Omniture Survey

A New Survey Tool
Finally the green guys have released their new survey product! It is Instant Survey of the now acquired Instadia that has had a makeover and we in the web analytics team at Creuna are quite enthusiastic about the outcome. Furthermore, the perspectives of a survey tool fully integrated in the Omniture suite really makes a geeky web analyst dream about future ingenious analyses and problem solving.

What’s New?
If you have been working with online surveys anywhere I Scandinavia there is a big probability that you have experience with Instant Survey. Maybe you remember a grey, dull and a little slow user interface but also a product that delivered great results once the cumbersome setup process had been done. The user interface is still easily recognizable but a refreshing stay in Omniture-land has really improved the usability and look of the product. From my first login it took me less than twenty minutes to produce the survey below and the answer to the question was obvious!

The intention was to produce something close to the new Creuna look, and I could have spent even more time fine-tuning the layout of the survey to perfectly match it to the launch page. Thereby I could prevent that users perceive the survey as “dangerous” third party involvement.
The ability to adjust the layout was already pretty good with Instant Survey, but in addition Omniture has added P&P functionality to embed the survey in a container on the site thereby making it an actual part of the site – nice!
Other great features is the ability to connect survey answers to a context e.g. a page or an element on a page as well as the ability to manually launch surveys when a user interacts with an element on the page such as a “No this information was not what I was looking for” button. With these features it is easy to get continuous user ratings of and feedback on your FAQ-pages, special offers, self-service pages and so on.

Pandoras Box
Obviously I am very excited about the product and this is only version 1.0. When the next version is released and what it will contain is of course a deep green secret, but we are still allowed to hope and guess 
I think it would be obvious to attach a visitor ID to every survey answer thereby making it possible to analyze every single visitor who has answered the survey.
This would work very well with Pathing Visulization that is a feature in Omnitures deep data mining tool Discover. This functionality allows you to visualize a single user session and would enable you to find out how a user entered the site, what the user subsequently did on the site, and the sequence of events. This would facilitate an understanding of why the user who wrote “useless homepage” in the free text of the survey was so horribly disappointed.
Similarly there would be a lot insight to gain by segmenting groups of users by the answers they had given or by asking targeted questions to users on the basis of their browsing patterns identified by SiteCatalyst variables.

Survey….Really!?
Most of us have at some point been subjected to long and very boring paper or digital surveys, and maybe you are thinking that your user do not want to answer a survey anyway or that they at worst might be inclined to leave you if you subject them to something that dull.
My experience is that a little rational thought and a good and reliable survey tool gives you the possibility to gain a lot of insights without any risks at all.
Online surveys are your chance to engage in a dialog with a very big share of your users and get feedback and suggestions from the most dedicated of them.
You will be able to test whether your users agree with your conclusions and you will be able to dig out information that can help you form new business questions for further investigation.
The use of online surveys does not end with the optimization of your site. In addition you have a unique chance to understand trends and developments in your industry and in what directions your products and services should develop.

Web Analytics Wednesday, first time in Norway

On Wednesday May 28 WAW will have its first meeting in Norway.
For more info on the event click: WAW in Oslo May 28.

Is this just a promotional trick from Halogen, who’s sponsoring this first event, or is it a sign of a new trend in the Norwegian marketplace. I think it’s a little bit of both.

In February there were two rather large events for people interested in analytics in Norway. Arena Data (the WebTtrends partner in Norway) had its annual event, with approx. 200 people attending. Nina Furu had a web statistics course with more than 50 participants. She’s having another course September 25 aswell.

It seems to me like webanalytics is becoming more interesting to the general public.

Facebook, from hype, to overload, to practical and beneficial use

I find myself using Facebook only a few times a week now. But when I use it, I now feel I get a great benefit from it, with only a little effort. It has not always been like this.

In the beginning I used Facebook every day, several times a day. It was important for me to study and understand the tool, as fast as possible and as extensive as possible. I’m a web professional so it was kind of mandatory…

After a while it all turned into a big overload. A time consuming activity with little real benefit. For a few months I was “all-out”.

Then (now), suddenly messages started popping up in my mailbox with a “normal” frequency and suddenly the messages were more relevant and tangible.

It seems like not only I, but also my friends and family, have matured in the use of Facebook. Gone are most of the “too much fun / spam” things, and suddenly it all got more relevant.

I use Facebook less, but get greater benefits than before, with less effort. So do obviously my friends and family. We all use the tool less, but more importantly we still use it, and we enjoy it more than before.

No wonder that the number of Facebook users in Norway are increasing again, after a few months with little or no real growth in numbers.

Social media is about more than english speaking countries

Social media like LinkedIn and Facebook provide for more segmented and relevant marketing, through their intensive and extensive mapping of personal interest.

Unfortunaltely, they are all focused on American standards and the English language, which are limiting the potensial results for e.g. Scandinavian advertisers.

Let me give som examples:

Linkedin.com segment their users in American business sizes. The interval 1-10 employees are their lowest segment, in essence defining a startup company. In NOrway the business sizes are different, because the amunt of people in the nation is smaller, making the markets smaller too.

If I was to market startups I would like to target companies with 1-2 employees, maybe 1-3, not any more. Combine that with the linkedin parameter “Owner” and we have a good case.

The reason for me reacting to this, is that I and an email dialog with linkedin.com about a markleting campaign, and their price were 6 times what we normally pay. Their reason was better targeting, which could have been the case, but for Norwegian startups it really isn’t.

Another case is Facebook. They have very good segemntation on age, that give me value, but the interest section doesn’t give any utility. Why is that? Because Norwegian users use Norwegian terms, and such does not fit into the English language categorizing supplied by Facebook. I can guarantee that there are thousands of Norwegian Facebook users interested in Business, but that’s not the term we use… The consequence is that Facebook cannot offer me the targeting value of interest that it can in English speaking markets.

Will something change? Norwegians have the highest interenet penetration in the world (88%) and the second highest Facebook penetration (22+ %) in the world, only beaten by Canada. Unfortunately we’re only 1.000.000 millon users and 4.5 million people, so we are rather small in absolute numbers…

WAA Finland official website

On behalf of Web Analytics Association Finland, I’m glad to say that WAA Finland official website is now live (as beta). Check out the site at http://waafinland.com. If you have any recommendations or development ideas regarding the website, events and WAA Finland operation, please contact Country Manager Kalle Heinonen. Last WAW event on February was a big success with approximately 80 people attending and the high conversion rate of feedbacks.

Shopping Search in Finland

Unfortunately there’s no such a cool thing as Google shopping search in Finland. But, at the moment, there are couple of other options to think of. So if you’re running or would like to run an online store in Finland, maybe you would like to have some visibility on these shopping search sites (mostly in Finnish):

• Hintaseuranta
• Ostokset.fi
• Vaivaton.com
• Vertaa.fi
• Webinfo.fi

In my opinion, Webinfo is the closest match on Google’s unpaid shopping search. Vertaa.fi has CPC (cost per click) pricing method and the rest have some kind of small monthly or annual fee. Almost each of these announce different metrics about usage: page views, visitors and unique visitors. Hard to say whether these are really good for your online business, but they are probably worth to try.

Web Analytics Wednesday in Helsinki - Measuring Social Media

The next web analytics wednesday in Finland will be held on 27th of February at Sanoma building. Steve Jackson from Satama will speak about measuring success of social media. A very interesting topic followed by Tommi Lehtonen from Whitevector. He will present how to measure social media’s effects on brands. This is excellent chance to get new ideas and meet the experts with relaxed atmosphere. See the below:

Search Engines in Finland

Google dominates the search engine market in Finland. According to my own little research with IndexTools web analytics system and TNS Gallup’s national interviews, Google’s market share is approximately 95 % in Finland. So, if you plan to do some search engine marketing here, Google is probably the best way to start with. I did a cross site analysis from 22 different sites last year including six month’s data from January to the end of June. At the same time TNS Gallup interviewed 3 000 people, aged between 15-79. We do have other search engines too. Here’s a list of most common ones:

• Google
• www.fi
• Eniro
• MSN / Windows Live
• Webinfo
• Yahoo

More than 200 people interested in web analytics gathered in Oslo yesterday

I had the pleasure to be attending and speaking at the gathering yesterday. WebTrends had invited their clients to a user forum, and more than 200 people showed up.

It’s the first time in Norway that I have seen more than 10 people, all interested in web analytics, in the same room. And this time it was more than 200.

Is this a signal of analytics as a growing market in Norway? Is this a signal of more focus on analytics in Norway and a bigger and better environment for the analytics profession? Or was it just a good marketing effort done by WebTrends?

Probably it’s a little bit of “all of the above”.

I had the pleasure of speaking at this seminar. If you would like to see my 15 minutes pep-talk, greatly inspired by Al Pacino, clik on the link (it’s all in Norwegian).

• Konkurrer med deg selv !!  (Compete against yourself !!)

If you are one of those people interested in learning the basiscs of web analytics, there is a course/seminar beeing held by Nina Furu on February 14.
I will be a guest speaker at this event.

Click to learn more about Nina Furu’s statistics seminar on February 14.

Facebook in Norway more than 1.000.000 users

I just checked some stats about Facebook through their advertising application. There’s now more than 1.000.000 profiles in Norway. When you make it relative that’s an overwhelming 22% of the population (4,7M).

Sweden has about the same amount of profiles (1M), but with a population double the size the relative situation (12%) is not as extreme.

As far as I can see, only Canada has a higher relative position with its reach of 24% of the population.