Awards for Excellence 2011 – Thank You
This will be the last post about this I promise! As most of you know the podcast that I co-founded and produce was not only nominated for but won the first ever Award for Excellence for Innovator/Technology of the year. I was in such shock and overwhelmed when they announced it that I fee like I rushed through the little speech. Now that I have had a bit to reflect on everything there are a few last things I want to say about this.
First, thank you again. Thank you to those who nominated us, thank you to those who voted for us, thank you for selecting this podcast as the winner.
Thank you Gretchen! And though this will not be nearly as clever as the Joe Megibow, speech where he thanked his family, I have to thank them. My wife has been extremely supportive from the very beginning. Without her support for all the time I sit and edit podcasts in the evening with my headphones on lost in the laptop this would not be possible.
Thank you Adam. You befriended me on twitter months before we started the podcast and you were excited and into this project from the beginning. Thank you for not just deleting the emails that I sent you about starting this process. Thank you for lending your vast knowledge to the podcast and the community.
Thank you James and Gary. Both of you guys really stepped up to help us get this podcast off the ground.
Thank you to all of our guests. I know that the listeners would have gotten tired of just hearing the same folks every week. You variety of backgrounds and experience help keep this podcast fresh and entertaining.
Thank you to all of our listeners. Holy Wicked Downloads Batman. Nearly 80,000 to date! Your overwhelming response to this is what drives us to continue and improve.
Thank you to the WAA! Thank you for putting together the Gala and the awards. We were humbled to be listed alongside the other nominees and finalists.
Shamelessly copied from the Web Analytics Association's web site.
The Beyond Web Analytics podcast should pretty much say it all. They've had pretty much every top person in the industry as a guest and take the time to discuss the thinking, philosophy and application of web analytics in an easy to follow discussion format. Much has been gained from listening to the episodes and they have positively influenced plans and development in the WA arena.
The podcast is product agnostic which is also nice.
There are other sources out there but they tend to be focused on a particular product or service and presented by an evangelist. Beyond Web Analytics dispenses with the thinly veiled sales pitch and instead delivers what anyone who's interested in the overall subject of web analytics wants and needs: a presentation of concepts, ideas and strategies that goes beyond products and vendors.
This podcast represents a unique resources on the web. What's more, the nearly 40 episodes cover all aspects of web analytics from best practices to strategies to usually ignored subjects like WA career development and finding/retaining WA talent. It is doubtful there is any other online WA resource that spans the web analytics world as comprehensively as this podcast.
Thank you to my friends and colleagues. Your support and participation on the podcasts and being about to share this moment at the Gala with so many of you is something I will treasure forever.
Thank you to the guests that we have not had on the show yet. We look forward to getting to know you and sharing the conversation with our listeners.
Thank you to our Sponsors. IQ Workforce has been great and even provided the shiny microphone we used at eMetrics to record some in person interviews. Thanks Corry!
And finally, thank you to my Mom. I wish she could have seen this.
-Rudi
X Change 2010 – Web Analytics Conference
For those that have attended the 2010 X Change Web Analytics Conference you know that it was an amazing experience. For any that did not make it, boy did you miss out! This was once of the best conferences I have ever attended.
Even with the conference attendance being limited to a small number, I had the opportunity to meet with and have really great conversations with most of the people there. The format of the conference is unlike anything you will find elsewhere. There are no speakers, no presentations, no sales pitches. It is as the title says an exchange of ideas among the attendees. The sessions or huddles as they call them are a focused conversation with 8-14 people who are passionate about the topic at hand. Each attendee is invited and encouraged to participate in the discussion and in the huddles I was apart of, almost every person there had something to offer to the conversation.
The huddles that I was able to attend were:
- Integrating Web Analytics and CRM
- Do’s & Don’ts when working with developers
- Turning around troubled Web Analytics deployments
- Moving from short-term conversion to lifetime value
- The myth of the “Universal” tag
Every huddle leader did a great job of keeping the conversation focused and on topic without limiting the natural flow of the conversation. And being able to listen to others in the industry that have struggled and had success in dealing with the same issues that I have faced. I was able to take plenty of notes and many take aways to put into action almost immediately.
In addition to the huddles there were multiple functions that enabled you to interact with your fellow attendees and continue the conversations from the huddles or branch off new topics with new people. The list folks I was able to meet and talk to were too numerous to list, but everyone there at the conference was approachable and eager to share their knowledge and experiences with others.
The Semphonic and Web Analytics Demystified folks really know how to put on a great event, and I am grateful to have been able to participate and I am looking forward to next year’s event already.
The best laid plans of mice and men
Over the past few months there have been several great articles about the amazing projects, mentors, and students over at the Analysis Exchange. This post is not going to be like those. Yes, the project was for a great cause, The Peoples Charter, and the mentor Ridder Manzanet, is fantastic. The student however....... me ...... did not do the project, or the Analysis Exchange justice. In short, I failed.
There are many excuses I could list, or hide in the shadows and hope that no one else would find out about this, but I won't. I knew when I took on this project that I did not have the time right then to work on the project and I should have not signed up for the project, but I did. Thankfully, Ridder, was totally committed to the project stepped in and did all of the work for the client. I sent my apologizes on to the client, my mentor, and even to Eric Peterson. All of which were extremely professional and really speak to the quality of the work and people contributing to the Exchange. It is because of this quality that I wanted to write this post. I truly do feel bad for the position that I put both my mentor and the Analysis Exchange in, but the more I thought about it the more I felt it really echoed what happens on many, many projects out there in the real world.
Things happen, deadlines are missed, and projects fail. That is a fact of life, not just in the confines of the measure community but in all aspects. I can not change the things that have happened in the past, all I can do is to accept responsibility for my inability to contribute on the project and make damn sure that does not happen again. Fail faster is a phrase you hear frequently in the measure community, now having earned that badge :/ it is time to try again. And try again I will. But this time I will be better prepared. I will take more time to evaluate the project before putting my name in. I will make sure I have the time to commit to the project. I will strive to make a positive impact on the project.
If you have already contributed to the Analysis Exchange, thank you for all that you have done. If you have not, don't be afraid to fail. Try it! If it does not go well, accept it, figure out what went wrong, fix it, and try again.
-Rudi
Share This Page – On Your Terms!
Build your own "Share this page" feature!
Not too long ago I added one of the "Share this page" scripts, AddToAny, to our web site. This seemed like it was going to work fine but this approach had 3 major drawbacks.
- Most of these services require you to link to their JavaScript file on their servers. Sure this is fairly reliable but I am not a fan of this approach.
- Limited tracking / analytic capabilities.
- Cookies you can not control.
The first two issues are not huge issues, but while we were testing the site, we noticed that the scripts were adding a few of their own cookies to our users. I understand why this is, but I did not like it and the feature was pulled. So I tested out another one, Share This, and it did the same thing. Not only do they add cookies to your users, but they are also tracking usage of their tool on your site. I don't blame them for this, after all they are providing this as a free service but I still do not like it.
After looking at the scripts for a while I decided that it could not be that difficult to write my own "Share this page" feature.
My goal was to create a widget to let users share the current web page without the limitations listed above. With just a wee bit of research I found the methods needed to be able to share a page via email, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And then track the usage of data in Omniture SiteCatalyst.
<ul>
<li><A onClick="jsFunctionToRecordClick('Email');" HREF="mailto:?subject=#variables.emailSubject#&body=#variables.emailMessage#">Email </a></li>
<li><a onClick="jsFunctionToRecordClick('Twitter');" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=#variables.twitterLink#" target="_blank">Twitter </a></li>
<li><a onClick="jsFunctionToRecordClick('LinkedIn');" href="http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=www.rudishumpert.com&title=AmazingArticle&summary=This is the best ever&source=Rudi" target="_blank">LinkedIn </a></li>
<li><a onClick="jsFunctionToRecordClick('Facebook');" href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?src=bm&u=#variables.currentPage#&t=#variables.twitterLink#&v=3" target="_blank">Facebook </a></li>
</ul>
Sample links without the tracking added:
And then the JS Function: Note the JS function is specific to Omniture tracking but this could be leverage for any analytic solution with some minor tweaking.
function jsFunctionToRecordClick(category){
var s = s_gi(s_account);
s.linkTrackVars="events,eVarN,propN,propN";
s.linkTrackEvents="eventN";
s.events="eventN";
s.eVarN=''+category+'';
s.propN=''+category+'';
s.propN=''+category+' | '+s.pageName+'';
s.tl();
s.events="";
s.linkTrackEvents="";
s.linkTrackVars="";
s.eVarN='';
s.propN='';
s.propN='';
}
The feature is added to the page using a jQuery menu script that creates the same mouse-over drop down effect that the free scripts use, but you can use any sort of presentation approach that fits your web site's style.
And that is it. You know have your own custom share this web page feature that your can style however you like and maintain complete control over what cookies are used on your site and what level of tracking you would like to get out of the widget.
Practical Analytics
Often when reading blogs and articles on web analytics there is lots of use of the term "Actionable". Well I'd like to talk about something else. Something that should please the developers in IT that support your site and just maybe help to improve what can sometimes be a tenuous relationship between IT and Marketing. Practical Analytics.
What does Practical Analytics mean? Here is my spin on it:
Practical Analytics is the process of using web analytic data to help guide infrastructure, features, and support of a web site or web based application.
Really it comes down to makes changes on your site that make it easier to manage and maintain, not necessarily changes that make it a better experience for the end user of the site itself. The data used to make these changes is not hard to get to, nor does it require any deep analysis. Most of the time it is data contained in the most basic, canned reports available in almost every tool.
So what? Well as a career developer, I can not tell you the number of times I would have killed to have had the type of usage data I have now to not only help guide change, but to be able to use this data to help convince the HiPPOs out there that these changes needed to be made.
This is extremely important to me right now, as I am knee deep in a major redesign effort. As part of the planning process for the redesign there have been countless decisions made based on analytic data we had, and over the next few blog posts I will be highlighting some of my favorites.
Practical Analytics: Use Case #1 - Kill the old, tired, busted, outdated pages.
I am sure this is hardly news to anyone, but as a company constantly adds content to their site to keep it fresh and current, there is often a multitude of old outdated pages that never quite seem to get deleted. Perhaps the thought is that they need to be kept for SEO, or someone may have a bookmark to the page, or more than likely a new page version with a new name was published and the old file was never deleted.
So use your web analytics tool of choice and pull a list all the web pages with any traffic at all for the last six months. The most basic of reports. Then get a list of all the files currently on your server. Apply a little excel magic and you will get a list of pages on your site with zero traffic in the last six months. These are the first ones to go, no one will miss them at all.
The next step would be to look at the ones that are really lagging far behind. This will take a bit more time to go through that list and see if these pages need to go, or need to be improved. Either way, you have made the maintenance of your web site a bit easier by removing the pages with little or no traffic.
If you are truly concerned about users that might have a bookmark to one of those old pages, then you could easily modify your 404 process to send users to a search results page or some other custom 404 solution.
This is simply one of many practical applications of analytics data that will not only help you clear out old content, but should make the overall task of site maintenance easier. This should please even the most obstinate of curmudgeon developers out there!
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