“I’m loving your book, it’s proving very helpful in getting me up to speed on YWA. I noticed this morning that on page 90 there *might* be a mistake in the code example.” - James Dutton.

That’s a first, and not that I am surprised, but James found a mistake on page 90 in my Yahoo! Web Analytics Book – minor and repeated on the next page in correct form, BUT I still owe him a free Diet Coke in New York for pointing it out. Here is the section from the Book – I highlighted the error and added in the correct deployment syntax.

Tracking Products Viewed

I have been very focused on the nirvana of e-commerce actions, the sale, but I am sure you agree with me that there are many steps and many actions before getting to this point. You can track any number of steps and any number of activities with Yahoo! Web Analytics. The tool has a few hard-coded events, however, that come right out of the box—one of them is the unique action value called PRODUCT_VIEW. The Product View variable provides you with the opportunity to expand your merchandising knowledge to activities, very close to the top of the sales funnel. In this way, you can see how often potential customers view your products, which products are the most popular, and whether a positive connection exists between product campaigns and product views.

Remember that selling only provides you with successful customer behavior, whereas events before the sale occurs can provide you with very powerful insights on unsuccessful customer outcomes. The product view can be used in a number of ways, and you will even see some use of it as a proxy for products added to cart or sales (if they do not have volume enough to perform signifi cant campaign analysis on that parameter). To enable this type of tracking, you apply the value PRODUCT_VIEW to the ACTION variable on all the pages where you display products:

Version 4

var ACTION=’PRODUCT_VIEW’;
var _S_SKU=’DM112899’;

Version 5

YWATracker.setAmount(“PRODUCT_VIEW“); //Correct: YWATracker.setAction(“PRODUCT_VIEW“);
YWATracker.setSKU(“DM112899“);

The pages where this code is applied do not have to be unique and in fact rarely are. Products are displayed on product marketing pages, technical specification pages, in search results, in recommendation boxes—and I am sure you have even more suggestions. I recommend you enhance your document-naming and -grouping skills to create opportunities to split different product views over the site.

Which leads to our next topic: forwarding to pages where we display multiple products at the same time. A product search result is likely to do this, as shown in Figure 4.3

Figure 4.3.  -  Standard product search result page

There are other scenarios where this is bound to happen. In order to track several product views at the same time, continue using the same syntax we’ve discussed in previous chapters, separating variable values by a semicolon. Tracking two product views at the same time looks like this:

Version 4

var ACTION=’PRODUCT_VIEW’;
var _S_SKU=’DM112899;DM113834’;

Version 5

YWATracker.setAction(“PRODUCT_VIEW“);
YWATracker.setSKU(“DM112899;DM113834“);

If you are not sure which product views to track together, the default merchandising report, shown in Figure 4.4, is a good starting point for you to play around with the various dimensions and metrics.

Figure 4.4  -   Default merchandising summary report

Note that the report in Figure 4.4 and those from earlier include product naming and product categorization, which we are yet to talk about, and thus your reports will look different. However, you can view merchandising reporting and products on a SKU level, as shown in Figure 4.5. You only have this option, though, if you have not uploaded any merchandising information. If you proceed to the summary report, you will see the screen shown in Figure 4.5.

Figure 4.5   -  Viewing products by SKU

As I mentioned earlier, you can choose to view products by SKU to begin with and then associate product names and categorization later. Now, let’s move on to tracking products added to your cart.

…

Well, error corrected! :-)

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

As I walk cheerfully down 6th Avenue, on my way to the Yahoo! 18th street office this Saturday morning, I stop by a red light, well, first, because you are supposed to (I believe), but mostly because I am hand in hand with my two daughters. In this obviously selfish action by me, I slow down a chap behind me, who in all his wisdom, lets me know what a jerk I am! I’ll be honest with you – this is not the first time somebody on the streets of New York have let me know their feelings about my traffic maneuvering choices ;-)

This got me thinking about how we choose to label each other, and how that is coming through the recent launched twitter lists. So before assembling a posse and hunting down my new friend from JCPenny; I thought I would collect all the lists my twitter followers use for me. You can see the result of this in a tag cloud below (I used wordle.net to create it):

So it seems like, I might actually be less of a Jerk and more of an analytics person. Personally I am fond of the terms sexy and data nerd. Ha!. (Perhaps they are actually conflicting labels though.. hmm). The other cool thing is that my blog is supposed to be about Analytics, Media and Marketing. Close eh?

Have a great weekend.. I am off for a walk around Chelsea (with the same two girls and traffic standards).

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

Note: The following is a post by Charlie Holbech, who is a Sr. Yahoo! Web Analytics Manager out of Los Angeles. Charlie was the one running the Partners division (and half our revenue I might say) at IndexTools.

As I am sure most of you recall we (Yahoo!) launched Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN) at the beginning of August 2009. Since then we have been literally inundated with applications (apply here) from all corners of the globe from smart, enthusiastic and extremely analytics savvy consulting firms. These companies excel in their various regions around the world and provide an invaluable analytics service to their customers in areas such as:

• Vendor Selection
• Training
• Tracking code Audits
• Tracking code Deployment from scratch
• Universal Tagging solutions
• And of course Consulting and Optimization!!

Expanding YWACN

So today sees further expansion to YWACN and I’m extremely pleased to announce an additional 20 Consulting firms have been accepted into the network - taking the total YWACN membership to 71! We have focused primarily on expanding members in markets where, until today, we lacked representation and are very happy to have a fantastic group of experienced companies onboard. We are also welcoming a number of folks from existing markets who, based on their experience, we simply couldn’t say no to!

All these consultants are a substantial compliment to the Network, have a breadth and depth of insight into their various regions that is an invaluable resource to YWA users and are, most importantly, charismatic and passionate analytics individuals! If a 60 second ‘get me pumped about web analytics’ pitch were a pre-requisite to joining YWACN these guys would nail it!

So without further ado, our new consultants are:

www.resultrix.com, www.pop.us, www.vml.com, www.bell.ca, www.techwyse.com, www.purevisibility.com, www.cadastra.com.br, www.interactivo.cl, www.mvconsultoria.com, www.neoogilvy.com, www.sqliagency.com, www.clicmetrics.com, www.overalia.com, www.hub-sales.com, www.optimics.cz, www.queromedia.be, www.freshegg.com, www.iihnordic.dk, www.wattproject.com and www.orangevalley.nl

Full contact details for all of our Consultants are located on the YWA website. Welcome all of you, we’re looking forward to an exciting 2010!

Here’s a snapshot from our YWACN Homepage:

Yes, there are still areas of green remaining :-) But seriously, we’ll be expanding the network further in 2010 and are always looking for Consultants in Cities and Countries not yet covered. Located in a ‘green’ area (or white if you happen to be in Greenland!) and want to become a YWACN member, apply here.

Cheers,
Charlie

Last week I posted a Microsite Analytics white paper preview note – and was happy to see a dozen something folks making the effort in going through the early version as I emailed it out. I would like to thank the following in particular: Mihaela Popa, Emer Kirrane, David Kopp and Rune Flint for their great input! I created a separate download page, so take it away guys - Microsite Analytics White Paper.

Not convinced it’s worth your time; here’s the abstract and the introduction:

Abstract

Measuring and reporting on the impact of a Microsite without taking into consideration how it uniquely differs from the expected and somewhat associated parent website is an error! This white paper points to a number of analysis items which will facilitate the right mindset for Microsite analysis and reporting - if this type of thinking is not applied, you will at best provide flawed reporting to your customers and at worst suggest actions that will negatively impact the Microsite.

Introduction

Any online endeavor such as a Microsite is created with a business objective in mind, and for this business objective, one must have a set of measurable KPIs and very likely a set of associated metrics that can be used to optimize the KPIs. This is a given and, with this assumption in mind, as I take you through this white paper, you must understand that this is not meant to provide you with an exhaustive list of Microsite specific KPIs.

Measuring and reporting on the impact of a Microsite without taking into consideration how it uniquely differs from the expected and somewhat associated parent website is an error! This white paper points to a number of analysis items which will facilitate the right mindset for Microsite analysis and reporting - if this thinking is not applied, you will at best provide flawed reporting to your customers and at worst suggest actions that will negatively impact the Microsite. That being said, this is neither a complete reporting and analysis guide nor a template for you to replicate to your next customer - it is a way of thinking which you must apply to your own Microsite reporting. For every three suggestions I provide with regard to reporting or insight on Microsites, there should be another three as obvious recommendations from you, based upon the introduced mindset.

A Microsite (and it goes by many different names) is an autonomous website, focused on a smaller subject matter. It is usually detached from the parent website and the only combined experience is a set of gateways into the parent site. It is unusual and in most cases not recommended to replicate the navigation structure and general layout of the parent site as you lose the advantages of the Microsite - and honestly, aren’t you then just building a new subsection to the parent site? There are ways to analyze whether you have been successful in your casual parent site attachment and we will come to that later. Finally, have in mind that a Microsite is designed to have a limited lifespan - if nothing else, in its current form. You can also think of it as a range of purposes like; specific product offerings, whether that is a feature film, car or a burger for that matter, small branded communities, portal integrated and sponsored content sites, branded entertainment used as a promotion vehicle - and with that in mind, you should have a fair view of what I warrant a Microsite.

It is important that you do not misplace the meaning of a landing page or set of landing pages as a result of your Microsite endeavors. A landing page is a logical extension of your advertisement of your parent site. The landing page serves, for the most part, as either a gateway into the parent site or directly as an optimized transaction page. You can, of course, have a unique landing page on your Microsite, should you want to, but for the most part this will be the home page or a page that plays the role of the homepage. See Figure 1 for an illustration of how Microsite content and traffic overlaps with parent website and landing pages.

As an Agency you must create a mindset in your analysis and reporting that intelligently takes into account the content split and overlap of the three constituents (as shown in Figure 1) and their traffic flows. To put it clearly, we agree that the Microsite is indeed independent, but we also expect integration and overlap with the parent website. Do have in mind that a Microsite can function as a bridge and path between two parent websites as well, such as having the Microsite partly injected into a foster parent. As an example, in describing the idea of a foster parent, envision a scenario where you have the Microsite created as part of a portal channel. In this particular scenario, I both view and treat the initiating foster parent as a campaign source throughout this white paper - and I suggest you do the same in general. The thinking about a foster parent expands the Microsite definition to include elements like the fan-page and branded apps.

I am not debating or concluding on the potential success in deploying a Microsite and/or the overall strategic righteousness in using a Microsite as a marketing vehicle. This white paper assumes you’ve used a different set of metrics for such a debate and positively concluded that branching out from the parent website and using a Microsite is what’s needed for success.

So who is this white paper for then? The Agency Analyst, Account Manager and anybody who is responsible for communicating the effectiveness of a Microsite.

I am adding the finishing touch to my Microsite Analytics White Paper and I would love any feedback I can get. Should you have the time to flip through a twenty something pages draft (let’s call it v0.95), let me know, and I’ll send you a draft-copy to look at - especially if you are at an agency and report on the effectiveness of client Microsites.

If you subscribe via my personal RSS feed, Email feed or Twitter feed for that matter – you should see a notice come out in the next coming weeks, in regards to the final Microsite Analytics White Paper.

The white paper will be posted as a PDF download.

Abstract

“Measuring and reporting on the impact of a Microsite without taking into consideration how it uniquely differs from the expected and somewhat associated parent website is an error! This white paper points to a number of analysis items which will facilitate the right mindset for Microsite analysis and reporting - if this type of thinking is not applied, you will at best provide flawed reporting to your customers and at worst suggest actions that will negatively impact the Microsite.“- White Paper: Microsite Analytics - Dennis R. Mortensen, Yahoo Inc.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

I and the web analytics Industry in general was flabbergasted by the announcement of the Adobe Omniture marriage and there’s been a big ‘huh?’ debate going on since; which I see no reason to elaborate on. Eric does (as usual) some good analysis/commentary in his two posts Thoughts on Adobe + Omniture and More color on Adobe + Omniture.

However; I would like to set free my long term belief about this, as I can see some positive momentum in justifying the deal - people getting lulled into thinking that it might make sense (it does not).

To put it politely, I am probably less optimistic about the value of this particular acquisition than most are (quite honestly, I believe it’s broken). Though, I am happy to see that we all agree about this not being a deal about revenue and/or bettering the overall margin of Adobe product sales, which is something Omniture cannot help with, quite the opposite actually. So it must be about the technology, and there is no doubt about the fact that uniting content and tracking is an inevitable next step for the analytics industry.

That said, in the desire to unite content and tracking (and the subsequent optimization) I assume that those involved (Adobe) understand that the current data-collection methodology – primarily Script/Pixel tagging – is a HACK. It was never intended to be more than an intermediate delivery mechanism and a way of circumventing the IT department until we got true access to the data stream. So the future should not, and is unlikely to, include a, as some put it “installing tags” task (something which we debated vigorously at X change earlier this month). If we think about the task (detailed event tracking) at hand for a second and extrapolate today’s web-page status into a future of web-applications (which is happening as we speak). In this scenario we must also accept the arrival of a Web OS of a kind – which could be the browser, which is what we are seeing today, but it could also be something like Chrome OS or a Adobe AIR permutation if you like (to keep a positive tone in this post). In this scenario, which I again believe is inevitable, we have some history to draw our conclusions from, which is, if I use MS Windows as an example, 25 years of event handling and logging. You would NEVER dream of tagging a windows application, why?, because the whole application is built around an event log which you can choose to tap into if needed. The Web OS (in whatever shape or form it arrives) will most certainly and without doubt include the same thinking.

In the above situation, buying a JavaScript tagging company (this might be too harsh a statement) based on yesterday’s idea is worthless; what they needed was actually to build this themselves. For adobe this is (must be) an inherent part of their future thinking, if they want to play in the Web OS game. Building it them selves could include acquiring a company for the engineers and analytics understanding; and for this, Omniture and their limited and by that calculation very expensive few hundred engineers doesn’t count.

If you want my quick quotable conclusion and a quick $100 bet; what we’ve seen is the best of Omniture and any succeeding years from here will be downhill in revenue and likely innovation, furthermore the content and tracking marriage will be won and or lost on a Web OS level - and thus likely to be between Google, Microsoft and perhaps even somebody like Mozilla.

Sorry for the rant, but being an Entrepreneur and as frugal as I am, it just hurts to see the right thinking (content+tracking strategy), but $1.8B wasted on the wrong execution.

Anywho, from one Entrepreneur to another: congrats to Josh, John and team. Well done!

(1) I’m told that SAP looked at Omniture as well (briefly though), which in the current situation (not thinking ahead) and without disrupting Omniture business would have made much more sense.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis R. Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

Amazon just sent me a note as the Author of the above mentioned analytics book repeating that: “This title has complex layouts and has been optimized for reading on Kindle DX’s larger screen”.

First. I am a huge Kindle fan and seeing the DX optimization is just absolutely fantastic! But wait, oh no, I don’t actually own a Kindle myself. Anyone out there who own a Kindle or even better actually owns a Kindle DX? .. or perhaps this is just a sign from God (or whomever) that I must go buy the device! :-)

Amazon Kindle link:
Yahoo! Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights (Kindle Edition).

n.b. Optimized for means: “This title has complex layouts and has been optimized for reading on Kindle DX’s larger screen, but can still be viewed on other Kindle devices.”

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis R. Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

Before we get started, let it be clear that I LOVE the New York Times, heck, I like just saying the word; the New York Times – and as a data geek I in particular love their data visualization unit (feel free to pack your bags and walk down to 18th street for a Coke at Y!). BUT in today’s online version of the paper, an Article by Claire Cain Miller titled: Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens, I missed a stronger dataset than the casual reference to comScore. However; This made me curious (which might actually be good journalism) - and I decided to do a bit of additional analysis on the question - with a twist.

Which Demographic is Driving Twitter’s popularity; where popularity is measured by the visitors they send me (the publisher).

I looked at 2,394,753 referring visits to 7 unique US News Media sites (Q3 2009). A dataset which is not supposed to represent the twitter universe as a whole, but it is confined to one vertical, and as such can be transposed to the general world; PLUS reading news is after all a pretty general activity. I added in the Age distribution from Google referrers, to provide some additional context. Find the exciting result below:

Find the table based data to the chart below. I rounded all percentages because, well, I wanted them to fit on one line.  :-)

So which Demographic is Driving Twitter’s popularity? where popularity is measured by the visitors they send me (the publisher). Definitely Not Teens as the New York Times correctly pointed out today, BUT neither Senior citizens. If anything Middle Adulthood is the term we should use for the demographic driving Twitter’s success.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

I did a Presentation and Talk in Boston not long along (Internet Retailer conference in June), about how e-commerce (store) owners could easily take advantage of their analytics package. It ended up being two simple and very actionable ideas (tricks), which I believe most folks should be able to take advantage of. I wrote two separate posts on this:

• Using a Page Revenue Participation metric for Conversion Optimization
• Using Web Analytics Metric Alerts for Search Phrase Opportunity Insight

BUT I just made the effort (it is summer after all) in uploading the actual presentation to slideshare; a presentation which you can find embedded below - the post’s hold my commentary, whereas the presentation only served as a backdrop for my song and dance show.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

Note: The following is a post by Emer Kirrane, who is a Yahoo! Web Analytics Account Manager out of the Budapest office. Go connect with her @eXXX - as I said before, she’s smart!

I recently surveyed 100 “internet-savvy” people to understand their attitude towards cookies and whether or not they considered cookies to be a privacy or security concern. As a follow-up, I surveyed another group. This time, my focus was the general internet user, who would not be expected to understand the use of cookies. Getting to my target of 100 took slightly more time in this case as the respondents were not as engaged with the subject!

The survey was posted on a group unrelated to web analytics on LinkedIn.com, on Facebook.com, as comments on some blog posts on the subject of internet privacy, and in 15 random categories on answers.yahoo.com. It was also circulated by email (thanks Andy, Mom, and friends!). To my knowledge, the respondents came from at least 8 countries.

In my previous survey, I asked 5 questions which assumed at least a basic understanding of cookies. In this survey, because I could not make the same assumptions, I asked 6 slightly differently-phrased questions, most of which had a yes/no answer and an optional comment field.

The Results

1) I know that cookies are put on my computer by websites that I visit.

• YES 84%
• NO 16%

The vast majority of those surveyed knew that cookies were placed on their machines, although several of those who responded “Yes” were under the impression that cookies were only placed by certain types of sites, like forums or social networks.

2) I know what cookies are and understand what they are used for.

• YES 57%
• NO 43%

Although more than half of the respondents claimed to understand cookies and their usage, quite a few of those who answered “Yes” felt that cookies were solely used for website preferences or helped to load a page faster. The overall understanding seemed rather vague (some considered them to be rather benign viruses) though many grasped the basic concept. It is interesting that although 84% know that cookies are placed on their computers when they visit a website, not all of those have tried to find out what cookies actually are.

3) I know the difference between 1st-party and 3rd-party cookies

• YES 35%
• NO 65%.

Given the fact that 57% of respondents claimed to understand cookie usage, it is interesting to note that only 35% knew the difference between 1st-party and 3rd-party cookies. However, this segment did appear to genuinely understand the difference between the two types of cookie.

4) I have customised my browser settings with regard to the treatment of cookies.

• YES 35%
• NO 65%

The responses to this question were interesting. Of the 35% who responded that they had customised their browser settings with regard to the treatment of cookies, several admitted that they had customised their settings, but that they had no idea what the settings now were. On the other hand, there were several whose set-up meant that they were prompted for permission every time there was an attempt to set a cookie. Some blocked all cookies while some accepted them all, so there was no one setting that stood out as the most adopted.

The majority, those who responded that they had not customised their browser settings, commented that they had not changed their browser settings for a variety of reasons – because they did not know how to, because they would not know what they should change them to given their understanding of cookies, because they knew the default settings of their browser or because they regularly used an application to clear out cookies. We can infer from this then that most of the respondents use the default browser settings, which are often to allow 1st-party cookies and reject 3rd-party cookies (though not always: Chrome, by default, accepts all - you can then choose to reject all or “restrict how 3rd-party cookies are used” – I haven’t been able to find out exactly what this means (though I can imagine) but would be curious to know).

I asked this same question in my first survey, the response to which was YES: 42% and NO: 58%.

5) When I visit a website, I look for and read the privacy policy.

• Always 5%
• Sometimes 41%
• Never 54%

Though this question is not directly related to cookies, my interest included attitudes towards privacy on the internet and overall security concerns. The overwhelming feeling that I got was that “life is too short” for reading privacy policies. In addition, all privacy policies were considered to be the same and over-complicated with legal jargon which could hide any dubious statements. In general, it seems that privacy policies are considered a nice-to-have element of a website, but not a crucial part of a visitor’s navigation behaviour.

6) I have privacy concerns specifically regarding cookies being set on my computer by websites I visit.

• YES 38%
• NO 62%

A similar question in my previous survey (I have concerns about cookies being misused to compromise my privacy) generated exactly the same results. In this case, however, the reasons were slightly different – the distrust of cookies centred more around data being sold on, unwanted viral material etc than profiling and targeting. There was also distrust stemming from a lack of understanding of what cookies are and what they can be used for.

In a fascinating twist, quite a few of those who did not have these concerns said that it was because they did not understand what cookies are and what they can be used for!

Generally, knowing what cookies are does not seem to be a barrier to acceptance. In addition, ignorance of what they are does not seem to be a barrier to acceptance. Most of those surveyed did not know of any problems caused on their computers by cookies and for that reason did not fear them. This did not mean that they knew what cookies were or even had much interest in finding out. Again, as in the first survey, to a large degree, convenience is an important consideration – knowledge that, for example “Bebo forgets me if I delete cookies” outweighs any other possible concerns.

So, all in all, good news for the 1st-party cookie (depending on the default browser settings of your website visitor). For the 3rd-party cookie, however, apathy may mean that it is often blocked and largely misunderstood - like me, as a child :-).

Cheers,

E

Today, we are launching the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN).

I don’t know about you, but I personally think this is beyond exciting, and I am thrilled to see us take this (almost) final step towards full integration into Yahoo!

What is YWACN?

This is a network of third party companies with expertise in deriving insight from Web Analytics AND deploying Yahoo! Web Analytics in particular. The purpose of this network is amongst other things to help our clients get the best out of the tool - and hopefully also help us spread the gospel of YWA. It might even alleviate the stress on my personal in-box!

You are more than welcome to compare this in idea to the GAAC network - there, I’ve said it! :-)

Who are the Consultants?

A lot of the consultants are legacy IndexTools partners - and thus a bunch of folks who have years and years of experience in the actual technology, from before we turned purple. They are… drum roll please:

countquest.se, tribal-im.com, nordicemarketing.com, receptional.com, naviatech.fi, netvantagemarketing.com, e-dialog.at, Leads2Business.nl, milesbennett.co.uk, tricomb2b.com, sems.it, explido.de, booming.de, latitudegroup.com, emerite.cz, astrups.com, snowvalley.com, b-found.no, epsilonium.com, netprofiler.nl, acronym.com, networkintellect.com, coloradowebsolutions.com, contentmetrics.de, deducta.dk, eformation.de, e-interactive.es, eurorscg-riley.co.uk, engineready.com, inflow.dk, intellignos.com, onetomarket.nl, lbigroup.be, positive-thinking.co.uk, stonetemple.com, sundancemedia.ca, webcertain.com, studiocappello.it, zunch.com and creuna.dk.

We even added a few additional rock stars to that:

webanalyticsdemystified.com, semphonic.com, stratigent.com, sapient.com, purpleclick.com, thesedays.com, bitbang.it and insightr.com.

48 YWACN partners all in all - and you should be able to see a full list of YWACN partners on the YWA site. CALL them today, email them, tweet them .. heck, invite them out for dinner, they deserve it! (if you haven’t noticed, they are your new best friends)

Can I join?

Perhaps ;-) If you really excel in the field of web analytics and truly are one of those consultancies that help derive actionable insights from web analytics for your customers - we would love to hear from you.  In return and as a Member of this exclusive, global professional network of Yahoo! Web Analytics consultants you will receive a number of benefits, this including:

• Yahoo! Web Analytics FREE account creation rights (This is sexy eh?)
  
• Listing on Yahoo!’s Consultant Network web page
• Potential client referrals from the Yahoo! Sales team
• Exclusive “Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network” icon for display on your website
• Premium levels of technical support and access to a partner portal
• Access to an exclusive YWACN forum to share ideas and technical tips with other top analysts worldwide
• Unique opportunities to work with Yahoo! to provide trainings, books and speaking engagements

Go have a look at the criteria for becoming a member of the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network on the web site.

YWACN Links: (..and partners; send me your blog posts if I didn’t catch’em)

- Netvantage - now a member of the Yahoo Web Analytics Consultant Network
- Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network, Nordic eMarketing accepted
- Receptional. Yahoo Web Analytics Consultant Network
- Insightr joins the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN)
- Tribal is nu ook Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant
- Onetomarket toegelaten tot Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network
- ..

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis R. Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

Thanks for your interest in Yahoo! Web Analytics. We’re excited to inform you about the launch of our Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN)

YWACN is a network of independent third-party analytics specialists who can help provide analytics consulting services. The specialists in the network have been approved by Yahoo! to help our valued customers. The breadth of experience of YWACN members, and their knowledge of Yahoo! Web Analytics, makes them uniquely qualified to provide expert assistance in analytics planning, implementation and usage.

Whether you’re a large organization or a small ecommerce merchant, you can expect to benefit from a more intelligent leveraging of analytics with YWACN. The consultants in the network can help increase your qualified website traffic, achieve more conversions and sales, and see a better overall ROI.

To learn more about YWACN members, click here. Also, you can look for consultants with the YWACN member emblem.

Note: The following is a guest post by Emer Kirrane, who is a Yahoo! Web Analytics Account Manager out of the Budapest office. Go connect with her @eXXX - she’s smart!

This week, I ran a survey on the subject of cookies, cookie deletion and privacy and the results were quite interesting. The survey was run online and had 100 respondents who can generally be assumed to be at least vaguely Internet-savvy. It was sent out to and passed around by Twitter followers who are, in the main, linked to analytics/SEO/SEM etc; to the IT department of a large bank; to the IT department of a small-town local authority; to the staff in the Yahoo! Web Analytic Hungarian office, most of whom are programmers. Respondents came from at least 6 countries that I know of – very possibly more. I had considered broadening the scope of the survey to include those who use the Internet but cannot be considered to be terribly clued up on issues like targeting, tracking, cookies etc, (which would have led to completely different survey questions), but on a quick verbal survey of a small group of those who would be considered to fall into this category, I felt that the results would lose focus. I.e. most did not know what cookies were, what the difference between 1st- and 3rd- party cookies were, and those that did had were not entirely sure what they were used for. Therefore, for my purposes, I assume that this category would generally leave cookie treatment to their default browser settings. I think this group should be treated in a separate survey, which I will leave for another day.

The survey comprised 5 questions, most of which were Yes / No with an optional “Why?” comment.

The Results

1) I block 3rd-party cookies.

• YES 36%
• NO 64%

Of those who answered “Yes” and commented, the main concern appeared to be around trust and privacy. There was a general consensus that 3rd-party cookies were unsolicited and set by “snoopers“. There was also some concern around the fact that something, however innocuous, was being set on the visitor’s hard drive.
Those who answered “No” were generally far more blasé in their language. 3rd-party cookies were nothing to worry about and could always be deleted if there was some concern about their origin.

2) I block 1st-party cookies.

• YES 6%
• NO 94%

The overwhelming consensus here was that 1st-party cookies did more good than harm. Convenience (in terms of recognition, logins etc) was cited as a major bonus. What is interesting here is that it appears that visitors don’t mind their browsing behavior tracked or monitored as long as they feel they have been given a choice in the matter. I.e. if I go to Site A, I have no problem with Site A knowing what I looked at, what I bought, and who I am, but I don’t want Company B to know the same information.

3) I manually delete cookies:

• Daily
• Weeky
• Monthly
• Never (never delete cookies manually - don’t know browser settings)
• Never (never delete cookies manually - auto-delete cookies based on my browser settings)
• Other

Unfortunately, due to some over-zealous multi-tasking, “Other” was set not up as a separate choice, but as a comment, which meant you also had to choose one of the time-frames. However, as luck would have it, the vast majority, according to the entries in the “Other” field, indicated that cookies were manually deleted fairly randomly and with no particular pattern (if deleted at all). Most cookie clearances seemed to take place after online financial transactions or if a site visited appeared particularly dubious.
Interestingly, despite the general acceptance that cookies are not insidious pieces of software out to steal your identity, there was quite a high instance of seeing them as having a potential for abuse. I.e. cookies are fine, I love them, I would let my favourite child marry one, but I still wouldn’t trust one set by a site I don’t trust.

4) I have customized my browser settings with regard to cookie blocking and deletion.

• YES 42%
• NO 58%

Due to the high instance of 3rd-party cookie deletion and non-blocking of 1st-party cookies, it can be inferred from these results that many of the respondents know that their browser settings reject 3rd-party cookies while accepting 1st-party cookie and have left these settings be.

5) I have concerns about cookies being misused to compromise my privacy.

• YES 38%
• NO 62%

Of those who answered “Yes”” to this question, the comments indicated an uneasiness with being tracked and targeted by advertising companies. There was also a sense of distrust around the potential for abuse – companies using cookies to personally identify visitors, spyware, information theft, malware etc. However, we can infer that some of those who do not entirely trust cookies and their usage also happily accept 1st-party cookies because of the convenience they offer.
Those who answered “No” were generally very emphatic about the fact that they did not suffer from “paranoia”. Understanding the limitations of cookies and the fact that other forms of “spying” were far more threatening were cited as reasons to discount any perceived menace from cookies.

It would appear that cookies can be seen to make life easier and that this convenience outweighs most of the worries those in this particular survey group suffer. Visitor choice is key – if someone chooses to visit a particular site, they choose to accept cookies from that site in order to make that site work better. However, this consent does not necessarily extend past that particular domain.

So, cookies are good as long as they’re not bad.

Cheers,

E

When people talk about reporting on data, they usually envision a scenario where the analytics user traverse the application from one report to the other. Which might or might not be OK. But I am sure we agree on this just being one way of communicating the information in the data we’ve collected. We can communicate this information in anything from reports, dashboards, scheduled emails, documents to presentation slides – and no one channel is per definition better than the other. The channel is simply something which is chosen as a best possible medium to support the goals you must have in distributing this information to begin with.

That said; I would like to advocate for another communication channel, the Metric Alert Email, because it tends to help focus on metrics that matter, be on time, insightful and for the most part almost actionable as is.

Instead of pitching a web analytics tool feature, I’ve create a setup where we use Web Analytics Metric Alerts to illuminate a set of organic Search Phrase Opportunities. There is a whole industry dedicated to keyword research and insight, which I think is just splendid. Alerts is not to replace any of that, this is more to show you how a simple thing like alerts can create a lot of value inside your organization; which is interesting, if you don’t necessarily have a full-time analyst work your data day and night.

So HOW do I use Web Analytics Metric Alerts to create Search Phrase Opportunity Insight ?

1.

Go find your most popular search phrases report, which in most tools, means a report that shows a sorted list of all the search phrases that delivered traffic to your website. The list is usually sorted by visits, which is also the case in the below screen shot. This is, as I am sure you’ve heard repeated a hundred times, a traditional long tail distribution. Meaning that we have a few keywords bringing us a lot of traffic - and an abundance of keywords which drives little traffic to our site, individually, but in aggregate makes up a large traffic influx.

I don’t necessarily think that this report, holds much insight by itself without further analysis. This is, being very blunt, more a report that we do for your entertainment.

2.

Let’s assume, just for a second, that you are in retail and that you are driving online revenue. If that’s not the case, then the following examples and conclusions are still very much valid, but you would of course have to substitute the Revenue metric, with another success metric of your choice. A different metric that for some people could be a proxy for off-line revenue.

The first thing I suggest we do, is customizing the above most popular search phrases report, by appending it with the following metrics:

- visit to sale conversion rate
- product views
- avg. order value
- revenue

But not only that, I suggest you add in a channel dimension as well (such as the individual search engine). The setup and customization task look like the below screen shot as you create the custom report:

3.

See, now we are talking! (looking at the custom report result below) This is exciting, ..and provides almost instant insight. Just go look at the report below, there is an abundance of immediate insights - and that, without doing any other magic. Beyond my point and goal of taking you towards a metric alert search phrase opportunity, I suggest that you save this report as it should be the absolute minimum information that goes along with search phrases. As you can tell - I LOVE - this custom report. Moving along though.

I’ve highlighted the third most popular search phrase, as it truthfully indicates that we might indeed get a lot of visits, but NO revenue. What does this mean? it means that something is likely to be very wrong and that we as retailers screwed up. You need to figure out why we drive this traffic, what the landing page is, why we don’t convert and so on (but thats not the task for this exercise). We might not sell this item, we might be out of stock, we might have an error on the landing page, but something is very likely to be wrong - and now we know. And as you go down the list you can see that there are other potential ERROR’s and thus revenue opportunities.

4.

The screen shot above is just fine, but in includes the process of us (the analyst) having to go hunt for the data in our row based data. So I suggest that we apply a simple set of filters.

- show only those search phrases that drove traffic, but created $0 revenue
- show only search phrases that drove above 100 visits*

* the reason for this filter; is that we will have a long tail of very unique search phrases that we get a few visits from and no revenue, which is acceptable. Search phrases like that, are some we probably have to analyze in bulk, but that’s for a later debate.

The result of applying these filters (and how they look) is presented below. Which clearly shows a long list of search phrases that I need to dig into. You could surely, and probably should, bookmark this report and re-visit it once in a while as you do your weekly analysis schedule.

5.

Finally; to the actual suggestion. Alerts! I suggest that you apply an alert on Product Views (you could do this on visits as well). In YWA this works simply by right-clicking the data point in the column you would like to monitor. The reason for me using Product Views is that there can be a very valid set of search phrases that you know for sure are non-converters. I do not want to be alerted about those search phrases, as that is just data noise.

Elaborating a bit, looking at the above screen shot, you see a term for this hardware tools web site that says “ jigsaw puzzles”. This is obviously a set of visitors looking for something completely different and this retailer just happens to rank well for the phrase jigsaw - and thus get some ranking for some of these playful terms as well. As we can also see, people do not go look at the product pages, which is OK and expected (This attitude might be flawed in some instances, dependent on your tracking code setup and other issues, as such, you are more than welcome to set this up on the visit metric).

When I use the Product Views metric as the alerting metric to monitor, I am essentially just applying a simple filter, about NOT sending alerts out on search phrases with less that 10 product views. But as I am sure you thought through, I could simply have applied this as a filter in my above reporting filtering.

What you can see in my Edit Alert box below, is that I have used the following monitoring method; to Monitor each and every item individually, as every search phrase is important to me (*I added a small appendix section below describing what metric alert type to use). I’ve set it up to check the last full 30 days, once a month, which is of course something you will change to match your analysis routine and traffic volume - and finally set the Alert up so that it triggers on Product Views above 10 (*so I don’t get my jigsaw puzzles alerts).

I added my email and a small description (don’t discard naming and description as something you shouldn’t think about, because then you would be wrong - but that’s for another post as well).

**Just as a side note, you need to bookmark the above report in YWA for alerts to function on it. I assume it is pretty much the same in other tools.

6.

There you go! The conclusion and result of our endeavors. Once a month a list of search phrases, which you MUST look into, is delivered to your inbox. This is highly actionable and I would find it hard to believe that you would just accept a list of 50 something search phrases sending a lot of traffic to your site and generating exactly $0 revenue for you. I would personally throw up in my keyboard every month on the 1st at 13:00 EST. Does that make me bulimic - or just plain nerdy!? :-)

A small disclaimer; all of the above screen-shots are from Yahoo! Web Analytics, but you have the same metric available in e.g. Omniture Site Catalyst and you can go do the same thing there.

AND if you want to know a bit more about how you customize report and work with alerts, I have a good section about this in my Data Driven Insights with Yahoo! Web Analytics Book.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

Appendix: What Metric Alert type to use:

Average - You can monitor the average of the metric for the specified column. Suppose you allow marketing to do any campaign they want, as long as the overall visit-to-sale conversion from campaigns is above a certain level. Setting up an alert that monitors the average will look at a total for all your campaigns and you will not be alerted if a single campaign performs badly, as long as the overall conversion rate is where it is supposed to be.

Each Item Individually - Choose this option if you want to ensure that every metric in that column is measured against the triggers. Suppose you want to monitor the visit-to-sale conversion rate on all referring visits from several campaigns. You might have hundreds of marketing campaigns running at any given point in time and they are always changing. Setting up an alert is a way to ensure that you are instantly warned about campaigns going below a given negative threshold, even as marketing is setting up new campaigns and deleting old ones.

One Unique Item -  This is the most specific of all the alerts: it lets you monitor the metrics that you clicked against the triggers on that one item only. Suppose you engage in a narrow SEO activity, which is intended to drive up your visits from AOL Search. If the promised output and closure of the project is expected to occur at a visit number above 2,500, you can create the alert shown in Figure 7.2 and wait for an email to arrive. Your situation will determine which option you choose. In general, I have observed that the Average alerts tend to go to managers, who might not even log into the tool but rely solely on scheduled emails and alerts. Each Item Individually is somewhat the same as setting up 20 alerts on each unique item, and thus those two options tend to go together and are mostly used on an operational level—for example, if you are a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or SEO manager or if you in charge of specific website optimization tasks.

Hmm.. :-)  It seems like I’m in a jolly summer VIDEO mode. @widgetgirl did a post which includes a VIDEO of The Analytics Food Chain panel we did at the OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference in New York on June 9th.

You can go to the original post here: http://widgetanalytics.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/the-analytics-food-chain-panel-from-omma-metrics-measurement/

I embedded the video below; for your entertainment:

Panel: Monster, Yahoo!, Razorfish, Hitwise and Neo@Ogilvy.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

I recorded a 30+ minute DEMO (screencast) of YWA version 9.5 the other day - and am publishing the outcome below. The tone of the Video is less advert-like and much more educational; or this is at least something I tried to capture.

I believe the video is a great appetizer for how we approach web analytics from a feature point of view - and if you are not yet fully comfortable with YWA, I am most confident this video will shine some light on the product. Enjoy :-)

The above screencast is reduced in size, simply to fit this blog page, but you can click through to the original sized (990*938) screenscast, should you want the full experience. :-)

Yahoo Web Analytics in 30 minutes (VIDEO - HD)

If you made it through the video, and were pleased, you might be happy to hear that we plan to do a number of 3 min. videos focused on insight - not features.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

Optimizing for better online conversion is, for the most part, something we do by examining our content and its layout, such as landing pages and immediate pages in our funnels – and hopefully applying some sort of testing methodology. This is a standard practice I most certainly agree upon, but I also believe that one needs to look outside this, sometimes, closed loop of pages.

I suggest, as an alternative, that you try using a Page Revenue Participation metric for your next Conversion Optimization routine, as it might reveal opportunities away from your traditional funnel. When debating this, please note that, I am purely talking about Controlled On site Content, as defined by the Online Business Measurement Quadrant.

The reason for brining this up; I only just returned from Boston, where I attended the Internet Retailer conference, and probably even more exciting the Yahoo! Merchant Summit, which was delivered in conjunction with the show (On that note, the ystoreblog folks did a respectable pre-show interview about YWA 9.5 and my book). Anywho; the merchant owners had some of the most honest analytics questions I’ve heard in a long time. You simply cannot wow these folks with a posh looking four-dimensional bubble chart – they wanted to know exactly HOW we are going to help them make more money!!) – Refreshing!

A small disclaimer; all of the below screen-shots are from Yahoo! Web Analytics, but you have the same metric available in e.g. Omniture Site Catalyst and even though Google Analytics have a different term ($ index) and slightly different calculation, it is the same optimization attitude.

So how do I use a Page Revenue Participation metric for my next Conversion Optimization routine ?

1.

Go find your most popular pages report, which in most tools, means a report that shows a sorted list of all your pages, with the one receiving the most page views on top. By most standards, this report does not provide much insight, unless you derive your revenue from page views (such as advertising) - fair enough, then this might not be a bad proxy for $money.

2.

Customize this particular report in a way, so that you get your tools revenue participation metric appended to it. In Yahoo! Web Analytics the Revenue Participation metric resides under the sales group under metrics, when using the Custom Report wizard.

3.

The below figure, shows a standard most popular pages report, which have had the revenue participation metric added to it. This is almost per default, and with out much fingering, a better choice than just looking at raw page view numbers.

4.

Fingering or not! I am a big fan of visualizing data and the below screen shot is essentially just an advert for data visualization (but also, potentially, a  honest report export, that will create better value than a non colored bar chart). The below bar chart was extended to 100 bars and had its bars colored by the revenue participation metric. This alone brings instant insight, as we can spot easily spot “small green bars” – or more precisely, low page view volume combined with high revenue participation (a.k.a. important pages). We could of course expand this with more rows of data or just sift through the bars a hundred at a time.

5.

What I really like for you to do, is to change the sorting from page views to revenue participation. This changes the picture completely and it is the essence of my suggestion for you trying out a Page Revenue Participation metric for your next Conversion Optimization routine. This should in a best case scenario bring forth a set of pages, that you might not see as active drivers for conversion today.

The last X steps in your funnels, which are required for people to check out, will of course always be on top, and if you are anal (like me), I suggest you go filter them away, so you only have pure content in this report. Especially if you have to communicate this beyond yourself or your close team.

The below shows a astonishing set of facts:

• The “About us” Page Touched 23% of revenue in < 1% of visits
• Site Search participates in about 50% of all my revenue.

Knowing these two facts (which will be completely different from site to site) I hope one would set out to work on the “About us” pages AND closely look at those internal site search result pages. For these folks, their business clearly depend on it.

6.

As a closing comment; not that the upper commentary need further input, it is obvious that neither “About us” or “Search” is part of your traditional funnel analysis as below – and as such we sometimes forget to look outside our funnel.

Doing a better “About us” page, in this example, even though it is not part of the funnel, is likely to widen the funnel – and if that is not exciting I don’t know what it.

This is not the first time I talked about revenue participation per say and if you are still listening, the post about how you can Use Web Analytics to determine the width of your Internal Search Query box might be worth a read.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

What is the current state of web analytics tools and their usage today? - and to what extent should we expect today to provide us comfort for the future.

What is the current state of web analytics tools and their usage today? - and to what extent should we expect today to provide us comfort for the future.

That is a grand questions and I am not suggesting that I hold all the answers. I do however believe that this is something we, the Web Analytics software vendors, need to ask ourselves on behalf of the entire community from time to time.

I suggest and advocate excellence on today’s current 3 steps of Web Analytics usage:

Today

1. Collect Data
2. Report on Data
3. Insight from Data

I don’t think any of these primary tasks have been solved to the complete satisfaction of our users yet, and I am confident in speaking on behalf of all web analytics software vendors on this. Something as basic as collecting data, is a huge challenge, especially if you think of every one of the Online Business Measurement Quadrants being important to your online endeavors. Reporting on data is far from being solved as well, and providing people a login and password to the analytics interface, is in most cases more harmful than good. Finally, I don’t think we can honestly say that we get all the insight we expect from our data just yet. However; I do believe that all of these point are well understood and that we are making great progress.

That said; we must look towards tomorrow and apply new (or evolutionary) thinking to what we do today. I personally advocate the next two steps clustered around the following:

Future

4. Recommendation
5. Automation

Don’t get to hung up on the words themselves, that’s not the important part. When I talk about recommendation, I want you to envision us, the analytics vendors (and this might not be your traditional vendor), to apply our own modeling on your data, coming up with recommendations, for what you should do next. When I talk about Automation, I believe that you should be able to have your analytics technology (or API like offspring) act upon recommendations without your direct interference.

This is all part of moving you towards the true data driven organization, where we input the objective and let data speak for how we get there - which is where I supposed you are headed? We do have players that do some parts of the above, but not to the degree that I can confidently say that we started these steps.

I am the International Keynote at the Web Analytics Congress in Amsterdam on 28th May 2009. Where I will present and debate the above, which is something I am really looking forward to. I’ll be using the below set of slides to get to my point:

..So if you happen to be in Europe>Amsterdam, please drop by and say hello, and perhaps get the one hour version of the above slide set, which without me, as you can see, doesn’t say much.

AND finally; what are your step 4 and 5?   - I’m sure we can’t all agree on this. :-)

Cheers
dennis (@dennismortensen)

n.b.
If this subject is of your interest, I strongly suggest that you go read: http://www.nettakeaway.com/tp/article/377/what-web-analytics-is-missing

Well, today’s the day! The book is out: Yahoo! Web Analytics: Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights. I am super excited about this - and even better, this coincides beyond perfect with the recent launch of YWA 9.5.

I did an interview over at Web Analytics World, which includes some decent commentary about the book and who it is intended for.

A few metrics for people as nerdy as I am. I announced the agreement with Wiley on Sunday July 6 2008, started writing the book in the fall of 2008 and spent about 5 months and 370 hours writing it, before turning it over to Wiley recently.

Another fun trivia is; that my good friend Avinash (from GOOGLE) wrote the foreword. (Thanks Mate!)

You can go preview the book on Amazon, and also on Google Book Search. AND should you fall in love, this is where you can go buy the book:

• YWA book at Wiley.com
• YWA book at Amazon.com
• YWA book at Barnes&Noble.com
• YWA book at Borders

A bit of information on the three parts of the book:
(..and yes, I look a tad too serious on that picture)

My philosophy is that you should focus on three different but equally important tasks; A) Collecting Data, B) Reporting on Data  and C) Deriving insight from Data. Dependant ones vantage point, one or more of the chapters will be in focus. I have divided the book into three parts to reflect these broad tasks.

Part 1, “Advanced Web Analytics Installation,” consists of Chapters 1 through 5. The focus is on data collection. True competitive advantage in web marketing comes from collecting the right data, but also, and no less important, from configuring your web analytics tool in such a way that you can derive insight from the data. Part 1 features detailed code examples that webmasters or developers can apply directly. Marketing people and executives will learn the opportunities they can demand from this tool. I also show you how to add reporting dimensions to the predefined report structures for fantastic filtering and segmentation opportunities.

Part 2, “Utilizing an Enterprise Web Analytics Platform,” encompasses Chapters 6 through 10, where we focus on reports. Creating reports is an easy feat, but remember that reports are never better than the data you collect. You need an exceedingly good understanding of how to work with your data. Part 2 is less technical than the first part. In it I’ll teach you to use your reporting toolbox to provide targeted answers to specific questions, such as “How much revenue did we make from first-time organic search visitors from Canada last week?” For this and many other questions you’ll encounter there is no standard report, but you will know how to get this answer and hundreds of others when you’re through with this section.

Part 3, “Actionable Insights,” encompasses Chapters 11 through 13 and focuses on how to take action on your data to optimize your web property. Having gone through the effort of implementing the data collection and reporting strategies in Parts 1 and 2, you will have gained enough insight to start an optimization process. Part 3 introduces you to optimization using a set of actionable insights. This is merely an appetizer, and the handful of optimizations I present are not, by any means, the only ones you can pursue. But the ideas and attitude behind them can most definitely be copied and carry you down other optimization avenues. Think of this section as an idea catalog. One of the most important questions I tackle in this section is paid search optimization. Always keep your eyes on the money, eh?

I am truly grateful for the really nice endorsements I received from my industry peers, here is Eric and Bryan:

“In Yahoo Web Analytics Dennis Mortensen manages to do the impossible by adding real value to our knowledge of web analytics in an already crowded market. His clear language and excellent examples make this book required reading for any web analytics practitioner interested in extending their use of freely-available tools. Dennis is one of the best and brightest in the web analytics industry and Yahoo Web Analytics reinforces that with every page.”

Eric Peterson,
Eric T. Peterson, author, Web Analytics Demystified

“As the individual who drove the initial development of Yahoo!’s Web Analytics tool, Dennis managed to conquer mind-numbingly complex issues by presenting them in a simple and useful way. It’s no wonder that he did it again with his Yahoo! Web Analytics book.”

Bryan Eisenberg,
NY Times Bestselling author of Call to Action & Always Be Testing and cofounder of FutureNow Inc.

See you in San Jose for Emetrics and especially Web Analytics Wednesday tonight.

Cheers :-)
@dennismortensen

I am extremely happy to announce the new edition of Yahoo! Web Analytics (#YWA) which is rolling out to clients as we speak (YSM post) - an upgrade process which should be finished by end of May for everybody, you know, if we are on schedule and all. Beyond all the work one would expect in regards to general backend and scalability issues, we also had the opportunity to implement some exciting NEW features, such as:

• New Demographic Dimensions
• New Psychographic Dimensions
• New Charting Capabilities
• New Path Analysis
• New Negative-Segmentation opportunities
• New version 5 tracking code (I describe the upgrade in my Yahoo! Web Analytics book)
• ..and 30 other smaller updates like e.g. native PDF export, use up to 50 actions (goals), introduction of 38 custom fields - and purplefication of the tool, well, you probably don’t care too much about the latter. :-)

The really exciting fact is that, the Demographics Data is not just presented in pretty reports, but much more importantly, as information that you use to filter other reports with. (Note: You might remember this type of sampled data from Microsoft’s adCenter Analytics - link to Ian’s launch post)

The dimensions are Age and Gender, which have the following properties:

• Age (0-17,  18-24,   25-34,  35-54  and  55+)
• Gender (Female,  Male)

The Psychographic Dimensions, which is called Interest Groups within Yahoo! Web Analytics, hold similar characteristics as Demographics, in the sense that you can filter and segment on this data.

The Interests are categorized as follows:

• Automotive
• Consumer Packaged Goods
• Entertainment
• Finance
• Health Pharma
• Life Stages
• Miscellaneous
• Politics
• Retail
• Small Business and B2B
• Sports
• Technology
• Telecommunications
• Travel

Please note that the data in reports, based on these two new exciting dimensions, are based on Yahoo! Visitor Interest data and may not be available for all your website visitors. YWA generate the output based on a sample of your visitors with their behavioral data, and YWA will only display the numbers meeting a certain confidence level.

This confidence level reflects how confident YWA are that the sample accurately reflects the makeup of your site visitors. You can actually reduce this confidence level to see more data, where you of course have to understand that by lowering the confidence level you are viewing numbers that one should be less confident are accurate for your actual site.

We also upgraded, as you can see from the screenshots below, the actual charting and visualization area of each individual report. This included opportunity to change the default visualization for the data, the opportunity to apply other data dimensions (such as coloring a bar chart based on a metric), visualize multiple metrics at the same time, visualize the true long tail using e.g. 500 data points, Introducing Bubble Charts, introducing the opportunity to use both trend charts and bar charts at the same time, having report filters and sorting reflected in the actual visualization etc.

Well, enough talk!

One note before you go down and have a look at the screenshots; with this release YWA is opening up for managed Yahoo Search Marketing Accounts, so go CALL your account manager to get access - Don’t mind the data below, the screenshots was done in a staging environment and this post is not about the insights you can get with the new features, I’ll get to that in a later posts. I just want you to go have a look at some of the new features and preferable get excited as a marketer.

Imagine YWA being able to tell you, as a travel sector marketer, that those successful individuals who bought the trip to London in June where primarily interested in Politics, Female and between 35-54 years old. Sexy eh!?

Cheers :-)
@dennismortensen

Link to last post, when we rebranded, which includes pictures of the more general feature-set: Indextools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics

Appendix  -  (Yahoo! Web Analytics 9.5 Screenshots)

.

Forrester Research is updating their Web Analytics Wave Research from 2007, which back then evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of eight Enterprise Web analytics products against 127 criteria. 8 Web Analytics vendors have been chosen for the new 2009 report - and I am happy to let you know that Yahoo! and our product Yahoo! Web Analytics is included. This is great validation for YWA in regards to the positioning as a Enterprise Analytics tool, and it positively solidify the positive comments from the CMS Research document: Yahoo! Web Analytics Leaps Ahead of Google Analytics for Enterprise Use.

The (2009) current 8 enterprise analytics players according to Forrester are:

• Omniture
• Coremetrics
• Webtrends
• Unica
• Nedstat
• Xiti
• Google
• Yahoo

Let me include the 2007 status, so you have an understanding of who left and who entered. The new report, which is headed by John Lovett, will arrive (if on schedule) in July 2009. I for one am super excited to see the output of the report and I strongly suggest you go find it when published.

The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q3 2007
Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of eight top Web analytics products against 127 criteria. Coremetrics came out as a Leader, with a product suite that balances power, usability, and strong customer service for firms that want a partner, not just a vendor — especially in retail, travel, financial services, and media. Our analysis revealed that Omniture, Unica, Visual Sciences Visual Site, and WebTrends are also Leaders in the market by virtue of their powerful, complex platforms for enterprises with specialized data needs and a dedicated Web analytics team. Visual Sciences HBX is a Strong Performer, with one of the best user interfaces we saw and the option to overcome feature limitations by adding HBX Visual Workstation, a version of Visual Sciences’ advanced data analysis tool for HBX clients. Both ClickTracks and Google Analytics are Contenders, offering streamlined reporting, some of the industry’s best data visualizations, and a few analysis tools at a low price — a good choice for small to midsized businesses, departments within large enterprises, and anyone just getting started with Web analytics.

Cheers :-)
@dennismortensen