Archive for the ‘Web Analytics’ Category

The numbers I’m seeing in my statistics are less then 2% 800×600, 37% 1024 and that the rest of my users have more than a 1280 pixel wide screen resolution.

Is it time to start designing for 1280, as opposed to 1024 ?

Anyone who has done it? Any ideas as to how use the increased space in 1280, while at the same time not excluding the 37% of users with “only” 1024 ?

Last week Avinash Kaushik was in Norway. He attended the SEM conferance on Wednesday and held an analytics presentation on Thursday. I was happy to be attending the analytics presentation.

As an “Avinash-fan” I’ve bought and read his book, read several of his articles on his blog, and there wasn’t much new in his presentation. But he’s a cool dude ;-)  You don’t see many analytics professionals like this man. What a blessing he is.

But he has an important message, and if you haven’t heard it before, go read it here: Web Analytics 2.0

He also showed us some of the new features that are coming to Google Analytics in the near future. See the detalis in the GA-blog. I’m impressed. With the custom reports and segmentations possibilities GA is giving even the bigger tools, like WebTrends and Omniture, competition.

I’m still, and even more, an Avinash-fan after his visit.

If you want some new input, the week from Thursday Sep 18 to Thursday Sep 25 could be a magical one…

You have one of the biggest Norwegian conferences (Webdagene) in Oslo Sep 18-19, and you have eMetrics in Stockholm Sep 23-24 and then again back to Oslo with a webstatistics course with Nina Furu Sep 25.

If you’re the least bit interested in the web, this is the week for you. I’m hedging my bets, so I’ll be attending everything.

Some highlights:

• Gerry McGovern; Webdagene, Sep 19: How to create killer content.
• Jim Sterne,  Emetrics, Sep23 – Tough Times Call for Tough Measures
• Neil Mason, Emetrics, Sep 24– Advanced Web Analytics

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

We’re not blessed with a lot of Analytics seminars in Norway. It’s one of those topics that seems to fade on the priority list. But this month there’s a seminar…

Arena Data, the agent selling WebTrends in Norway, are hosting a seminar.

• For more on the seminar: http://www.arena.no/sem08

Generally there are two main events for web professionals in Norway.
These are:

• Webforum Norge
• Webdagene

During the course of the year there’s always a couple of interesting seminars hosted by The Norwegian Computer Society and and occasionally in The Norwegian Polytechnic Society.

The GURU seminars by Dataforeningen tends to be quite good, since we’re not that big a country, so we don’t really see that many experts coming to visit us. We rather have to go to UK, Germany and US to find them…

• The 2008 calender for the computer society (dataforeningen)