Web Analytics Insight

Web Analytics Business Process

2009-06-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

Web Analytics in an organization should be just like a development cycle starting from requirement gathering to validation. Below is a visualization of an ideal Web Analytics process. This process is more suited for tech organizations which already have defined KPIs and regular weekly/monthly releases of new features on their website.

1) Requirement Gathering: This is the start of the Web Analytics process and it deals with an Analyst collecting tracking requirements from stakeholders. Similarly this step will also involve review of feature specifications of new items that are part of a release cycle. An example of a new feature can be a new page being added on the website or a new outgoing/external link being added or even an A/B Test.
2) Creating a Tracking plan: Once all the requirements have been gauged, the Analyst will create a Tracking Plan/Analytics plan/Solution Design document to define the variables for Web Analytics vendor tools (custom variables, pagename variables etc) like Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, Clicktracks or Google Analytics. This is usually an excel document containing a matrix of all the variables and their corresponding values.
3) Development: In this step, the Analyst will usually work along side a developer to get the features implemented on the website. This step also requires the Analyst to assist the developer with any questions she has regarding the Web Analytics code or the Tracking plan. This applies especially to new developers who do not understand the Web Analytics snippet.
4) Data Validation: This step deals with the QA/testing of Web Analytics data that land up in the Web Analytics tool. I have written a comprehensive article detailing the importance of this step as this in itself is a separate process.
5) Reporting/Analysis/Recommendations/Next Steps: After the data is found to be clean, it is the responsibility of the Analyst to report numbers resulting from the feature which went live during the previous release cycle. The Analyst will also provide analysis (explaining the data or conversion etc) and possible recommendations/next steps to improve the website even more.

This, according to me is an ideal end to end process which organizations should be following to manage Web Analytics. It is vital for a big organization to incorporate these steps in their overall plan for Web Analytics to ensure smooth functioning.

My take on 404 Error Page Naming and Analytics

2009-06-01T22:53:00.000-07:00

‘404 Error Pages’ are the pages displayed when someone is not able to find a link/URL on a website. There are usually 2 ways by which one can find the 404 page:

1) Typing in the wrong URL: If a visitor has typed a wrong URL, by default he will see a ‘The Page cannot be found’ page in case there is no custom 404 page present in the website. Below is a screenshot of such a page.

In order to fix this, the best practice is to create a custom 404 page which will be shown to visitors who try to access a page which has either been removed or doesn’t exist. This 404 page should contain links to the most important pages of your website and will play an important role in engaging visitors back to your website. You can also create 404 pages which have a funny message. Some examples of such pages can be found here.

2) Deleted or moved links: The same default page mentioned above will appear in case a visitor clicks on a link/page that has either been deleted or moved to a new location.

To fix this, implement 301 redirects which send visitors to the new page which has been moved to a new location.

As far as Web Analytics tracking is concerned, it is pivotal to accurately track how many people are looking at the 404 page and what URLs are they looking for. The method explained below will help you track 404 pages efficiently (Tracking impressions on the 404 page and the incorrect URL) through Omniture and Google Analytics.

1) Omniture: Capture the incorrect URL (JavaScript function document.location) in the s.pagename variable and append ‘404’ to it as shown below.
• s.pageName="404:"+document.location (E.g. If the incorrect URL is http://www.undp.org/ss, then the pagename variable will capture it as ‘404:http://www.undp.org/ss’. This naming structure helps in gauging the amount of traffic going to incorrect pages as well as fixing broken links. Similarly pathing can be performed on the error page to find the flow of traffic to and from this page.
• Another mandatory variable which should be populated on error pages is s.pageType which should be populated as s.pageType="errorPage".
Below is a screenshot of the UNDP 404 page using similar Omniture snippet.

2) Google Analytics: Capture the incorrect URL in the trackPageview function as shown below:
• pageTracker._trackPageview("404:" + document.location) (E.g. If the incorrect URL is http://seattleindian.com/seattle/xyz.asp, then the value captured in the ‘utmp’ variable will be ‘404:http://seattleindian.com/seattle/xyz.asp’.
Below is a screenshot of the SeattleIndian 404 page using similar Google Analytics snippet.

Below are some advantages of implementing custom 404 pages in your website:

1) Engaging visitors to pivotal pages of your website: If your 404 error page has links to important pages of your website, users can be sent to important pages of your website thereby increasing user engagement. You should also add a link to the sitemap page and a search box.
2) Leveraging Web Analytics to optimize your website: You can utilize Web Analytics tools by analyzing 404 URLs which users type and fix broken links on your website.
3) Reduces user frustration: Creating a custom 404 page eases user frustration caused due to not being able to find what they were looking for.

Small change with a huge impact

2009-05-25T18:46:00.000-07:00

Recently I was involved in changing the layout of a website and measuring the impact of that change. We changed the Top navigation on this website and changed the color of a link to Red/Bold. It was a very minor change with respect to the whole website as the Top navigation menu only contributed to less than 5% of users engaging in the website. We wanted to make this change to enhance the Top navigation and entice more clicks on the edited link (Coupons). P.S. We leveraged Google Analytics to measure this change. Below is a screenshot of the previous Top Navigation menu:

After a week, I pulled the ‘Top Content’ report and filtered on the Top menu Coupons link. I was pleasantly shocked to notice the results. There was a 65% increase in User Engagement (Clicks) on the Top navigation Coupons link clearly due to changing the link color to Red. From the context of the website, this page amounts only to a small proportion of traffic but this change has paved the way for similar changes which can be replicated on others pages in the future. Below is a screenshot of the change we made on the Coupons link:

Immediately after noticing this change I sent a tweet in excitement: ‘Wow! Top menu navigation link text change resulted in over 60% increase in user clicks. Changed the font of the link to Red/Bold #ga #wa’. Surprisingly, I got a response from a Twitter user: ‘So funny. We also changed the nationalgeographic.com top nav to red/bold in Dec 07 for commerce promo. It stuck.’ The user mentioned that Nationalgeographic also made a similar change back on 2007 and they too noticed an increase in clicks on the button. Isn’t it coincidental?

Going forward we plan to replicate the same exercise on the Side menu. We will also be performing AB Tests on the Top navigation menu and compare it with newer menus. P.S. It is always a good practice to add a query string parameter in the URL. E.g. Add ‘menu=top’ (http://www.seattleindian.com/seattle/indian-restaurant-coupons.asp?menu=top) to distinguish this URL as a Top navigation link.

Hope you like this article. Please comment and let me know if you’ve done similar exercises and noticed a considerable impact.

My take on Social Media Analytics

2009-05-17T04:11:00.000-07:00

Social Media is one topic which I haven’t written about in the past. I am still coming to grips with Social Media as there’s so much to learn but am convinced that it is something which just cannot be ignored. I say this because websites like Facebook with 200 Million active users (Source: Facebook), LinkedIn with 39 Million users as of May 2009 (Source: Wikipedia) and Twitter with 7 Million users as of Feb 2009 (Source: Nielsen) are at the peak of their popularity with more users being added by the hour. P.S. Population of United States is 304 Million as of May, 2009. In this article I will write about my experience with Social Media Analytics and the mediums to track it. Twitter will be covered in detail.

Social Media measurement:

1) Twitter Campaign Analytics: It is very easy to measure traffic from Twitter with Campaign Tracking parameters. There is an article which I wrote on Email Marketing which brushed on the concept of Campaign tracking. Here is an example of a Twitter Campaign URL which can be measured in Google Analytics: http://rkapoor.blogspot.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=googleurlbuilder&utm_campaign=socialmediaarticletweet. This URL was created from the Google Analytics URL Builder. These campaigns can be attributed to Web Analytics metrics like Bounces, Time spent on Site, Visitor Type and Conversion once we start getting traffic from Twitter.

2) Short URL Analytics: There are also various short URL websites which can shorten the campaign URL to be placed on websites like Twitter (Maximum Twitter Tweet length is 140 characters so short URLs are very efficient). One of the websites is Clop.in which offers you an interface where you can easily create campaigns for Google Analytics, Omniture and WebTrends. This tool will allow you to create a custom campaign URL string and will shorten it. I leveraged this tool to shorten my Twitter campaign URL to http://clop.in/PWGCto. Other short URL websites are tinyURL, Cli.gs etc. Some of these websites will also report the total clicks, referrers and location of the users who clicked on the short URL along with measuring metrics on the destination website.

3) Reputation tracking tools: A new variety of tools have appeared which allow companies to analyze what consumers are saying about their brand (Customer Sentiment). I tried my hands on Radian6 and SM2 which offer a great interface built out of data captured from blogs, forums, review websites microblogging and news websites. These results are captured based on the keywords which users or companies search for. SM2 has a great graphical interface whereas Radian6 shows keyword search results via Widgets. For e.g. Microsoft can search for ‘Zune’ and analyze consumer feedback/mood for this product. The possible data points available from this search keyword can be segmentation of Media type with the location, sentiment and engagement. Based on this data, companies could even contact sources/people that have a negative taste about the brand to improve their reputation. Other reputation tracking tools are Buzzlogic and Buzzmetrics.

4) Twitter specific tools: As Twitter is the hottest from of Social Media today, companies are putting in more effort to know about their competition and the most popular trends in real time on Twitter. Some tools which I have used and report data from Twitter are Tweetvolume (Competition comparison tool) and Twitscoop (Current buzz on Twitter). There are some websites like Tweetvalue which even assign a price to your Twitter profile and offer to buy your Twitter account (I haven’t really tried selling it yet).

5) Widget Analytics: Another form of Analytics which comes under the Social Media umbrella is Widget Analytics. Widget is a snippet of code which can be embedded in Web pages and can be used to display Videos, Ads, News, and Weather etc. Widget integration has recently exploded with Social networking sites, blogs, and Ecommerce websites etc. Some metrics which can be measured on Widgets are clicks, impressions, install conversion, widget stickiness, installs by country and time spent on widget etc. Some tools which provide widgets and an interface to measure them are Gigya and Clearspring etc.

Through this article I am able to share my experience with Social Media measurement but there are lots of other tools which I haven’t used or mentioned. Please let me know if I need to add any more tools as many might have been missed. I will be writing more about Social Media in the future.

Should a Web Analyst have development skills? - Part 2

2009-04-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

I wrote an article in 2007 about Web Analysts having development skills and my conclusion was that it would be an add-on to have basic skills. I got a comment from a user who thought that only having analytics skills are suffice and I somewhat still agree with him. I have seen a lot of Web Analysts who are perfect in analyzing data but don’t have development skills. They tend to do very well in their usual job but lack context pertaining to the implementation of code. This article will cover what I’ve learnt about the Web Analytics job market since then and what makes an ideal Web Analyst.

I have been analyzing the Web Analytics job market and have noticed that almost 90% of the listed profiles have a mention of Web languages like HTML, JavaScript or Flash. (P.S. I had predicted such a trend) This wasn’t so common a couple of years back when companies mostly looked for people who are simply ‘Analysts’. In my opinion, it is very important to know how the Web Analytics code works and the technology behind capturing data. My take on the Web Analytics data capture is explained here. In one of my assignments, I was involved in configuring the Web Analytics tracking code to track features which were not possible through the generic snippet. A JavaScript Wrapper had to be created and added in the code. This asset helps a Web Analyst to stand out and is often the path to rise in the organization as a multi-talented contributor. Apart from knowing programming, it is also helpful for a Web Analyst to know basic SQL as most companies have an in-house reporting system which might need to be extracted for analysis.

We can have hours of discussion on whether the above skills are really necessary for a Web Analyst but based on the current market situation, extra skills other than analysis will be more than useful. Below are a few skills which I think will be make a very good Web Analyst in the order of priority:

1) Analytical skills, drawing conclusion from data and offering recommendations to improve the business (Presentation skills and Excel knowledge included)
2) Client interaction and excellent interpersonal skills (Requirement gathering and building relationships)
3) Statistics knowledge (Ensuring whether data is ready for analysis and concepts like Confidence level)
4) Basic Programming skills (Understanding Web Analytics code and ability to enhance it)
5) Basic SQL skills (Ability to pull data from the backend databases if necessary)

I will appreciate if you can share your views in case you agree/disagree with this article.

My take on Web Analytics Testing/Quality Assurance

2009-04-02T19:29:00.000-07:00

When we discuss Web Analytics, we talk about Implementation, Reporting/Analysis and offering recommendations on how to improve a website. QA/Testing is something which is often put in the backburner. Companies focus on the Analysis of data but don’t usually concentrate on the validity of data. This often leads to reimplementation of code and the data being inaccurate. This is not good news for companies tagging their website with Web Analytics code and paying for Implementation and Analysis. This article at a high level explains some of the things which may help improve the Web Analytics QA process of organizations. These are some of the points which can be useful for Web Analysts looking to setup a Web Analytics QA process.

1) Spread the word: Spread awareness about Web Analytics QA benefits to your Manager/Stakeholders specifying how thorough Web Analytics QA can help them save cost in the future. For e.g. you can tell them that proper Web Analytics of the code/data can help companies reduce repetitive fixes/patches of code or resultant skewness of numbers while performing Analysis.
2) Include in Release cycles: Try to incorporate Web Analytics QA in the weekly/monthly release cycles by bringing into perspective all stakeholders from QA Analysts, Developers to Program/Project Managers. It might involve lot of patience, persistence and convincing but it is worth the time. Come up with a process document/Flow chart depicting the QA process and share it with the concerned teams.
3) Performing QA/Knowledge Transfer: Once the Web Analytics QA process has been approved, start off by performing QA yourself and transition this responsibility to the resident QA Analysts as a Web Analyst should be involved more with Analysis/client interaction etc. Sharing tutorials about different Web Analytics tools might be helpful to pass on to the QA Analyst.
4) Create a reusable Test document: Once the training has been imparted, the QA Analyst or Web Analyst can create a test document to perform Web Analytics testing. The QA document should leverage a Packet Sniffer (explained in my previous article) and should also validate data in the Web Analytics tool. For e.g. the below screenshot makes use of conditional formatting to color incorrect values (not matching requirement) as Red and correct values as green. This is a screenshot taken from a QA document which I created in one of my assignments where we were QA’ing Omniture data. This document helps in validating the code as well as checking the output and should be reusable.

Hope you like this post. Please comment in case you agree/disagree with my analogy about Web Analytics QA process being an integral part of a Web Analytics assignment.

Vote for Anil Batra running for the WAA board of directors

2009-03-25T22:15:00.001-07:00

Please cast your vote for Anil Batra (webanalysis.blogspot.com) at http://cli.gs/Y2PpTH running for the Web Analytics Association Board of directors.

P.S. You can only vote if you are a Web Analytics Association member.

My take on Email Marketing

2009-03-01T05:20:00.000-08:00

Emails have been an integral part of communication since a long time on the Web. It is scary to even think of a world without emails. Over 50% of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_marketing). In the world of Web Analytics, emails plays a very important role in advertising, bringing in fresh traffic to a website or enhancing customer relationship. This particular branch of direct Online Marketing/Web Analytics is known as Email marketing.

Just like Affiliate marketing, Contextual marketing, Offline marketing etc, there are huge advantages of leveraging email as a powerful medium for advertising purposes.

Advantages of using Email marketing:

1) Less cost and reach: Email campaigns are much cheaper to implement in comparison to Banner campaigns or contextual ads. Its accessibility and reach make it a front runner in inciting traffic and creating awareness about your website.
2) Quick and easy: Email campaign/newsletter is usually very easy to implement and is the fastest medium to send a message across. Email Campaigns can be easily customized with graphics, video etc.
3) Tracking is simple: There are many tools available which are specifically designed to track email campaigns. You can also track email campaigns yourself. I will be explaining how we can track email campaigns ourselves.
4) Testing for best results: Email campaigns can also be subjected to AB tests incorporating different subject lines, different content of email or different call to actions. You can measure the open rates or Click through rate of each test email campaign and measure efficiency.

Disadvantages of Email marketing:

1) Prone to Spam and Phising attacks: Emails are often notorious with spam/junk sent to your inbox which causes disreputation. Hopefully the Spam filters of email clients do a good job to an extent but usually good emails might get filtered too. So there is always a trade-off. Similarly spammers/hackers might create Phising/Fake email campaigns and incite you to go to a different website which might look like a legitimate website.

Email Marketing metrics:

There are many metrics that we can measure to gauge the success of an Email campaign. Let’s try to understand this from a conversion perspective as shown below.

• Emails sent
• Emails sent successfully (Non bounce emails)
• Emails opened (Open Rate: emails viewed/emails sent)
• Clicks on link in the email (CTR: Total clicks/emails opened)
• Visitors redirected to target website from email campaign (Landing page visitors or visits/emails sent)
• Conversion rate on target website (Thank you page visitors or visits/emails Sent)

Email marketing deep dive/best practices:

1) Open rate is considered to be an important metric while measuring an email campaign but tracking it has some constraints. Mostly all email campaigns are created in HTML and tagging them with a JavaScript snippet of Google Analytics/Omniture will not cause the image pixel to be fired. The reason why it happens is because email clients don’t run JavaScript. A potential workaround that can be to include a .gif image call in the HTML email to get the impressions of the email/opens. Based on the read emails, calculate the Open rate: opens/emails sent.

2) The target outbound link embedded in the email should always contain respective URL parameters to track that the campaign is email specific. Visitors landing on the target website should be attributed to the email campaign based on these tracking parameters. A perfect method for tracking emails yourself can be tried with the Google URL Builder tool found here:

As shown in the image above, when we click on the ‘Generate URL’ button the URL generated is http://rkapoor.blogspot.com/?utm_source=rohanblog&utm_medium=email&utm_content=textlink&utm_campaign=testemails which can be placed as a text link in your email campaign to track a particular campaign. You can then go to Google Analytics and view your Campaigns report.

3) If you do not want to use tracking parameters in your URL, then you can create separate landing pages only specific to your email newsletters. Once you start getting traffic, then you can measure the Visits on the unique email landing page to measure your campaign response to get data for the newsletter clickthroughs.

4) Opt-in is another metric that you can measure to gauge success/response of email opt-in links present on your website. You can measure how many visitors click on a check box to opt-in for an email newsletters. The metric here can be Email Opt-ins/Page Views.

There are various tools available to track email campaigns in the market. Some of those are Madmimi, Aweber, Icontact and Jangomail. Please let me know if I need to add more.

It was really nice blogging about a successful, yet underrated topic of Email marketing. I hope you like this post and will highly appreciate if you can share your wonderful suggestions on this topic.

AB/Multivariate/Segmentation Testing– Choosing the best Page/Combination/Segment

2008-03-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

Web Analytics is not just pulling numbers from the Web Analytics tools and reporting numbers, it is much more than that. As an Analyst, your task is to report the numbers in a presentable and descriptive manner with analysis but also give suggestions on how to continuously improve the website in terms of appeal and ease of use. This article will touch base on the 3 major website conversion testing methods: AB Testing, Multivariate Testing and Segmentation Testing.

AB Testing or Bucket Test as you might call it is a way to test 2 variations of a page in order to determine which page is more successful in terms of pulling people towards a website goal. We split traffic on each page based on a defined proportion (50/50, 90/10). Usually the first step where there are most chances of convincing a user to buy something is the homepage as this is the page that defines a website in terms of visual appeal, product listing, ease of navigation, color scheme and even text. These things go a long way in generating a sense of trust in the users. For e.g. we have a website whose business model is selling books and there are 2 AB Test pages with the first page being the Control (original) having a discount offer banner on the top and the second page doesn’t have any discount offer banner but a slideshow listing the top selling books. We will then put tracking codes on both these pages and identify each page with a unique identifier in order to measure each page’s success. This success is usually measured in terms of the Conversion ratio which can be measured as: Visitors on the Conversion page/Visitors on the Test/Home Page. Some tools that can help you achieve AB Testing are Google Website Optimizer, Verster, SiteSpect and SplitAnalyzer. Below is a screenshot depicting a typical AB test report.

The second and the most efficient method to optimize your page is known as a Multivariate Testing. In this method, we don’t use multiple pages to determine a higher conversion rate but we test the same page by changing the elements around. For e.g. we can test headlines, colors, buttons and images on the same page by correlating each element with each other to find the best possible combination/element. The method used to achieve this is known as the Taguchi Method. This method takes into consideration the sample size and how long a test should run in order to have a clear winner. Google Website Optimizer uses this method to measure a multivariate test. This tool lets you view the various combinations and elements separately and then based on the Taguchi method decides the winner. All you need to do is add a tracking code on to your page and Google Website Optimizer will then split the traffic equally on each element separately. Please look at the below screenshot to understand how Google Website Optimizer measures a multivariate test. Some other tools that can help you achieve multivariate Testing are Google Website Optimizer, Optimost, Memetrics, Verster, Maxymiser and Omniture Test&Target.

Another form of testing which can be used to target specific segments like country, keywords, referring domains and direct traffic is known as Segmentation. In this we split the traffic based on a defined segment and then track the success factor/behavior pattern of each segment. This is the first step to achieve Behavioral Targeting which is in itself a very powerful way to understand user patterns. Please look at the below mockup segmentation test report screenshot.
Again the best KPI to measure the success is the Conversion rate. Some tools that can help you achieve Segmentation are Google Analytics (Free), Kefta and Maxymiser.

Content Management System Walkthrough – Joomla and Drupal

2008-03-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

A Content Management System is used to handle website content which can include text, images, audio, video etc. A CMS allows you to create a website without having any prior knowledge of programming. For the past couple of weeks I tried my hands on open source content management systems. The 2 premier open source content management systems in the market are Joomla and Drupal. The names sound funny but these 2 tools are one of the most robust tools available which can give any other CMS tools a run for their money. It was a tough couple of weeks to figure out the installation process of setting up the Content Management systems. After going through tons of articles on the Web, I managed to successfully install these on my machine.

Through this article I’ll try to share my experience in setting up the CMS tools in a local environment. Following are a few tools you would need on your machine in order to properly configure these CMS tools:

1) IIS (Internet Information Services/Apache Web Server: You can install IIS on your Windows XP machine by going to Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Windows Components Wizard and select IIS from the list as shown in the figure to install it. IIS is a Web Server which enables you to publish your webpages in a local/global environment. I didn’t use Apache but you can use it instead of IIS.

2) PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor): PHP is a Server Side programming language used to produce dynamic Web Pages. We don’t need PHP to do any sort of programming in this walkthrough but it is pivotal as the CMS tools we are using contain pages created in PHP. PHP can be downloaded at www.php.net. Once you have installed the PHP executable and setup your IIS Server, you can test whether your PHP is working correctly or not. You would need to create a document test.php and enter the following text in it: ?php phpinfo();? included in <> tags. Save the test.php and place it in this folder: C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\test.php which is your IIS Server’s root directory. Once all the above steps are complete, test your PHP installation by going to this URL http://localhost/test.php. If you see the page as shown in the image, it means that PHP is successfully installed on your machine.

3) MySQL Server: MySQL is a free open source database that has all the features that an expensive server can have (For e.g. SQL Server, TeraData costs can go up to thousands of dollars). Joomla and Drupal make use of MySQL as the back-end which provide storage for all text content and configuration settings. You can download MySQL Server from www.mysql.com but don’t forget to download the MySQL administrator (Image below) as well which will provide a front end GUI (Graphical User Interface) for your databases. Configuring and Installing MySQL is very simple and easy but if you do face any problems, you can always search the Web. It is however mandatory to create a username and password which you will have to use in order to install Joomla and Drupal. (Note: One of the biggest problems I faced after the installation of MySQL and PHP was getting MySQL compatible/talk to PHP. Basically there are a lot of extensions or Dlls that you might have to play with or change in order to create a successful connection between MySQL and PHP. I still can’t figure out which exact extension was responsible for making these 2 tools compatible but it is either php_mysql.dll or php_mysqli.dll. So if you are unlucky, then you might have to wait a little longer than expected to make Joomla or Drupal work. However, I finally managed to make these 2 tools talk by installing EasyPHP which is explained next.)

4) EasyPHP: This tool allows quick compatibility of PHP with the Web Servers and databases. It was only after installing this tool was I able to access Joomla and Drupal on localhost. This tool will install all the extensions that PHP needs in order to create a connection with MySQL. You can install EasyPHP from http://www.easyphp.org. Once you have installed and executed EasyPHP, you can see an E icon on the taskbar (bottom right of your screen). Right click on that and go to Configuration -> PHP Extension. Once you see the box as shown in the below image, you should select all the extensions listed in the box as it will install the necessary Dlls.

Once you have completed the above steps, then you need to install Joomla which you can download from www.joomla.org and Drupal from www.drupal.org. Choose the latest installation versions (I chose these files Joomla_1.0.15-Stable-Full_Package.zip and drupal-6.1.tar.gz) and extract these files in the root directory of your Web Server (C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\joomla and C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\drupal). Once you have extracted these files, you would need to create respective databases for these 2 tools in MySQL Administrator as shown in the below image.

Finally you would need to go to http://localhost/joomla/index.php and http://localhost/drupal/index.php in order to install these 2 tools on your machine. While installing these tools, it would be required to create a connection with MySQL Server in order for these CMS tools to publish their files on the database by entering your MySQL credentials as defined earlier. Once your installation is complete, you should see the following pages as shown in the last 2 images.

All in all it was a nice experience learning the CMS installation procedure as it has added a new dimension to my career and also a skill-set. Hopefully you like this article and let me know if you have any questions regarding the rigorous installation process as I’ll try my best to help you.

Page View metrics – Is it really dead?

2008-02-26T15:28:00.000-08:00

I read an interesting post regarding the Page View KPI no longer being part of the Web Analytics metrics in the future as Nielsen/NetRatings have decided to scrap Page views from their rankings. The article alleges that the Page View metrics is incapable of telling us about the overall user experience as nowadays most websites make use of widgets, videos , flash, AJAX content etc and it is impossible to measure those attributes with the use of Page Views. The article mentions “If you have widgets, you don't really have page views. If you do videos, you don't have page views.”

Will Page Views suffer the same fate as the Hits metrics? In the nascent stage of Web Analytics, Hits used to be the key metrics tracked in place of Page Views but as the Web Analytics community became mature, the Hits metrics was found wanting. This is because Hits measured everything from loading of images, CSS to JavaScript which meant that Hits will count all the individual requests and report them seperately which in turn was termed as inaccurate. One of the reasons why Hits noticed a quick exit was due to the fact that it could only be tracked via Server Logs and with the advent of conventional Web Analytics tools, it was easier to find a replacement in the form of Page Views.

Are Page views dead? Personally I think it is too early to say that. I say this because around 90% of the companies today would be using Page Views in their day to day reporting/dashboards and also all the major Web Analytics tools report this as a prime metrics. Page Views have been widely accepted as an industry standard and it would be really difficult to replace it immediately as a suitable replacement would not be easy to find. Though we have noticed in the past that Visits and Unique Visitors have been considered a better metrics than Page Views but it doesn’t really mean that we can totally discount Page Views as they have their own value in Web Analytics.

What can be the possible replacements for Page Views? I don’t think the existing prime metrics like Visits, Visitors would replace it but I agree with what was written in the article about User Engagement. User Engagement according to me is the Visitor experience on a webpage ranging from clicks on specific links, interaction with the embedded applications like Videos, Widgets etc and most importantly Time Spent. Based on my experience, I’ve noticed that majority of the exits on a website happen within the first 15 seconds and it is crucial for us to decrease the exit rate for this time range. Ideally in case of Ecommerce websites, a user session should range between 5-10 minutes as I think by this time the user is well adept with the website interface. He would then decide to perform the appropriate task like filling a form to buying something. Similarly the user engagement metrics would be different for a content, classifieds and News website. So the Time Spent metrics is in a way a subset of User Engagement.

All in all I think it is too early to totally discount Page Views from Web Analytics but sooner or later the industry will decide to replace it. But whenever that happens, I sincerely hope that Page Views would be given a graceful exit unlike it’s predecessor Hits.

Excel Alerts- A gift for Web Analysts

2008-02-17T14:11:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Excel is the lifeline of most of the reporting done these days and it is imperative for an Analyst to present the data as visually as possible. So I’ll change gears this time and write about a very useful feature I learnt last week which I call as Excel Alert. This is not an in-built attribute in Excel but it resembles the properties of an Excel feature known as Conditional Formatting. This characteristic allows us apply formats like color, bold text etc on values in a cell or formula. For e.g. if we have 2 cells containing ratios, conditional formatting allows us to determine which is greater by highlighting either of the 2 cells in Red, Green or some other format.

This article will help you get introduced to yet another Conditional Formatting feature which will add more visual appeal to your reports. Instead of using CF we will make use of AutoShapes to determine a change in cell values. To accomplish this, let’s look at the below steps and screenshots:
1) Open Microsoft Excel and go to Insert -> Picture -> AutoShapes. Choose Basic Shapes and select Isosceles Triangle from the list (You can choose the shape of your choice). Select a cell and draw the shape in that cell (I have merged 3 cells and accommodated the shape) and rotate the shape of the Triangle if you want. Right click on the Triangle, select Format AutoShape and under the Fill section choose the color of your choice which in my case happens to be Red. Copy the Red Triangle, paste it in another cell and change the color of the shape to a different color. So now I have 2 shapes in Red and Green. Look at the screenshot.

2) Next you need to go to Tools -> Customize and select Tools on the Left to view the goodies in the right section. Choose the Camera tool from this list and drag it to the Menu bar. Now select the cell with the AutoShape and click on the Camera icon. Start drawing the shape again and you will find a replica of the AutoShape you first created. Then as you can see in the screenshot, right click on the newly captured AutoShape and choose Format Picture. In the Colors and Lines tab, choose the No Fill and No Line options from the Fill->Color and Line->Color drop downs respectively. This will get rid of the outer boundary of your captured AutoShape. Have a look at the screenshots below to follow the steps.

3) Then we need to name our 2 AutoShapes which we can do by going to Insert-> Name-> Define. Once there, we need to define the cells where the 2 Shapes are placed. In my case, I have referenced the cells and named them according to the color of the Shapes. This step is really crucial because we uniquely define the Shapes as these are the definitions by which we will be referencing them.

4) Now let’s look at the final step which deals with the definitions of the Alerts. First we have to define the cell where we will be displaying the number with name ‘Score1’ and statement = IF(Cell-value>5, 2, 1). The simple IF statement in the example validates the condition which in this case means if number is greater than 5 then choose 2 else choose 1. Finally we need to define the Alert which will be displayed next to the number validating the condition. Please look at the Step 4a image which shows that we have defined the Alert1 with the formula =Choose(Score1,Red,Green). This formula is helpful in providing an alias for the numbers used in the previous IF statement. So 1 means Red and 2 means Green.

5) Now if we change the values in Cell C3 to a number lower than 5, we will see the Alert as Red and vice versa. Please look at the final 2 images which will give you an idea as to how these changes will take effect.

You can also download this file here. I hope you like this post as I think it was a refreshing change from the usual topics.

Debugging your Web Analytics code

2008-02-10T22:07:00.000-08:00

I came across a question on Yahoo Web Analytic Group regarding debugging tracking code on a webpage without having access to the Web Analytics tool. The answers to this question can be more than one but based on my experience, the best way to check Web Analytics code on a page is to use a Packet Sniffer.

A Packet Sniffer or HTTP/JavaScript Debugger as it is known is a tool that analyzes and parses network traffic. There are many other uses of a Packet Sniffer but in this case we are only looking at capturing HTTP/JavaScript packets. So if I have a webpage containing Google Analytics code, all I need to do is activate this software while the webpage is being loaded. Once the entire code snippet on the page has been loaded, you can go to the Packet Sniffer tool and search for the Google Analytics code from the list of captured packets.

Let us look at an example by going to www.msn.com and capturing the Omniture Web Analytics tag on their webpage using a tool called Fiddler. Please look at the 2 screenshots captured after the MSN-US page load was complete.

The first image is an overall summary of all the code being rendered with the Omniture code highlighted in Blue. Please note that for an Analytics JavaScript code to be successfully rendered, it has to make a ‘Status 200' call to the respective Datacenter meaning the request has been completed. Now double click on the captured snippet and look at the second screenshot for the next step.

After double clicking on the Omniture code, you will have to click on the Web Forms tab on the top right in order to view the various parameters being passed onto Omniture. You will notice all the various parameters being sent to Omniture like the Page name, Language, Screen resolution and so on. This step will also tell us whether the custom variables we passed on the analytics code are being sent correctly or not.

Packet Sniffers have a very important role to play in Web Analytics as they can help fix issues like data not being present in the reports to discrepancy in numbers. Finally listed below are a few more HTTP Debugger tools that I’m aware of:

1) HTTP Watch
2) Charles Proxy
3) EffeTech HTTP Sniffer

A peek at Web Banners

2008-02-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

My last post mentioned the various Web Advertising deals that take place between advertisers and publishers. This post will help us understand what is pivotal in ensuring that these deals are successful. You must have come across various advertising banners displayed on websites like Yahoo, MSN etc. We will now take a closer look at the different kinds of Web Banners present today.

1) Banners and Skyscrapers: Banners were one of the first Web Adverting units introduced in the Internet. They are complied of specific measurements which can range from 234*60 to 468*60 pixels. They are created from JPEG, GIF images and will generally be displayed on the top just below the heading of a website or at the bottom. However while scrolling down the webpage we might loose sight of them as they are mostly displayed on top. Skyscrapers/Sidebars on the other hand are tall Ad units displayed on the right or left portion of the webpage making them visible throughout the scrolling process. They are mostly displayed as 120*600 pixel banners. It is therefore essential to select the kind of banner you want to display on your website depending on its CTR (Click through Rate). Google Adwords and Adsense make use of various banners that are displayed on its search results and publishing websites respectively.
2) Floating Ad Units and Multimedia Ads: Floating Ads are displayed once a visitor lands on the homepage and these units are known to travel on the page during the scrolling process. They are usually designed in Macromedia Flash to draw the attention of the user and entice him to click. However they can be annoying for a lot of users as they completely superimpose the text area on the Webpage. Multimedia or Unicast Ad is typically displayed as an animated video/audio message designed especially to replicate a television.
3) Popups and Popunders: Popups are banners that are displayed in the form of a new browser window displayed onto our screen. It is immediately displayed after a user visits a website. However a Popunder browser window opens itself underneath the parent website usually getting unnoticed during the initial entry to the website. Again they are designed primarily to grab the user attention and encourage him to click. These Ad units are known to be more successful than Banners and Floating Ad units in terms of getting more clicks.
4) Ecommerce Widgets: A Widget is a snippet of code that can be embedded in a website and it is the latest inclusion in the ever-growing Web Advertising field. For e.g. An Amazon widget can added to a webpage for selling books, software etc. The Widget advertising model almost follows the PPA (Pay per Acquisition) which is described in my last blog post. So if a user buys a book through a widget embedded on a website, the publisher will be entitled to receive a portion of the Book cost. I recently read an article mentioning about a Widget called the ‘Paypal Storefront Widget’ which is especially made for Blogs and Social Networking websites. This widget offer services such as in-widget shopping carts, product description, thumbnail gallery etc. Unfortunately this widget is only available for Typepad Blog users. Widgets like these help tap the enormous potential of Ecommerce and with such tools Internet can only get better.

These were some of the banners which are the most prevalent today and it should be noted that there will be newer and more creative Web banners that will hit the Internet sooner or later. Having more and more of these banners on your webpages will obviously enhance your earnings but we should always draw a line between the acceptable and uncomfortable user experience which according to me is of the utmost importance. I hope you like this post and if possible share your opinions.

My take on Web Banner Advertising

2008-01-27T21:44:00.000-08:00

How does a content websites make its revenue? The answer is simple and it is the same concept that magazines, radio and newspapers have adopted which is by selling ads. By selling ads, I mean the source (publisher) website displays Banner Ads of other target websites/businesses (advertisers) on their website based on an Advertising deal which will be talked about in a bit. The Banner Ad will be a kind of campaign which the advertiser would run on its end which can either be landing users on the Homepage or in case of an Ecommerce website, landing visitors in the Shopping Cart. The advertiser will also measure the performance of Banners based on some 3rd Party Ad Serving Tool which in most cases the publisher would also be using to track progress at their end. The aim of the publishing website is to get as many users visiting the website so that the chance of it making money increases. The publisher will get paid based on namely 4 deals listed below:

1) PPC (Pay per Click): This deal specifies that if a visitor clicks on the banner and lands on the advertiser’s website, the publisher of that ad will get a specific price. More the visitors, more the clicks and eventually more revenue. It is measured as CPC (Cost per Click).
2) PPM (Pay per Thousand Impressions): This deal is primarily based on the volume of traffic landing on the website. The publisher will be paid X amount per 1000 Impressions (Page Views) on the page hosting the Web Banner. The deal can range from 50 cents CPM (Cost per Thousand) to $50 depending on the publishing website.
3) PPV (Pay per Visit):Through this model, the advertiser will pay the Publisher based on the number of times visitors have visited the page. (A Visit is a session on a Website which occurs within a time frame for the same Unique Visitor. The Universal Web Analytics time frame standard set for Visits is 30 minutes but it can be changed).
4) PPA (Pay per Action/Acquisition): This is my favorite. Based on this deal, the publisher will only be paid if a visitor from its website performed a predefined action like converted into a customer by buying from the advertiser. In this case, the publisher will be paid a portion (0-50%) of the cost of the product.
I can add one more to this list which is MGR (Monthly Gross Revenue): This is more applicable to online Poker business. According to this deal, the publisher will be paid a share of the monthly gross revenue generated by a Poker player.

These banners can be targeted based on Country (I.P.), search terms, source of traffic, Day Parting (Serving Ads during different time periods) etc which is made possible by tools like Zedo, Atlas etc and can be used by both publishers and advertisers to track banner performance at their end. These tools help both parties to track Banners and manage campaigns like advertising deals and landing traffic.
All in all Banners are the lifeline of today’s advertising business model and they are here to stay. I will be next writing about the different kinds of banners present in the industry today.

10 Ways to lower Drop off Rate in a Conversion Funnel

2008-01-20T23:15:00.000-08:00

My last article mentioned ways to measure the drop off rate but through this article I’ll try to list ways by which you can reduce the drop off rate. Drop off Rate and Conversion Rate are two sides of the same coin as the below points would relate to both equally. A Conversion Funnel can start from the homepage, a search results page or a campaign specific page. Now let’s look at some of the ways by which we can reduce drop off rate:

1) A/B or Bucket Testing: A/B testing means testing many variants of the Conversion pages (Homepage, Product View etc) by sending a proportion of traffic on each page and eventually determining which page led to the minimum drop off or the highest Conversion. The important factor to keep in mind while conducting A/B test is that one of these pages should be the control (the original page). We can test pages by changing button color, size, text, placement etc or by modifying forms in order to minimize the customer drop off during the Registration process. Eventually by using a unique page name/bucket page name we should be able to determine which page performed the best.
2) Segmentation Tests: These are different than Bucket Test because in Segmentation we are looking to target certain segments of customers/users. We target customers based on their status (New user, not yet registered and Registered Customer). The “not yet registered” customer segment should see the login page so that he can continue the Conversion process where he left it. Similarly new users would see a different page and registered customers see a page only listing products of their choice. We can also segment customers according to their country (I.P.), Campaign Tracker ID, Direct/Indirect source of traffic. Ultimately we want to be able to determine which segment has the lowest Drop off/Highest Conversion rate.
3) Products Out of Stock: This is one of the mistakes that online retailers might make in order to make a customer purchase a product by pretending that the product is in stock when it is not. When the customer actually believes and purchases the item then guess what he gets an error message saying “Payment failed as Product out of stock”. I’m not saying this is a common practice but this scenario is possible and when it does happen it will surely leave a bad mark on that customer and maybe potential customers. So if a specific product is out of stock, then make sure you don’t display it.
4) Detailed Product Description: One of the reasons why sites like Amazon and Dell are pioneers in Online Shopping is because they make sure they provide the in depth coverage of the product. The users should also be made well adept with the specs of the product before they enter the cart with detailed textual description along with pictures. Sometimes including user comments also help.
5) Hyperlinks to Popups: While in the Conversion Funnel, a user might be distracted to click on a link/button that he finds appealing and this is the time when most customers leave the page. So in order to minimize that point of drop off, try to create links that open a new browser window/popup in order to retain the users on that page. It is however a highly debatable point because we need to be able to measure the links which lead to the customer exiting from the Funnel (Exit links). So I would suggest you to include links to Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, Product Specs and others in the form of popups so that you do not loose the customer in case he doesn’t go back in the Conversion process.
6) Trust: If your company is a public company/Fortune 500 company, always mention it on the Conversion funnel pages. In case of other companies, be sure to display a secure page icon (Verisign) on the encryption pages in order to generate a sense of trust for the customers. Having a privacy policy and terms of conditions page is also very important. A clearly defined Privacy Policy goes a long way in making the user feel secure before making a payment.
7) Shopping Cart Indicator: It is very important for visualize the Shopping Cart through a Step indicator on Conversion Cycle pages. As soon as the user selects a product you need to make him feel as if he’s entering a Shopping Cart and also listing what step it is so that he knows exactly where to go next.
8) Simple Registration Process: Try to make the registration process as simple as possible and try to minimize asking questions about PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Make sure the spellings are correct in the Registration process as it can really leave a bad taste for the user experience. Include as much predefined information as possible to reduce the amount of information the user has to fill in. For e.g. If a user has selected UK as the country then if possible auto populate the City, County, Country Code in the drop downs/text boxes and let the user select from that list rather than him entering it manually. Also radio buttons can work better then drop downs in most scenarios especially if there are only 2 choices.
9) Search Functionality: It is usually not advisable to include a search text box in between the Registration process but having it would only make things better. I say this because if a user wants to search for any information then he might want to exit the cart and go back to the Homepage. But if you have a search box which displays results in the form of a popup then you reduce your chances of jeopardizing your Funnel process by retaining the user on that page.
10) Web Analytics Tool to Measure KPIs: Finally the most important step is proper configuring of your Web Analytics tool to measure relevant KPIs or metrics. The Web Analytics code implementation according to the pages is of pivotal importance which hold true for Bucket Testing or Segmentation. The KPIs/metrics that might be of up most importance in case of the Conversion cycle can be Drop off Rate, Conversion Rate, Time spent on page, Exit Rate and Click Tracking.

These were just some of the ways that can help you maximize your ROI in terms of Conversion as there might be a lot more. I hope you like this article and if possible, let me know your thoughts about it.

Funnel Drop Off/Abandonment Rate

2008-01-13T07:19:00.000-08:00

Drop off or abandonment rate measures the number of visits/visitors who left a conversion process (funnel) without completing it. Any process with 2 or more actions on the site can be considered a conversion process, what you define as a conversion depends on the purpose of your site and your business objective. Some of the commonly used conversion funnel are shopping cart, newsletter signup and document downloads.

Abandonment rate helps identify the steps in the funnel that are causing the users to drop off. Conducting analysis of those steps will help us take necessary steps to minimize the drop offs and optimize the conversions.
There are 2 ways to calculate Drop off rate and each of them provide the data in slightly different ways. Both of them are correct ways to calculate.

Drop off/Abandonment rate = (Visits of the current Conversion Step-Visits of first Conversion Step)/Visits of the First Conversion Step. Let’s assume that we want to use Product as the first step of the conversion process and that step gets 10,000 visits. But of those 10,000 only 7,000 continued to the next step of adding the product to shopping cart. Then in the next step only 200 out of total 10,00 that started the process continue to Registration form and finally 1,200 out of 10,000 got to the final confirmation page. This means we saw 30% abandonment between Step 1 and Step 2 ie. (7,000 -10,000)/1000. Abandonment was 80% from Step 1 to Step 3 (2,000 – 10,000)/10,000. Final abandonment rate was 88% (1,200 – 10,000)/10,000. Though this calculation gives us a good idea of final drop off rate and conversion it is a little hard to understand.

Drop off/Abandonment rate = (Visits of the current Conversion Step-Visits of the previous Conversion Step)/Visits of the Previous conversion Step. This calculation takes into account the previous Conversion Step and the current Conversion Step. Fore e.g. In the Funnel, we notice 7000 visits are measured on the Add to Cart page (Step 2) and only 2000 Continue to the Registration form which means that the calculation based on the formula would be (2000-7000)/7000 which would be -71%.

Based on the above formulas, it looks like the first one seems better in terms of Funnel visualization but personally I like the second formula better. I say this because in the second funnel we are only considering the respective Conversion steps in the calculation and not Step 1 (Products) because Step 1 is entirely a separate user experience. According to me the Drop off rate should be calculated based on the 2 Conversion Steps as they are independent of the user acquaintance on the other pages of a Funnel. These 2 pages alone can determine how we can improve the conversion rate at each step as these are not based on the Products page experience. For e.g. The Registration form design and involvement is totally different than what it is on the Products page. I hope you like this post and would really appreciate if you can share your opinions.

P3P - Do we really care about it?

2007-07-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences Project) as it is commonly known is actually not known by the regular internet user. I was going through some Internet terminologies and came across this term in Wikipedia. It immediately struck me as an interesting topic and prompted me to share my own views. P3P is a standard introduced by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) for website to share/display their privacy policy to the general Internet users. There is tons of information on P3P on the Internet with all sorts of intricate details.
But do people know or feel the need for P3P? Personally, I think people should take it more seriously. I do know that third party cookie rejection rate has been at the highest during the past 3-4 years and it is high time that websites start feeling the need for introducing valid and sound privacy policies. Third party cookies are a piece of text/data placed on your machine that do not belong to the website you have visited. If you go to www.msn.com and you find an Omniture 2o7.net cookie on your machine, the 2o7.net cookie is the third party cookie tracking your browsing details in this scenario.

According to a WebTrends article posted in 2005, the cookie rejection rate was as high as 12-15%. So we can guess that figure should be between 20-25% in 2006-2007. The new versions of browsers like Firefox and IE7 aren’t helping matters either. The default settings in the Privacy tab of IE7 are designed to automatically block third party cookies that do not have a P3P policy. Look at the below screenshot.

So these points do prove that Webanalytics giants like WebTrends and Omniture are loosing a lot of valuable data as their cookies are being blocked more and more if the security setting of browsers is high. But this has been the trend since Web Analytics originated. One of the reasons why Google, MSN and Yahoo are successful in targeting their customers is because they have a login cookie placed on the user’s machine. If a hotmail customer is logged on to passport, it is really easier for Microsoft to show ads based on his previous browsing habits. This cookie can never be blocked unless the users chooses to block all the cookies. But if the user blocks all the cookies, he would not be able to login to his account. So it is possible that majority of the users will choose the defualt browser setting making it easier for other websites to place their cookies. It is always better for websites to have a TRUSTe Privacy Program which is a universal standard found in a privacy policy and for users it is a good practice to read the privacy policy of a website which can be checked by going to View -> Web Page Privacy Policy in your IE7 browser. The default setting in browsers will always allow cookies from companies having a Privacy Policy. A website having a valid privacy policy would also be worthy of the trust of users. Users should always shop online on portals having a TRUSTe Privacy seal in their Privacy policy.

It was a good practice for me to look around for information about P3P and believe that it is a positive step taken to make the users aware about what kind of data is being collected and how it could be attributed to their online behavior. Please feel free to add your opinions/criticisms.

Things that make Online Shopping click

2007-07-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

Ecommerce is really an interesting term to talk about because it is becoming popular day by day in developing countries and is already successful in the Western world. Countries like United States and United Kingdom have setup the appropriate infrastructure for Online shopping to thrive whereas developing countries are a little behind in terms of the facilities needed for ecommerce to boom. I also wrote an article on Online Shopping in India. Internet speed, Latest Antivirus protection, Updated Spyware and Malware protection, Firewall protection, Ground shipping etc are really important to make Online shopping successful in any country. So it is necessary that we ensure appropriate steps are taken to secure our computer before we shop online. Ground Shipping is another important aspect of Online Shopping. I was browsing www.amazon.com and looking for some game DVDs for my cousin in India but unfortunately Amazon has a policy which doesn’t allow people to ship DVDs outside of US. So such things do go a long way in hampering the growth and popularity of Online Shopping around the world but these are exceptions that will exist everywhere.
On a brighter note, a study by J.D. Power and Associates in 2006 revealed that used car buyers increased from 53 % in 2005 to 59 % in 2006. Websites like www.carfax.com, www.kbb.com have made it very easy for people to compare used cars online and portals like www.cars.com have made it a breeze for people to buy/sell cars instantly.
Another successful online shopping industry is the electronics market. Personally I have always believed in buying electronics online because I can get an in depth review of the product with detailed specs. Especially Laptops and Digital Cameras have experienced a huge Internet market as majority of the people end up buying them online because they are cheaper in comparison to retail store prices. Other important industries gaining popularity online are Clothing, Home Decors, Perfume and Cosmetics. Websites like www.ebay.com have made it possible for people to browse for their favorite brands in clothing. They also have the option to select the design, color of the fabric by simply sitting at home. Perfumes too fall under the same category offering consumers the option to easily select their favorite fragrance and brand. Home Decors is a booming industry in the making as shopping for these in stores is not a good idea as they might be bulky and difficult to carry. So buying them online is a really good bet as they can be delivered to your home without you actually going to that crowded store. So online shopping will continue to gain more popularity worldwide as it has more advantages than disadvantages but it will take some time for people to understand its worth in some parts of the world. I hope you like this article and please feel free to comment with your opinions.

Should a Web Analyst have development skills? - Part 1

2007-06-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

Development skills are in themselves enough to get you a great job. But does a Web Analyst really need to be a developer as well? Personally speaking, it would be a blessing in disguise if a Web Analyst has development skills. In my opinion he will be the ‘Ideal’ Web Analyst. But it is not usually common to find those skills in a Web Analyst. I am not a developer but I do understand the basics of programming as I took some courses in college. I do believe that a Web Analyst should be able to understand the code as he is the one who might be responsible for the implementation of tracking code on the Web pages along with reporting and analysis of data. Also he is the one responsible for debugging the code in case the captured parameters aren’t being reported correctly. Having basic knowledge is HTML, JavaScript and ASP will always be a big help in enhancing the Web pages if there is an area of concern on a page. Usually if a Web Analyst is working with the Dev team, mostly the changes suggested by the Analyst will be done according to the discretion of the Dev team which will take time. However if the Web Analyst knows a little programming, he can make proper changes on the page like changing links, renaming pages, modifying the JaveScript tracking code himself to make the process much quicker.

A Web Analyst should also have a sound understanding of Databases as they are crucial for a Web Analytics tool. Knowing what is the backend query being used by a WA tool like Omniture and WebTrends to pull out a particular set of data, a Web Analyst will understand the process even more. In some cases he can himself pull out data for a custom reporting request. One trend that I noticed since the time I started working is that more and more Developers started showing their interest in learning Web Analytics. This means that they will always have an edge over Web Analysts who only do reporting, analysis and don’t have a technical background. The Web Analyst/Developer might steal the show by showing their dedication and technical skills over a normal Web Analyst.

I do have a prediction for the Web Analyst job profiles in the future. Companies seeking Web Analysts will sooner or later be looking for people who have a background in Web Development or any other Development experience. The reason why I say this is because a Web Analyst’s job will be seen as very limited with a static role. Companies would want people who can minimize their expenses on the development team as the Web Analyst they would seek will have an entry level understanding of programming languages like JavaScript, VBScript and to some extent even AJAX. I hope I have expressed my point here that Dev skills will be a key in creating the ‘Ideal’ Web Analyst.

Hopefully you like this post and feel free to comment on this article with your opinions.

8 Steps for maximum ROI through SEM, SEO and Web Analytics

2007-06-25T04:57:00.000-07:00

SEO, SEM and Web Analytics are interconnected. A business can be very successful if we utilize the 3 skills effectively. Let us consider an example where a business is interested in increasing its ROI based on the SEM expenses. It is a travel website and has bought travel related keywords on Google Adwords. It is paying $2 per click for the keyword ‘air tickets’. So if someone searches for ‘air tickets’, this website will be on the first page of the sponsored listings.
Let us assume that this website got 100 clicks from the SEM campaign with an Acquisition rate of 50% meaning 200 people viewed the ad for this website and 100 users out of the 200 clicked. Now out of this 100, 3 people actually bought tickets worth $200 each. So the SEM expenses are $200 and the ROI in this case would be 600-200/600 = 66% with a Conversion rate of 3%. Note the difference between Conversion and Acquisition. In another case the business is again paying $2 per click on the same keyword with only 1% Conversion and 100 impressions/clicks. This time the ROI is 200-200/100 = 0%. So obviously the first case is better and it is imperative for the business to take immediate measures ensuring that the conversion rate is more and the expenses on SEM are less.
How do we do that? Simple, it is a mix of combining the 3 techniques (SEM, SEO and Web Analytics) effectively. Once you start your SEM campaign and buy keywords, follow the below steps:
1) Focus your attention on all the keywords you bought and specifically on the most expensive keywords like ‘air travel’. Keep track of this data to decide which keywords are getting the most impressions.
2) Prepare relevant and catchy ads in your campaign management tool that will entice users to your website thereby increasing traffic.
3) Always differentiate between Organic and SEM keyword traffic to effectively analyze your traffic. Organic Referring URL for ‘air tickets’ would be http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=air+tickets. For tracking traffic from SEM keywords, you need to manually tag the destination URL with a query string parameter like xyz.com/?abc=airtickets. This will help you differentiate the traffic from Search Engines.
4) Optimize all the keywords you bought and focus most on the expensive keywords. Create new links containing these keywords and make sure that you populate the Meta tags properly. Your Meta tags should always be in relevance to the content of your page.
5) Also use the Overture Tool for the lookout on related keywords to optimize your pages and add content.
6) Use tools like Google Analytics to look at the content performance report and Overall Keyword conversion report to analyze which pages and keywords are getting the most traffic from Organic Google search.
7) Also add Goals in Google Analytics to ensure that the conversion is according to your objectives. Once you know which pages are causing the majority of bounces, then it is up to you to optimize your pages and reduce exit links, introduce A/B testing etc.
8) Finally if you start seeing more Organic traffic on your website than SEM keyword traffic, make sure you lower your bid on the keywords and gradually finish your campaign once your website is properly indexed by Search Engines.

These were some of the steps that might help you lower your expenses on SEM. There is so much more information on the Internet that will help you diminish your cost on your online campaigns. I’ll keep you posted on new techniques and practices to help you lower your cost on online advertising.

How is my Web Analytics data captured?

2007-06-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

The concept important to learn after grasping the basic Web Analytics fundamentals is how do the Analytics software capture data. The basic thing required to track data on a Webpage is the Web Analytics code or tag. For e.g. if you want to find whether a page has the Google Analytics code, go to View -> Source and Ctrl+F for urchin.js. This is a JavaScript code that can be pasted on a Webpage to track Analytics data. Similarily there is a different technology of a .gif Image call to the Server to track Web analytics data. Similarily, to find an image call code you can go to www.msn.com and www.yahoo.com and search for c.gif and p.gif respectively. Below is my understanding of the various steps that take place before the data shows up in the Analytics tools. I have summed them up in a seven step hierarchy and call it the Web Analytics Data Lifecycle.

Webpage -> JavaScript Tag/Image Call -> Web Server -> Log Files -> Processing -> Databases -> Web Analytics Tool

1) Webpage - Web pages are the most pivotal part of this hierarchy. These can be HTML, ASP, ASP.NET etc or any other page hosted on a Web Server.
2) JavaScript/Image call – Omniture, Google Analytics, Web Trends etc use the JavaScript tag. This code needs to be placed on the client’s Webpage so that it can track the required parameters that can be used to make important business decisions. This JavaScript is then rendered when a person lands on a page and it sends parameters like Page Name, I.P, and resolution etc to the appropriate datacenters. The other widely used technology is the Image call technology which is a simple (img src) tag that calls the .gif image on the appropriate Server. Again, once the page is rendered, it calls the image and a hit is registered. Usually it is recommended that you place these tags on the top of your page so that they get called even if the page is not fully loaded.
3) Web Server – This is the datacenter/Web Server that is responsible for storing the parameters captured by the page tag. These Servers are usually very powerful and can store TBs of data and are also responsible for dropping cookies in the client’s machine. These cookies are the crux of Web Analytics and are crucial for calculating user behavior.
4) Log Files – The parameters captured by the Analytics Tag are stored in the Server Logs which are systemically designed to store data in the form of text files which can be in TXT or CSV format. Again these log files are huge and it is recommended to store them as compressed Archives.
5) Processing – The Log Files then need to be processed by the Operations/Database team which makes sure that the data land in the Servers hosting the databases. This is a very complex step and a team having strong technical expertise can do the job. This team is also responsible for filtering out the so called Bot traffic.
6) Databases – These databases/data warehouses store the filtered data that will be fed into the Web Analytics Tool. These databases are mostly used by Web Analysts who want to create custom reports usually not possible with the help of Web Analytics tools. They can write their own custom queries and create a report not present in the WA tool.
7) Web Analytics Tool – This is the final step of the Web Analytics Data Life Cycle and is the GUI form of data. Tools like Omniture, Google Analytics etc are the backbone for all the Analytics that take place nowadays. Anything like exporting data to creating graphs, charts are the basic features of these tools. They help organizations make the business decisions that generate revenue and make the appropriate changes to the Web Pages to retain users and also entice them to come back.

So you read how a simple Web Page forms the basis of such complex processes that are used to transform a simple http request into data that generates revenue. I hope you liked this article and would appreciate if you can critique it by commenting.

Online Shopping and Web Analytics in India

2007-06-14T06:39:00.001-07:00

Online Shopping and Web Analytics are still in their nascent state in India. A term like online marketing is quite uncommon here as majority of the population still tends to buy stuff from small retail stores. This has been the trend in India since the advent of Internet and online shopping was never given a lot of attention here. But as the status of living has been improving, people are becoming more aware of Internet. Some reasons for Online Shopping not being popular in India are:
1) There aren’t many famous shopping sites in India. The only one I know of that is famous is ebay.in formally baazee.com. (I might be wrong here but this my own opinion.)
2) Internet has never been treated as a shopping medium here as most of the Television commercials and shopping banners in the cities always encourage people to buy stuff from the Retail Stores.
3) Majority of the population still use cash as the major payment medium and Credit Cards are just recently being used by more and more people.
4) People feel hesitant to give their credit card information online due to fear of someone stealing their information online. This is a tendency in all of us but it’s only when we are aware of things like SSL and Verisign that we start trusting the Internet more.
5) Most of the people don’t have Internet at home so they tend to go to cyber cafes/Internet cafes where their information is more susceptible.
6) Slow Internet connection speed available to consumers. The fastest connection speed available to consumers is 2.5 MBps.

I will now write about my opinion on the future of Web Analytics in India. Since the time I have arrived in India after my project in United States, I have been looking at the Web Analytics job market here. I wasn’t disappointed at all after looking at the job profiles companies have to offer here. Majority of the jobs are in SEO, PPC and SEM but there is a small percentage of jobs in hardcore Web Analytics. US Companies in India are the first ones to have a Web Analytics department so that they can get some Analytics related work done from here. Many Indian companies too are opening up a Web Analytics department. So as far as the Web Analytics job market is concerned, India still has good positions but they are limited and will increase with time. Regarding the Internet usage, I have noticed that classified websites like craigslist.com are not yet popular here. Classifieds are something that can drive huge traffic but in India people still use the newspaper/radio as a medium for buying stuff or selling something. That culture is yet to creep in the Indian society but it will happen very soon.

I read an interesting post in Yahoo WA group regarding WebAnalytics not being accurate in India and China and wanted to add my own feedback on the Indian perspective.
It is true to some extent that people do tend to scramble on 1 computer but that is more prevalent in rural areas but not in metros like Mumbai and New Delhi. If talking in terms of business value, I would say people in urban India would always be more interested in buying something online rather than people in rural India. So if you want to measure the users in India, do so in the metropolitans rather than the small towns as in urban India there more chances to expand your business quickly. Again, this will change gradually once the standard of living changes and more people use their own computers. Currently only 5 % of the Indian population is using the Internet actively (Courtesy: http://www.internetworldstats.com) and still this number is in comparison to other major countries. It is inaccurate to say that Web Analytics can never be successful in India based on mere facts. As the number of Internet users increase, there will be more awareness and hopefully more business revenue. I hope you like this post and please feel free to add your comments.

Web Analytics related to Business Goals

2007-05-18T00:15:00.000-07:00

It is usually common for Web Analysts to simply report the data and follow the instructions as told. But the core of Web Analytics is the deeper analysis of data based on the business goals. Once you have the business goals then a question comes to my mind. Will the Web Analyst be able to state what metrics to use in order to calculate a business goal? Let us take the example of a content site which displays banner ads and gets paid according to the number of impressions reported. The Pageviews would be the business goal in this scenario. It is apparent that a Web Analyst should look at all metrics converting to Pageviews. More the Pageviews more is the revenue generated. The other metrics which in turn map to the Pageview can be Visits, Keywords, Unique Users, and Referrers. So what do you think should be the most important metrics? Logically looking at these 5 metrics, I would say each and every one is important as these are equally important for generating Pageviews. Once the metrics is known, it is now that the Web Analyst needs to make sense out of the numbers and report them in a presentable manner. He needs to effectively communicate what these numbers mean and in some cases give recommendations on how to increase these numbers.
Let’s think of another scenario where a user comes to a website, chooses a product and enters the cart (funnel). What do you think would be the appropriate business goal? The business goal in this scenario could be to sell a product or complete a registration form. So the metrics to measure in this case could be bounce rate, exit rate, page depth. Another good value to measure would be see where on the page the people are clicking to exit or bounce off the page. This can help us to detect which are the problem areas that are turning the page into a bounce page. We can then act accordingly and remove those links which are making the people abandon the cart. Another advantage of measuring these metrics would be introduce A/B Testing on the pages to test which page has a lower exit/bounce rate.
All in all it is imperative that WebAnalytics is tied with business goals and continuous analysis will help companies stay on top of things.

Probable reasons for Website traffic fluctuations

2007-05-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

I was doing some analysis and Anil Batra’s article Who moved my traffic really helped me. I liked the way he explained the probable reasons on why there is a difference in traffic every month. I would like to cite 2 scenarios I came across in the form of graphs. Let’s assume these graphs are for a small scale shopping site called sampleshopping.com. This is a shopping site which has a business model similar to amazon.com. This website has Omniture tagging setup and appears on the first page of google.com when we do a search on ‘online shopping’. The homepage has 40 % of its traffic from Search Engines.
I will try to explain the possible reasons for the traffic fluctuation for the graph below. The reasons are in bold.

January starts with an average visit count of 10000. This is the expected average visits for this site.
In February you’ll notice there is a slight decrease. This might be because of February having 28 days. The next 3 months experience average traffic inflow.
June experienced a drop off along with July. The most likely reasons for this drop are:
New competitor: A new competitor joined the race along with other online shopping portals which meant that some share of the traffic went to that portal. I say this because 40 % of the overall traffic to sampleshopping.com came from search engines and the inclusion of a new website on the search results page distributed the traffic.
Tagging not placed on all the pages: The previous months had 60 % of the traffic on the homepage but this month the homepage had 40 % of traffic which disclosed the problem of untagged pages under the sampleshpping.com. This was one of the main reasons for the discrepancy in traffic when I used to do analysis in my previous job.
Worldwide event/news: This scenario is the cause for the drop of traffic even on some major portals. The traffic might drop if there was some breaking news and people were busy visiting news websites or were mostly watching the news on TV.

The visits again picked up and the traffic came back to normal for the following months.
The traffic again went down in November and December. Below are some more possible causes:
The Website server was down: This is highly unlikely but I have come across such scenarios.
Search Engines did not display this website on the first page: Maybe due to some changes being made on the homepage etc, the Search Engines were not able to index the page and people were not able to find this website on the initial SE pages.
Tagging was accidentally removed: Again rare but a possibility.

The next graph is the opposite of the above graph and should be more appealing to website owners. Below are some the reasons related to increase in traffic:

Link Exchange: As the year passes by, more and more links are being exchanged to and fro with other websites which in turn increases the Page Rank of this website and thus increasing it’s ranking in search engines.
Search Engine Optimization: SEO is one of the key factors responsible for driving traffic from Search Engines. Page Name, Title, keywords and description have to be relevant on the page for search engines to index/cache the web pages.
Search Engine Marketing: Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter etc are the necessary tools that enable businesses to advertise by selling specific keywords. This mechanism of buying keywords is important for a website that isn’t on top of the Search Engine’s organic ranking.
Banner Ad Campaigns: Advertisements on the homepages are a good medium to attract more clicks and thus driving more traffic to the content pages.
Multiple tagging: A rare occurrence but again something I’ve noticed in my past analysis.
Weather and Festival/Holiday: You’ll notice that November and December have the most visits. The most appropriate reasons for this are that people tend to stay at home and browse the internet regularily during winters. It is also possible that they might be buying gifts from this website for Christmas.

These were some of the possibilities that might cause the traffic to fluctuate. Hope you like this post and feel free to add your suggestions/comments.

Legitimate ways of optimizing your Web Pages for Search Engines

2007-05-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

As a SEO expert, your job and goal is to push your website on the top of Google’s rankings without crossing the line. No one can assure you that your site will end up on the first page when someone searches for a keyword. The first objective of a SEO expert should be to add relevant keywords in the Meta keyword list pertaining to his business. So every time you add new keywords in your Meta Keywords list, you wish that Google will cache/index your page immediately but it’s not an easy process. I have tried this before while optimizing a new Site and it took 2 months before that page was indexed.
Here are the important things I learned from that experience:
1. Content of your website should be relevant and present in abundance on the homepage as well as inner domain pages.
2. Other sites linking to your website is an important point. The more links other websites provide to your pages, the better chances you have to increase your ranking.
3. The page name is an important point. Usually we tend to ignore the page name. Search Engines do index pages based in the page name. For e.g. http://imilap.com/Indian-dating-Sites.asp. The other important tags on the page are the description, title and keywords.
4. Never try to bombard your keywords in the Meta Keyword tag as it only decreases your chances for your page to be index.

Here is a link to a website that will explain my last point in more detail: http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html. Enter your URL name and this will give you an idea about what you can do to enhance the tags on your page. These are a few tips which might improve your website's performance.
I will continue to write more about Website/Search Engine Optimization in my future posts.

SEO free tools and tips

2007-05-07T20:59:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always fun and challenging. For starters it is always good to use free SEO tools before they become competent. I would like to share with you some of these free tools on SEO. I am going to share free tools with you that I came across as these will give you a background on where to start. I started learning SEO using a tool called Overture. This tool is a part of Yahoo and is available on the Internet at http://inventory.overture.com. It will tell you what keywords are being searched most on Yahoo based on a month to month basis. You would have to start off by entering a keyword to find related searches. For e.g. If you enter the word ‘insurance’, it would show you all keywords related to insurance with their number of searches. This is extremely useful in case of optimizing an insurance website. Look at the screenshot below from http://inventory.overture.com for the results when I did a search on the keyword ‘insurance’.

Note: This tool will only show you the top 100 searched keywords.

The next tool I used can be found at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. This tool is quite similar to the above tool but it harnesses the technology of Google and Yahoo. This tool reports 100 related keywords in the basic version but you can search up to 10000 keywords if you decide to go for the premium edition. So after you have added the keywords to the Meta tags of your Website using these tools, you can check your keyword ranking here: http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports. You can start doing this after 2-3 weeks of adding these keywords to your page. This will help you determine where your keyword ranks among all the major Search Engines. This is really helpful to be at the top of your game. Below is a screenshot.

Courtesy: www.imilap.com.
Finally I would not encourage unethical practices that would improve your rankings on Major Search Engines which might include flooding your meta tags with keywords or adding extra links on your page.
Hope you like this post. I will keep you updated with cool tips and information.

Web Analytics as a career path

2007-05-02T23:05:00.000-07:00

Shortly after college, I was wondering which career opportunity I should pursue. It wasn’t clear to me whether to choose a career in Networking, Databases or Quality Assurance. These 3 career options are pursued by many people and I was planning to be part of the usual crowd. But with the guidance of Anil Batra who has been in this field since 10 years, I came to know about Web Analytics.

I started learning about it by using a tool called Google Analytics which was the perfect medium to help me grasp the fundamentals of Web Analytics. Through Google Analytics I came across totally new concepts like Unique Users, Page Views and Visits. These terms and metrics really fascinated me and I wanted to learn more. It prompted me go deeper into analytics and I started reading Eric Peterson’s titles like ‘Web Analytics Demystified’ and ‘Web Site Measurement Hacks’. These books further strengthened my view about Web Analytics as a career option and I decided that this is the career option I want to pursue. Another important resource for me was the Yahoo Web Analytics group which provided me with all the information regarding the latest Web Analytics buzz. It is followed by all Web Analytics experts who often answer questions raised by other members.

I started applying for jobs all over the United States and believed that my lack of experience would not be a hurdle. I gained a lot of confidence by taking phone interviews and also went for a couple of face to face interviews. Starting as an entry level was always a challenge for me and I made up for it by showing commitment and the desire to learn to my interviewers. It was important for me to be confident and eager in spite of my lack of knowledge in this field. It was through dedication and hard work that I nailed both the interviews and had the comfort to choose the best opportunity.

Finally I would like to sum up my article by mentioning that Web Analytics is a really interesting field to be a part of. It will give you the opportunity to learn programming, databases and it will also brush up your knowledge in Networking. The most important contribution of Web Analytics is towards the Internet which is now looked at from a totally different business prospective.