, application value, and applications approved.
Then it was the turn of Thomas Grant, Director – Internet Marketing Solutions to share his ideas. He talked about the evolving marketing channels, which entail a mix of both offline as well as online aspects, he acknowledged that a lot of conversions take place offline.
Further, he went on to discuss how his company Unica makes use of “Enterprise Marketing Management” and softwares to deliver value in terms of marketing efficiencies, customer dialog precision, and accountability across all channels.
He further described how the marketing system of record was cyclic.
1. Analysis— 2. Planning— 3. Designing & product— 4. Execution— 5. Measurement and repetition of the process.
In all this Web Analytics have acquired core importance, which make use of KPI dashboards & reports, frictionless ad hoc analysis, granular, visitor level insight to take critical management decisions.
Next up, it was the turn of Kristen Nomura, Sr. Account Manager, Google Analytics. Google has been at the forefront of Web Analytics, the Version 2.0 was launched in May 2007. She discussed the various new features from the software and how they are valuable.
The new features are:
Internal Site Search: It can get you answers to question such as What keyword phrase was searched? Who searched? When is was searched? What pages are visitors searching most frequently? And even What page did they began searching from?
All the data got from this information can be very useful to do an in-depth analysis about visitor’s behavior. This data can definitely take analytics to the next level, by understanding what the visitor is looking for after reaching the site, it can help you to update content, layout, structure etc to improve your site’s performance.
Event Tracking for Rich Internet Applications:
This feature comes in the wake of the issue that Flash, Ajax and similar media types do not show up in the analytics. So with this feature, the problem should be solved.
Tagless Outbound link tracking: With this feature you’d know where the surfers go once they’ve visited a website, or it’ll help you to know the “exit destination.” To implement this feature they’re developing a new JavaScript tag called ga.js. Since its based on an OOP model so it would be optional.
It’s being developed in a way that it offers the following benefits, It is a Smaller Source File and runs Faster, Professional developers should find it easy to read, It would automatically detect the server protocol, whether its http or https, and would consequently eliminate the security issues involved. And it would offer a Faster download for non-secure pages.
Currently the Urchin software version 6 from Google is in beta, it should cost $2995, you could also get it for free if you’ve purchased the advanced support earlier.
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