“My world revolves around online publishers; in particular news media. With that in mind the most important 2011 trend, as I see it, will be greater DATA FOCUS and the desire and willingness to be more data driven. Editors will be looking to use decision support systems and will be moving towards an environment where machine learned and predicted content recommendations are a daily norm. Gut feeling will be a thing of 2010!” – Dennis R. Mortensen

Read the post in full here:
http://www.acquisitionengine.com/digital-marketing-trends-2011/

Cheers :-)
/ d (@dennismortensen)

We have spent the last 18 months integrating YWA (IndexTools) into the Yahoo Network and whilst our Account Management team has worked tirelessly to ensure that our client base (both YWACN members and Direct Customers) are well supported, we have also managed to find time to run some projects in the background!

Our onus has been on serving our customer base more effectively, tackling this in a variety of ways: Dedicated Account Management for YWACN members, an expansive list of FAQs available to all on help.yahoo.com as well as the recently announced YWA Status Blog keeping our customers informed in real-time (RSS, Email, Phone and Messenger Alerts).

I’m pleased to announce that today we add a considerable resource to our existing support and self-serve channels!

Yahoo Web Analytics Product Training on-Demand

We have spent the last few months converting our original on-site product training that we use to deliver to clients and partners at IndexTools, into short, easily digestible, on-demand webinars. These webinars are accessible by all and aim to give new and existing users a complete overview of the product allowing them to concentrate on what’s important: analysis. The webinars are collated using a combination of PowerPoint Slides and in Product Demo’s.

Further to this we have also added an Interactive Q&A section (Adobe Captivate) for each of the training sections. This will enable users to check their knowledge at each stage of the training, or go back and check it further down the line. N.B. We don’t capture any personal data or results :)

So where do YOU go to get access to these?

We have created a section within help.yahoo.com and you can access the individual sessions here. We’ve created a page for each session and you’ll currently have access to the following sessions and sections:

• Session 1: Deploying and Customizing the Tracking Code
• Session 2: Sales and Merchandising – Deployment and Reporting
• Session 3: Basic Reporting: Traffic, Demographics, Techno-graphics, Content, Navigation, and Path Analysis
• Session 4: Conversion Analysis, Scenario Analysis

Still to come over the next month or so are the remaining sessions these include:

Session 5: Reporting Interface Features
Session 6: Manual Campaign Setup
Session 7: Automated Campaign Setup
Session 8: Campaign Reporting
Session 9: Dashboards
Session 10: Settings

We hope you find these informative and useful! Stay tuned for the remaining 6 Sessions. If you’ve not had a chance to view the product yet checkout Dennis’ 30 min Yahoo Web Analytics Demo.

My thanks to Miha Popa who worked so hard to get these recorded and to the rest of my team for drawing up all the questions and answers!

Cheers,

Charlie

“Cut to the chase! Use analytics tools to get the specific answers you need about your search marketing campaign’s economic performance, your users’ on-site behaviors, and how to look for major red flags in traffic patterns. This slate of experts will keep you focused rather than poring through hundreds of pages of meaningless statistics.”

I know this is the usual promotional event pitch, and that’s OK. The easy response (presentation) would have been a focus around the magic, one can pull out of behavioral data in conjunction with search data. And that would be OK as well. I was, however, reading an article from Jacques Warren [1], who as a web analyst is as smart as they come, and during the post he concludes the following:

“Google organic accounted for 65% of all visits, 89,5% in December, 87% in January, and 84% so far in February. That’s only one search engine (and its various properties)! In a word, we LOVE Google.” [2]

I decided to use that as my outset and I in particular focused on what I bolded above (the capital letters are his). Before I move on, let me be clear that this is not a bashing of Mr. Warren, by no means. His post, and specifically the above comment, in combination with my talk in Chicago, just happened to trigger something in me, to finally utter my concern around the unfair relationship between content owners and search engines. This includes, what I believe to be a set of unhealthy search success metrics, or for some people, even a naïve belief in a search engine friendship.

Any other person, might just agree on how fantastic the traffic influx from Google is, in the above example, and continue to thrive on the euphoria of that – and perhaps even apply additional search engine optimization processes across multiple search engines and aggregators in regards to new content. But doesn’t this seem wrong to you, that we celebrate yet another winner of the Google organic search lottery ?

If I ran a business where most my revenue, if perhaps not all of it, depended on visitors to my site, I would be very dissatisfied to the extent of concerned by the fact that my life was in the hands of a random search engine.

To marginally illustrate my point, but mostly for us to continue the debate, let’s have a look at Figure 1 and Figure 2, and the apparent question that’s comes with those two data sets, such as; which of the below two trends would you describe as more successful (forget all about the usual ‘it depends’ and just assume that all the stars are aligned to your satisfaction).

My point is that, in the scenario of monetization being most successful around returning visitors (as we see with a lot of content owners), figure 2 is the more successful trend. AND the accompanying suggestion could very clearly be that by the introduction of Search Engine de-Optimization one might be able to force such a pattern. One action could actually be to remove some of your content from search engines all together! Drastic, yes, and this is certainly not for everybody, but think about it twice, before you conclude that I am completely crazy. :-)

Conclusion
It seems fair to debate whether or not search engines and other content aggregators extract too much the webs value, leaving less for the content creators (originators) – if this is true, one should introduce tactics such as Search Engine de-Optimization to destress the dependency!

I’ll prepare myself for the bashing and first hit in this blog post – it might mentally prepare me for Chicago. So there you go! Dear search engine, I don’t Love you anymore. – and it’s not you, it’s me that changed ;-)

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

[1] If you are coming to Chicago Jacques, Diet Cokes are on me! :-)
[2] You can replace Google with any other content aggregator and the above critique still rings true

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

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

Expanding YWACN

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

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

So without further ado, our new consultants are:

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

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

Here’s a snapshot from our YWACN Homepage:

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

Cheers,
Charlie

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

Abstract

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The white paper will be posted as a PDF download.

Abstract

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

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is YWACN?

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

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

Who are the Consultants?

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

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

We even added a few additional rock stars to that:

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

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

Can I join?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I embedded the video below; for your entertainment:

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

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

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

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

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

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

Today

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

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

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

Future

4. Recommendation
5. Automation

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers
dennis (@dennismortensen)

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