Web Analytics 101 & Career Advice by Alex

Alex Cohen did a wonderful job in this presentation to give his advices on how to start a web analytics career. Thought this is a good one to share with visitors to my blog.

Although his presentation is geared more toward beginners, yet the same principle are applicable for those who want to take their web analytics understanding and practice to the next level: learning (books, blogs, eMetrics Summit etc.), sharing (blogging, speaking etc.), networking (web analytics wedesday, eMetrics Summit etc.) and participating (WAA committees, WAA yahoo forum etc.) 

I can’t think of any other way to improve myself and this is an ever evolving, lift time process too. The moment you start to think that you know everything, that’s when you probably need find another job.

Now let’s enjoy what Alex brought to us:    

Seth Godin Saying “No”

I’m sure this is purely coincident. Yesterday I blogged about the first tip I shared with my fellow web analysts, titled “Tell me why you need this data before I give it to you!” Today I read a brief post by Seth Godin, “Saying no”.

Essentially we are talking about the same thing. Maybe I am not as bold as Seth but a little more polite by asking “why” question than straightly saying “no”. The end goal is the same: by asking “why” question or saying “no”, we allow ourselves focus on critical few things, rather than millions of ad hoc requests.

That’s the choice we all have to make. Like Seth put it so simply, “you can dissipate your gift by making the people with the loudest requests temporarily happy, or you can change the world by saying ‘no’ often. ”

Super Web Analyst Tip 1: Tell me why you need this data before I give it to you!

I plan to share some tips I have learned at work in a series of blog posts and here is the first one.

One common problem we, as web analysts are facing, is people tend to think that we are reporting or data people. And as a result of that, they often come to us and ask for all kinds of data without even telling us why they need it and how they plan to use it. Like it or not, that’s a reality we all have to deal with but that’s not saying that we don’t have any choice.

Actually two choices at least:

Choice number one, give them anything they are looking for, as long as you have it. Result of this? One, you will become a favorite person in the department and people will actually complement on your work and attitude etc. Sometimes if you are lucky, you might also get a team award or something like that. Two, you will be downgraded from a “super web analyst” to a “reporting squirrel”.

Yes, you hear me right. You will be downgraded. Your value will be diminished. You will not be considered as a “thought leader”. At the end of year, when you are doing performance review with your manager, he is going to ask you, “what significant changes you have made to the business?” and your answer, is sadly “no, nothing”.

You can’t make significant contribution to the business by simply providing data or even nice looking reports to people. You have to go beyond that.

So here is the choice number two. Ask smart questions before you give them the data.

Here is a typically scenario: let’s just say that John is doing some projects and heard from Mary that Ed might have some customer information he is looking for. So he sent me an email like this:

“Ed, can you send me whatever information you have about customers’ feedback on our site performance? Thanks very much, John.”

If you didn’t read this blog, you might just spend hours trying to find out the customers’ feedback and send to John. You might end up working late, missing dinner with your family, and hating the company you are working for.

But I don’t like that.

So I sent an email back, trying to be nice, “Hey John, can you give me more context about what exactly you are looking for?”

[more than 50% of time, people will just forget what they were asking for and don't bother to respond again. But John is persistent.]

About a week later, John sent me another email “well, I was just trying to understand what customers’ pain points are…”

[that's interesting. It didn't help me understand all I need know but a step toward right direction]

So I wrote back again, “John, can you give me some examples regarding what customers’ pain points you are looking for and how you want to use this information?”

[more than 90% of time, people will stop asking for data when I ask twice for clarification. But...John is persisitent]

So he sent me an email again “For example, if customers tell us that they can’t make purchase online because some site errors, then my team might be able to solve the issues with our BPI (business process improvement, similiar to 6 sigma) methodology.”

[that's becoming more interesting. He was actually talking about some potential actions there!]

For the third time, (sorry to be pain on the butt), I sent him another email “John, l’d like to meet with you to discuss this. I want to understand more about your methodology / process and make sure I give you right information and data to help you with your project.”

If John is serious enough, we will meet, discuss and formulate a plan. And I’ll find out right information / data and do the analysis for him so that he can really solve customer issues. But if he is not serious enough or has other priorities, we will never meet and he will never ask for the information / data again.

At that time, I am pretty excited and willing to give him help whatever I can. The sad thing is, 95% of time, John never comes back to me again. But that’s ok. The remaining 5% of people still survived are the ones you should really care.

Ok, so this is my “super web analyst” tip one. Is this helpful? How do you deal with similar situation? Kindly share your thoughts here.

Here I am San Jose!

Finally on my way to San Jose.

By no means, this is going to be a very special trip. Not only I am going to attend the first WAA Board of Directors meeting followed by eMetrics Summit from Tuesday to Thursday, but also because everything else going on, specifically the whole swine flu thing.

In my backpack, I’ve got my iPod loaded with songs, podcasts and sermons I like, Nikon Coolpix, to take pictures and videos whenever I want, Logtitech Webcam, to talk to my wife and kids with ooVoo, and of course, my Dell laptop, to work at night when all the eMetrics craziness is gone.

But this time, I’ve got something else. My dear wife, fearing of the pandemic spreading of swine flu, bought me two 3M N95 masks, and a gelFast personal hand hygiene unit. Imaging on my belt, there is hand sanitizer on the left, and Nikon Coopix and my Blackberry Pearl Flip on the right. No matter what, I’ve got myself prepared.

I definitely don’t think I am a risk averse type of person. If I was, I wouldn’t choose to risk my life and climb big mountains with a bunch of amateur student mountaineers from college. Quite contrarily, I think I am a type of person enjoy risk taking. But to risk my own life is one thing, to put my family at risk is another. Bible says, “A wise man is cautious…” (Proverb 14:16) Why a wise man needs to be cautious? Because he needs to take care of his family!

I booked my travel and registered eMetrics summit two weeks ago but only made up my mind until Friday when I told my wife, “Honey, I think I will go, but with extra caution”. She gracefully agreed. What complicated the situation was she suddenly got a fever on Friday night and had 101 temperatures. We were about to attend spring outing with the church group on Saturday morning and a house party with my wife’s colleagues in the evening. We canceled both. Although we know the chance is slim, we didn’t want to take it, and we didn’t want others feel uncomfortable either. I almost gave up. No matter how much I love this “web analytics” thing, I can’t leave my wife behind especially when she is sick.

But thank God. My wife feels much better today and she encourages me to go, at least for the Board of Director meeting because she understands that’s very important to me.

Maybe you are laughing at me…maybe you think we are over concerned. The reason I am telling you all these is that I want to say “thank you”, as the newly elected Director of the Board of WAA. I understand how difficult for you to come out and make time for this three days summit. It is challenging to get companies to pay for the registration fee, travel and lodging these days, as each one of them is cutting back on OPEX. It is uneasy to leave families, friends and communities behind. The three days’ summit is not like a vacation, but a brain washing, quite painful if you are not used to it. And when you are back, your managers expect you to deliver immediate 1000% ROI…do the math and calculate how much conversion rate you need improve.

I understand all these, but I am confident as you are and believe that these three days will be different. You and I will learn everything as we can. We will immerse ourselves in the ever-changing technologies, thought provoking presentations and workshops, not mentioning life changing networkings and meetups…

So that’s my little story of eMetrics. How about you? Do you have your story too? Tell us how you overcame challenges and finally made your way to San Jose!

Attention: My Fellow Web Analysts

I’ve been very swamped lately at work and haven’t got chance to write anything about the election of Board of Directors of Web Analytics Association. But this is official; I am elected to the board and will serve my two year’s term from May.

Needless to say, I am very grateful and still couldn’t really believe this is all true. I started the campaign with fairly low expectation as I understand how competitive the election is. But history is made. By You, my fellow web analysts.

I want to thank a lot of folks who stand behind me for this election. The first person is Bryan Eisenberg. He is the one asked me to consider running for the Board of Directors and gave me his full support. Joel Wright, my buddy and colleague at Dell, introduced me to web analytics and told me that I’ll win even before the election is closed (good prophecy, Joel!). Gautam Madiman, my manager at Dell, for encouraging me and endorsing me. Anil Batra from Zerodash1, Jonghee from Victoria Secret…and many others I don’t even know their names. Last but not least, for my wife, willing to share more family loads to support my duty as a Director.

So what’s the next? What I am going to do for the web analytics community as a Board of Director in the next two years? These are questions wondering in my mind. I am fully aware that as the only Director on the Board without a CXO title (sah!), I am bringing some unique perspectives to the Board. But to better serve you, I need your help.

May 3-4, I will be in San Jose, attending the Board of Director meeting. I will also be in the eMetrics Summit for the next three days. I encourage you to get in touch me if you are there. Let’s chat about work, life and the community while we are in the WAA Community Meeting and Speed Networking, or WAA Reception, or Birds of a Feather Lunch, or eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit Reception, or Web Analytics Wednesday. Talk to me about your ideas, passions or frustrations. If you are not there, feel free to drop me a note via ed at superwebanalyst dot net or follow me on Twitter @ed_wu.

Look forward to seeing you and hearing from you. Remember, we are super web analysts. No tool (no matter how good they are) can do us any good, until we are using it in the right way, with much passion and intelligence. And to do it right, you’re going to need help and guidance from WAA. Hope you have a great week.

Don’t Fool Us with Percentage!

My super hero, Avinash Kaushik wrote a wonderful blog last week Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques In that blog, he warned us to avoid using four amigos, common metrics that are misleading and yield little insights. These four pigs are:

• Averages
• Percentage
• Ratios
• Compound Metrics (aka Calculated Metrics)

Well, apparently not everybody gets the memo. Sad! Today I got a marketing email from Omniture titled “MarketingSherpa eMail Summit Special Offer” and in that email, I was asked to learn more about  the benefits of integrating email with Web analytics, specifically,  

how StubHub increased their “revenue per email” by over 2,500% and click-thru rate by over 550%  (Download StubHub Success Story) .

wow, 2,500% and 550%, that will surely get people jump out of windows and sign up for the special offer. But not for waving fans of Avinash’s blog!  

The remedy is simple, just go to look at the raw numbers. Unfortunately that’s not something Omniture is willing to give to me, at least not until I give my all personal information and sign up for the white paper. In this case, privacy is not my main concern because they should have my personal information in their customer database. But enough is enough, I lose my interests–sorry for my short attention span.

One final thought for the email marketing people: if you have customer information already, wouldn’t it be so much nicer that the information can be auto-populated so that users don’t have to fill it again to just get the white paper? Isn’t that a big opportunity to increase lead?

Feel free to share examples like this with us. It will surely make us smarter or at least LOL.

Web Analytics is Personal

We all are professionals so we tend to be very professional in what we do. However today I learned that web analytics can be personal.

Well, to be more accurate, I learned that long time ago when I watched how Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson or Bryan Eisenberg presenting in eMetrics Summit or anywhere they go. They are passionate, energetic, and they are personal.

Today I experienced that too.

Today we hit a really great milestone in web analytics within Dell. Several months after implementing SiteCatalyst globally, we presented a global executive dashboard which enables our executives to get a weekly snapshot of the site performance across our global regions.  It gives them a great benchmark, drive standardization of the site, promote best pracitice sharing. More importantly, it drives them to prioritize their web analysts’ time to work on big opportunities, instead of tons of ad hoc requests or routine reporting.

When a senior manager told me, “Oh my this is a thing of beauty! Tear in eye….” and when my director said, “we need turn web analytics from a tool to THE weapon”, I know that we are on something here. Tomorrow is going to be a little different. We might start to see a transformation and a new culture might emerge.

So that’s my thought of today. Web analytics can be personal, can be exciting, can be something you really love. It doesn’t have to be dull at all. Let’s get out of our cubes, start to be like a champion or evangelist within our organization.

It’s your time to shine now, seriously.

Hey Bryan, are you trying to kill all of us?

There is a lovely Sterne newsletter sit in my inbox when I came back to work. In the first item of that issue, he was trying to sell his buddy Bryan Eisenberg’s OnTarget service with a catchy title “Bryan Eisenberg Looks Over Your Shoulder”. He wrote:

[The following is from Sterne Measures newsletter Dec 15 issue, you can subscribe here http://www.targeting.com/

Ever sat down with Bryan Eisenberg and had him review the conversion quotient of your website? It's intimidating. In seconds, he can tell you seven things you know are true. They're obvious once he's said them. Well now they've found a way to downloaded Bryan's brain into a web server. They call it "OnTarget" and are rolling it out as a pay-per-month service.

So what's it do?
In his words it:

- Continually analyzes and uncovers challenges in over 100 different areas of your website, team, marketing
efforts, and visitors.
- Tells you what to do to fix it.
- Tells you what resources are needed and the estimated amount of time it will take them.
- Uncovers the reasons why visitors aren't being persuaded to do what you want them to and delivers approximately 40 hours worth of actionable recommendations and direction to your team per month on how to resolve it.
- Provides online survey & email campaign tools and reporting.
- Provides automatic visitor identification & reporting.
- Uncovers the effectiveness of marketing efforts and content.
- Provides competitive tracking and reporting.
- Provides lead qualification, scoring, and routing.

I call it Bryan Eisenberg on demand.

I call it way cool.

http://www.futurenowinc.com/ontarget_service.htm

[Sterne newsletter over]

All sounds good. Although it is very unlikely for us to subscribe such services, I couldn’t resist the temptation to click on that link. Knowing Bryan in person and reading his blogs all day long, I know when he has something to offer, it got to be great.

The landing page is well designed with similar information as Sterne summarized. I noticed there is a huge green button “Please contact me” screaming at me -good work, Bryan, you did what you are preaching.

Besides that green button, the second paragraph caught my attention:

[With OnTarget you get the benefit of analysis without hiring an analyst. It is better than simply analysis. You tell us what resources you have available to implement change so that you don't get recommendations that waste your time or resources.]

Get the benefit of analysis without hiring an analyst? Hmm, I am wondering if Bryan’s new year resolution is to kill all of us, poor web analysts. In this economy, I am pretty sure a lot of companies are interested in such strategy.

So I wrote Bryan an email with the exact question on the title “Hey Bryan, are you trying to kill all of us? ”

Bryan wrote back in a day and I really appreciate he took time to further elaborate his points as below:

[That is a great question and one I am glad you asked. Of course, I don't want to kill any analysts, I wish I could clone more of you though. Most organizations are having a difficult time dedicating resources, finding people and getting results with their optimization efforts. OnTarget is meant for those hundreds of thousands of organizations that aren't the Dells, Overstocks, or Amazons of the world.

You know Jim's and my passion and mission in starting the WAA was to create and educate analysts and bring them to the marketplace but while we have been successful, we haven't been able to keep up with demand. OnTarget is meant to bring cutting edge Persuasion Architecture trained analysts, leveraging our technology and help companies improve their conversion rates and operationalize optimization within the organization. Could we help companies like yours, the answer is yes, but we would only supplement and provide an outside perspective to your already capable staff. ]

I was half joking when I sent him the note but I am still glad to know that OnTarget is not meant to kill any of us. Without knowing much details about OnTarget, I believe it will be great tool, just because it’s from Bryan and his company. But from the bottom of my heart, I know a super web analyst is priceless.

And that’s you and me, baby!

Dell Implemented Omniture SiteCatalyst

Dell is no stranger to the web analytics. Since the inception of dell.com in 1996, we have been collecting and analyzing dell.com Web traffic data. And since 2003, we’ve used a global internal IT system to  continuously improve the user experience and drive online sales.

But yesterday marked an important milestone in our web analytics history and probably my career as well. We finally implemented Omniture Sitecatalyst across business segments and units. This is significant for several reasons:

1. Democratization of online data – By getting more information about what’s happening on our site into the hands of more talented Dell marketers, we will generate more awareness, discussion and insight about what’s working and what’s not working on the site.
2. Increase in number of testing ideas – Testing is one of the most powerful tools we have for tuning the site based on customer behavior. With easier access to information about what customers are doing on the site, we expect more testing hypotheses to be generated that will flow into the MVT testing roadmaps in various segments around the world.
3. Global Metrics Standardization – Over the years, different segments around the world have created their own reporting silo’s and metrics, making it almost impossible to compare performance around the world. With the release of Omniture SiteCatalyst, we are standardizing web metrics globally for Dell. Being able to compare apples to apples around the world will help us extend best practices around the world and measure impact of changes globally.

So personally I am excited. But I am also aware that Sitecatalyst is no panacea no matter how good it is. I am a firm believer of Avinash’s trinity strategy and I think we are far away from integrating clickstream, outcomes and experiences data together to drive holistic, insightful and actionable recommendations. But I feel that we are on the right direction and I am proud to be a member of this movement in the company.