Category: Web analytics

How do you know if the WordPress blog you have just launched and have been slaving over is going to be successful? You get picked up by the comment spammers. I love WordPress. And I love that it needs to be upgraded quite often to prevent nasty code insertions in footer.php. It means that there is a real live community hacking the code. Some are wearing white-hats and others black-hats. The comment spammers are such a nice collection of people I would like to tie them up and have a bunch of people poke them with sharp sticks before setting …

Scientists in the US will soon be able to do the unthinkable and regenerate extinct species like Neanderthals and Mammoths. This is done by building a map of the DNA and then re-engineering the DNA in an embryo or egg. Crazy stuff! Ethically I’m not sure where I stand so long as it doesn’t have anything to do with Jeff Goldblum wearing huge glasses and talking balony. It made me think about regenerating websites. How exactly do you work out that your website is the equivalent of a Neanderthal, hard working but simple and notvery smart. Bounce rates If people …

I have been watching the reports about ecommerce sales with a strange sense of foreboding and opportunistic delight. The reports are mixed, but it seems that growth is softening – in some cases dramatically. Whilst Cyber Monday, the Monday after the US Thanksgiving holiday, recorded the second highest online sales ever at USD$846 million, growth is down by 2% for the season. In addition according to comscore the growth is being driven by heavy discounting which means narrower margins. In the US only 7% of all retail sales are online. In Australia it is likely to be significantly less, due …

Last night I went to the first Melbourne Web Analytics Wednesday in the sweltering back room at Loop Bar. The discussion was a little stilted at first but there was a strong turn out from Sensis, CoreMetric and other analytics and search folks. There was some discussion alluding to the convergence between Customer Relationship Management tools and web analytics. This type of integration can not only tell you lots about customer behaviour but also dig deep into key attributes of the customer like age, sex, likes, dislikes, profession and so on. The integration of web analytics and critical business tools …

A website is kinda boring without content. The semantic web has no meaning without meaningful content. So why is content the last thing people think about when they are planning a website? It may be because people assume that the web is a visual medium and think visually about what they want. The boring words can always be grabbed from the company brochures, the tender documents, the introduction letters. This is why most small Australian websites have a bounce rate higher than 50%. People do not watch a website like they blindly watch the TV, YouTube excepted, although even YouTube …

In the eighties film 10, Dudley Moore, a middle-aged musician lusts after Bo Derek, a young and beautiful woman. I don’t think her career was ever made obvious. In an iconic scene, Bo Derek runs down the beach in slow motion her body glistening with the sea and coconut oil. She is in Dudley Moore’s eyes a perfect 10. This scene and the idea of the perfect 10 reminds me of the lust for the perfect conversion rate. Some people say that 3% is a good conversion rate. That is 3 out of 100 visitors to a website buying or …

When I first discovered the web I found a site called Digital Diaries which allowed for creative expression online. I signed up and was soon publishing sarcastic poetry about my life and receiving the odd freakish email from someone in Ohio. I often think it’s a shame that the Digital Diaries site didn’t take off. Soon after someone came up with web logging and blogspot had some great software and we became bloggers. Digital diarist has such a nice old fashioned tone. It reminds me of Charles Darwin diarising about his horrible discovery that we are descended from monkeys. It …

I am not a maths nerd. Never have been. Words have always been more appealing to me. They can inspire, terrify and antagonise in ways that numbers never can, at least for me. With this in mind I’ve been thinking about how important it is to tell a story when dealing with web analytics. The ‘meaning’ is in the story not the number. This is particularly so when you are trying to explain something to executives. A change in a KPI may be significant or alarming but a problem cannot be identified without a story. And without a story a …